Think about the level of executive stupid you're dealing with when a spinoff continues using the same literal playbook -- with identical terminology and resources (linking to former parent company servers) -- in executing a painfully obvious employment discrimination strategy. Well, either stupid or lazy. Either way, it's a situation that screams out for punitive damages. Here's hoping these cases send at least some of IBM's top management to an early retirement themselves.
Going to say it again: feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business. Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops. If you're not an owner with a real decision-making vote, you're on the menu for these guys.
>Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops.
The issue isn't philosophy. The roadblocks to worker-owned co-ops taking off are money and capital.
Picture a Venn Diagram of 2 circles:
(1) the circle of founders with some money (or don't have much money themselves but have the ability to get funds from investors) -- are not interested in forming worker co-ops. The founders want to own the business and hire employees to pay them wages.
(2) the circle of workers who want to share the ownership in a co-op don't have the money to fund the business.
Those 2 circles do not intersect for the most part. There isn't any alignment between the founders-with-money who want employees -- and -- the workers-without-money who want co-ops.
This is why you don't see those with some money and/or access to money (e.g. ex-Google ex-Facebook employees creating new startups) creating co-ops.
Likewise, examples of disappointed workers (e.g. tech layoffs, etc) who wished for a different corporate structure that gave them more ownership, are also not forming co-ops because they don't have the money. They're just trying to land the next job to pay the upcoming bills.
That's why the repeated advice and lectures to workers about "form co-ops" don't seem to make any progress. The reality is the workers just don't have the money.
> feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business
The efficiency gains and - more importantly - resiliency gained by having a single leader with a strong vision are enormous and the reason a single ruler is so prominent among humans. Democracy is weak to balkanization and demagoguery.
That being said the real issue here is corrupt elites - which no system can fix. The blast radius from a bad ruler is much worse than bad actors amongst a democratic system, but the potential gains from a single ruler are much higher.
Worker-coops would be great, but at a minimum I feel like we need, as a profession, a dues-funded professional association which can do things like:
Analyze and fight bad IP assignment, non-compete agreements, etc.
Hire lawyers to write alternative agreements that employees can suggest as a "standard" alternatives during negotiations.
Collect salary data for the profession across all regions and open it in a transparent un-biased way for members to use during negotiation.
Provide legal resources for people involved in mass layoffs. Analyze the severance packages and give advice.
Help connect people in our profession with good employer / position reviews. E.g. glassdoor without the bullshit, and for professional association members only.
And, yeah, staying on topic with this thread: analyze for age etc. discrimination and provide resources to deal with this.
(I would stop short of using the "u" word, and stop short of full collective bargaining and strike powers only because those are far more controversial.)
I lack the ability to organize such a thing, but would gladly pay a monthly fee into such an organization.
Even if you solve the problems that other people mentioned, there is simply very little incentive for a successful co-op to hire extra workers to share their prosperity. For example, say a co-op has ten people and sells 100 widgets at $100 a piece for a $20 profit. However, their widgets are constantly out of stock. If they hire 5 more workers and sell twice as many widgets at the same price assuming economies of scale, now each worker may make $30 of profit. However, it would be much easier and more profitable for them to simply raise their prices to $120, and make $40 of profit.
Good thing there is nothing stopping you from starting up such companies. If they truly are a better way of organizing businesses, they will soon become the norm.
> ...feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business.
Sadly - if you are organizing humans, at non-trivial scales, over time - the alternatives all have profound problems. Feudal power structures (whether or not a social anthropologist or medieval historian would officially certify them as "feudal") are so common because human nature very much favors such arrangements.
When I read people on reddit say stupid shit like eat the rich, I always get downvoted for going against those coommie/anti-work types. But sometimes like now maybe they are right even if I know its wrong.
Any good way for worker coop interested (not necessarily job seeking but even aspirationally aligned) HNers to coordinate/share resources? The topic often gets shut down here as controversial topics that smell like Marxist Leninist communism even when they are anything but get flagged out here in my experience
I cannot imagine why a new engineer or CS grad would want to go to work for IBM. Their reputation is that of a company that was great before you were born but forgot how to innovate long ago, except for a brief foray into AI that made them famous on a game show but was useless for everything else. Then they bought a Linux company but it's been subjected to the same capricious layoffs as the rest of the company so there's no job security. Most of their revenue seems to come from sending C-grade "consultants" to other big low-tech businesses to keep their computers running, which makes the customer's CIO happy but screws up the computers for everybody who actually works there.
While this is somewhat dated knowledge, I expect it carries over at least somewhat. IBM recruited hyper-aggressively at my university for internships. And at the internship you had minimal obligations and a quite comfortable salary which carried over into full-time employment. Why they were grabbing every warm body just to have them sit around is probably just the left hand not knowing what the right was doing, but it created a pretty nice opportunity for people whose main motivation was freedom.
Of course I expect those departments/divisions may well have eventually been "slimmed down", so everything comes full circle.
Not every new CS grad has offers from Google and Meta waiting for them when they graduate. If you exclusively follow online discussion about the tech space you'd think that all engineers naturally go to the FAANGs or some well-funded startup, but in reality 99% are employed by consulting companies, small regional shops, BPOs, IT divisions of non-tech companies and others who are way worse than "old tech" employers like IBM.
People reject claims of ageism in tech for lack of evidence, and when the evidence comes around they no true scotsman the evidence.
Ageism is real in our space. Older people are not slow, out of touch, or overly grumpy (to counter some common cliches).
Young people please wise up because I know you feel exceptionalism, but in truth you will gain a competitive advantage by leveraging the experience of older people (even if you think the experience irrelevant). And one day you will also be old, do unto others etc.
I suspect there will be a lot more attention to ageism in about 10 years when the current of cohort of tech workers starts getting replaced by younger new college grads. Right now the population affected by ageism is just not big enough. It mostly affects Gen-X, which isn't that big and didn't have that much tech presence in the first place, most went into more traditional fields. When it starts to hit the mid-millenials, it will be too big to ignore.
There is no evidence of age discrimination mentioned in the article.
> The complaint asserts that not only is Kyndryl using IBM terminology like "Resource Action," but it is providing affected employees with the same information resources to do so, right down to the letter.
Unless I’m missing something, the argument here seems to be: IBM discriminated against older employees during layoffs, and the IBM spinoff company hasn’t changed their layoff terminology or resources, therefore they must still be discriminating against older employees.
Not a lawyer, but it sounds like they have nothing substantive to work with here.
“Ageism is real in our space. Older people are not slow, out of touch, or overly grumpy (to counter some common cliches)”
Ageism is real. Also as people age their mental faculties decline. Plenty of “old” people (read: not actually that old, sometimes in their 40s) are in fact slow and out of touch. It’s very much a thing if you actually know what gen Z life is up to (i’m not them)
“Young people please wise up”
Like this. This is very out of touch and grumpy and is going to fall flat on most people under 40
Your post is actually a great example of why old people are struggling more and more to hang these days (granted I don’t blame them, times are just changing so fast)
Wouldn't it solved by market automatically very easily. Let's say older people are paid less or discriminated in some way for the same skill. Then the company which employs them are at financial advantage on average leading to more demand till return on investment becomes same for both old and young employees.
I don't think its right, but I understand their view of why they perhaps wanted to do it.
I had contact with quite few folks from IBM when I was at Red Hat and met Distinguished Engineers and Fellows and all they seemed to do was make slides and go on meetings. Literally powerpoint would be used for everything, Architecture? do it in powerpoint? Documentation, do it in powerpoint. Do it in powerpoint, and then invite lots of people to a meeting to share your slides, get as many people on the meeting as you can. These would be endless meetings scheduled into eternity, where the goal of the meeting was 'alignment', the same people going around and around not really getting much done, apart from agreeing on some things, and disagreeing on others. I stopped turning up, as it was a waste of time, so it was 'escalated' to my boss 'why is jossclimb' not coming to our alignment meetings?!?'
They were also clueless about how to deal with us. Had folks 'escalate' as we would not agree to something that first required it be accepted upstream in a community. Would have to say to them 'my word is not worth much, we need to get consensus in the community', this was read as us being difficult and not following some VPs wants to the letter. "This is very important to Arvind"
I will get shit for saying this, but half of them could disappear into the ether and you would not notice anything (apart from SWEs having more time outside of perpetual meetings around powerpoint to put their heads down and build some software).
All they seemed to do was make slides and go on meetings ... They were also clueless about how to deal with us ... Endless meetings scheduled into eternity ... the same people going around and around not really getting much done
So you're saying that on the basis of the above, you "understand" IBM's point of view that the way to fix this was to start firing the older workers?
Because that's, like, obviously the root cause of this malaise, right?
You’ve described a company culture problem, not specifically an age one. I saw similar (sans powerpoint) in the past at Disney. It was mostly fixed through a reverse merger/brain-transplant from Pixar.
Basically, management that needs to be replaced not all older workers. This is where Blue Hat could shine.
Something to keep in mind when deciding how much of yourself to invest into a corporate job. Every employee is expendable.
Get the experience you want ASAP, invest as much of your salary as you can, and then job hop.
Cynical? Maybe, but I don't think so. Effective? Definitely. The free market only works if all the people in it continually chase their own best interest.
Age discrimination is all over tech. But what's the argument for age discrimination after 40? What's the mindset that someone who is for this discrimination would have, no matter how immoral or unethical? Is there a defensible view that supports discrimination at all?
EDIT: Sorry for creating a downvote hole for some of you who respond. There are good responses immediately downvoted. It is important for us to understand the arguments behind these biases to effectively fight them. It is not productive to silence this discussion.
Thank you for those who responded seriously and helped me understand the situation better.
I honestly think it's mostly a set of connected biases along the lines of:
a) "Progressivism", a bias towards thinking of "good tech" as the "novel/new tech". Or believing that success rides on quick adoption of new things, along with
b) A bias that believes that that the older you are the less likely that you have engaged with new novel tech.
c) A bias that believes that if you're still "just" an engineer and not management, there must be something wrong with you. Younger staff will accept "grey hairs" at the executive level but sometimes be bewildered by it at the individual contributor level.
d) A bias against more expensive talent generally.
e) A bias (among some) against talent that cannot be easily manipulated
f) A bias (among some) against people with children/families/mortgages/elderly parents, etc. that might "slow things down." (This one is maybe the trickiest because it can express itself in ways that are not at all intended to be malicious but end up with bad effects. E.g. organizing team offsites and gatherings which are hard for parents or committed spouses to engage with because of their obligations. And the older we get the more likely we are to have such obligations)
Most people who hold these biases hold them unconsciously. I personally look (or sometimes act) younger than I am, and get "surprise" from people when I tell them my age. Likely because they have bias about what that age should/could imply.
Age bias is mostly "correctable" in most decent human beings. Where it gets malicious is when it gets in the hands of management who have a cost focus.
Yeah. I’m over 40, and I expect a high salary due to my productivity and experience. You could replace me with 3 folks from around the world, and it’s arguably a reasonable business decision.
One argument (though, very cynical) for getting rid of 40+ yo people in tech: they cannot be so easily manipulated into blindly following company directives, and they are more likely to actually push back against bs rules/guidelines, whereas young people either don't know better, or they are more agreeable.
Neuroplasticity is supposedly on a constant decline after childhood. Also processing speed, working memory, long-term memory. Offset by increased experience, of course.
The above post should not be down voted. Although as others mentioned, it could have been phrased differently, it was clear the post was about understanding the reasons behind age discrimination, not about endorsing or justifying it.
Age is an undeniable factor when it comes to learning new things[1], whether any of us like it or not.
Ultimately, the question to you as an employee is whether you can do the work demanded of you. While it would be nice for everyone to be judged on an individual basis, I can understand there needs to be some level of generalization to maintain a certain level of efficiency within an organization.
Interesting this came up around the same time as this story also about IBM getting sued for discrimination but under very different circumstances: https://www.neowin.net/news/inactive-ibm-employee-who-hasnt-... .. he's been off sick for 14 years and is suing IBM to get similar pay increases as other employees.
UK: The employee described himself as 'medically retired' and has been on 75% pay since 2008 under the terms of an IBM health plan. The arrangement will finish when the employee reaches 65. I'm sort of wondering if his pension contributions are based on 75% or 100% of pay scale. This kind of arrangement is not by any means normal in UK, and I wonder if the plan is still available to new employees.
Most companies and public sector employers have a sickness policy that pays full wages for some months then declines steadily until employment is terminated, around a year in the case of my former employer.
I hear/see this type if stuff but what are you supposed to do if you're not litiguous? Companies calculate cost and take risk aware decisions like this with no ethics or moralit y considered. It's like they corner people and expect them not to fight back or to accept what little fighting back they do. I feel like to avoid extreme measures, individuals should be sued ar least instead of companies.
I wanna see a lineup of low level and executive managers alike all on the hook personally for 10s of millions of dollars with no financial assistance from the company. I want to see HR, legal and direcr manager of this lady owing her 10mil+. You can fine IBM $10B and they'll just add it to their risk calculation over time. It is individuals that make these decisions, are they really protected from a civil suit?
This country is literally run by lawyers so litigation is basically how you move forward. All of these systems are setup by lawyers to generate income for lawyers.
While not directly related to the question, I wonder how things for universities for mature students, doing post grads? while there is non discriminator policies how they are in practice?
[+] [-] ncphil|2 years ago|reply
Going to say it again: feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business. Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops. If you're not an owner with a real decision-making vote, you're on the menu for these guys.
[+] [-] jasode|2 years ago|reply
The issue isn't philosophy. The roadblocks to worker-owned co-ops taking off are money and capital.
Picture a Venn Diagram of 2 circles:
(1) the circle of founders with some money (or don't have much money themselves but have the ability to get funds from investors) -- are not interested in forming worker co-ops. The founders want to own the business and hire employees to pay them wages.
(2) the circle of workers who want to share the ownership in a co-op don't have the money to fund the business.
Those 2 circles do not intersect for the most part. There isn't any alignment between the founders-with-money who want employees -- and -- the workers-without-money who want co-ops.
This is why you don't see those with some money and/or access to money (e.g. ex-Google ex-Facebook employees creating new startups) creating co-ops.
Likewise, examples of disappointed workers (e.g. tech layoffs, etc) who wished for a different corporate structure that gave them more ownership, are also not forming co-ops because they don't have the money. They're just trying to land the next job to pay the upcoming bills.
That's why the repeated advice and lectures to workers about "form co-ops" don't seem to make any progress. The reality is the workers just don't have the money.
[+] [-] rajin444|2 years ago|reply
The efficiency gains and - more importantly - resiliency gained by having a single leader with a strong vision are enormous and the reason a single ruler is so prominent among humans. Democracy is weak to balkanization and demagoguery.
That being said the real issue here is corrupt elites - which no system can fix. The blast radius from a bad ruler is much worse than bad actors amongst a democratic system, but the potential gains from a single ruler are much higher.
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|2 years ago|reply
Analyze and fight bad IP assignment, non-compete agreements, etc.
Hire lawyers to write alternative agreements that employees can suggest as a "standard" alternatives during negotiations.
Collect salary data for the profession across all regions and open it in a transparent un-biased way for members to use during negotiation.
Provide legal resources for people involved in mass layoffs. Analyze the severance packages and give advice.
Help connect people in our profession with good employer / position reviews. E.g. glassdoor without the bullshit, and for professional association members only.
And, yeah, staying on topic with this thread: analyze for age etc. discrimination and provide resources to deal with this.
(I would stop short of using the "u" word, and stop short of full collective bargaining and strike powers only because those are far more controversial.)
I lack the ability to organize such a thing, but would gladly pay a monthly fee into such an organization.
[+] [-] Aunche|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdasdf|2 years ago|reply
If they aren't, the only one harmed is you.
[+] [-] bell-cot|2 years ago|reply
Sadly - if you are organizing humans, at non-trivial scales, over time - the alternatives all have profound problems. Feudal power structures (whether or not a social anthropologist or medieval historian would officially certify them as "feudal") are so common because human nature very much favors such arrangements.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] easytiger|2 years ago|reply
Go start one. Let us know how you get on
[+] [-] ravenstine|2 years ago|reply
Are there any known businesses that have engineering teams and work this way? I'm just curious. It's not something I've really thought about before.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wesapien|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tasubotadas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wahnfrieden|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|2 years ago|reply
I don't get it.
[+] [-] somenameforme|2 years ago|reply
Of course I expect those departments/divisions may well have eventually been "slimmed down", so everything comes full circle.
[+] [-] paxys|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maerF0x0|2 years ago|reply
Ageism is real in our space. Older people are not slow, out of touch, or overly grumpy (to counter some common cliches).
Young people please wise up because I know you feel exceptionalism, but in truth you will gain a competitive advantage by leveraging the experience of older people (even if you think the experience irrelevant). And one day you will also be old, do unto others etc.
[+] [-] trashface|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SheinhardtWigCo|2 years ago|reply
> The complaint asserts that not only is Kyndryl using IBM terminology like "Resource Action," but it is providing affected employees with the same information resources to do so, right down to the letter.
Unless I’m missing something, the argument here seems to be: IBM discriminated against older employees during layoffs, and the IBM spinoff company hasn’t changed their layoff terminology or resources, therefore they must still be discriminating against older employees.
Not a lawyer, but it sounds like they have nothing substantive to work with here.
[+] [-] tasubotadas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beerpls|2 years ago|reply
Ageism is real. Also as people age their mental faculties decline. Plenty of “old” people (read: not actually that old, sometimes in their 40s) are in fact slow and out of touch. It’s very much a thing if you actually know what gen Z life is up to (i’m not them)
“Young people please wise up”
Like this. This is very out of touch and grumpy and is going to fall flat on most people under 40
Your post is actually a great example of why old people are struggling more and more to hang these days (granted I don’t blame them, times are just changing so fast)
[+] [-] YetAnotherNick|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jossclimb|2 years ago|reply
I had contact with quite few folks from IBM when I was at Red Hat and met Distinguished Engineers and Fellows and all they seemed to do was make slides and go on meetings. Literally powerpoint would be used for everything, Architecture? do it in powerpoint? Documentation, do it in powerpoint. Do it in powerpoint, and then invite lots of people to a meeting to share your slides, get as many people on the meeting as you can. These would be endless meetings scheduled into eternity, where the goal of the meeting was 'alignment', the same people going around and around not really getting much done, apart from agreeing on some things, and disagreeing on others. I stopped turning up, as it was a waste of time, so it was 'escalated' to my boss 'why is jossclimb' not coming to our alignment meetings?!?'
They were also clueless about how to deal with us. Had folks 'escalate' as we would not agree to something that first required it be accepted upstream in a community. Would have to say to them 'my word is not worth much, we need to get consensus in the community', this was read as us being difficult and not following some VPs wants to the letter. "This is very important to Arvind"
I will get shit for saying this, but half of them could disappear into the ether and you would not notice anything (apart from SWEs having more time outside of perpetual meetings around powerpoint to put their heads down and build some software).
[+] [-] lisasays|2 years ago|reply
So you're saying that on the basis of the above, you "understand" IBM's point of view that the way to fix this was to start firing the older workers?
Because that's, like, obviously the root cause of this malaise, right?
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|2 years ago|reply
Basically, management that needs to be replaced not all older workers. This is where Blue Hat could shine.
[+] [-] dangwhy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FredPret|2 years ago|reply
Get the experience you want ASAP, invest as much of your salary as you can, and then job hop.
Cynical? Maybe, but I don't think so. Effective? Definitely. The free market only works if all the people in it continually chase their own best interest.
[+] [-] clnq|2 years ago|reply
EDIT: Sorry for creating a downvote hole for some of you who respond. There are good responses immediately downvoted. It is important for us to understand the arguments behind these biases to effectively fight them. It is not productive to silence this discussion.
Thank you for those who responded seriously and helped me understand the situation better.
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|2 years ago|reply
a) "Progressivism", a bias towards thinking of "good tech" as the "novel/new tech". Or believing that success rides on quick adoption of new things, along with
b) A bias that believes that that the older you are the less likely that you have engaged with new novel tech.
c) A bias that believes that if you're still "just" an engineer and not management, there must be something wrong with you. Younger staff will accept "grey hairs" at the executive level but sometimes be bewildered by it at the individual contributor level.
d) A bias against more expensive talent generally.
e) A bias (among some) against talent that cannot be easily manipulated
f) A bias (among some) against people with children/families/mortgages/elderly parents, etc. that might "slow things down." (This one is maybe the trickiest because it can express itself in ways that are not at all intended to be malicious but end up with bad effects. E.g. organizing team offsites and gatherings which are hard for parents or committed spouses to engage with because of their obligations. And the older we get the more likely we are to have such obligations)
Most people who hold these biases hold them unconsciously. I personally look (or sometimes act) younger than I am, and get "surprise" from people when I tell them my age. Likely because they have bias about what that age should/could imply.
Age bias is mostly "correctable" in most decent human beings. Where it gets malicious is when it gets in the hands of management who have a cost focus.
[+] [-] christophilus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] serial_dev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yaseer|2 years ago|reply
Perhaps a better way would be "I'd like to understand why age discrimination exists in tech. What motivates companies to do this?"
[+] [-] HPsquared|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] op00to|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belter|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belter|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dalewyn|2 years ago|reply
Ultimately, the question to you as an employee is whether you can do the work demanded of you. While it would be nice for everyone to be judged on an individual basis, I can understand there needs to be some level of generalization to maintain a certain level of efficiency within an organization.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35595846
[+] [-] petercooper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2b3a51|2 years ago|reply
Most companies and public sector employers have a sickness policy that pays full wages for some months then declines steadily until employment is terminated, around a year in the case of my former employer.
[+] [-] walterbell|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badrabbit|2 years ago|reply
I wanna see a lineup of low level and executive managers alike all on the hook personally for 10s of millions of dollars with no financial assistance from the company. I want to see HR, legal and direcr manager of this lady owing her 10mil+. You can fine IBM $10B and they'll just add it to their risk calculation over time. It is individuals that make these decisions, are they really protected from a civil suit?
[+] [-] theGnuMe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nytesky|2 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/business/economy/ibm-age-...
[+] [-] nerdyadventurer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] datavirtue|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cde-v|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qgin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blastonico|2 years ago|reply