Making 'Dinobabies' Extinct: IBM's Push for a Younger Work Force (nytimes.com) 73
In recent years, former IBM employees have accused the company of age discrimination in a variety of legal filings and press accounts, arguing that IBM sought to replace thousands of older workers with younger ones to keep pace with corporate rivals. From a report: Now it appears that top IBM executives were directly involved in discussions about the need to reduce the portion of older employees at the company, sometimes disparaging them with terms of art like "dinobabies." A trove of previously sealed documents made public by a Federal District Court on Friday show executives discussing plans to phase out older employees and bemoaning the company's relatively low percentage of millennials. The documents, which emerged from a lawsuit contending that IBM engaged in a yearslong effort to shift the age composition of its work force, appear to provide the first public piece of direct evidence about the role of the company's leadership in the effort.
"These filings reveal that top IBM executives were explicitly plotting with one another to oust older workers from IBM's work force in order to make room for millennial employees," said Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer for the plaintiff in the case. Ms. Liss-Riordan represents hundreds of former IBM employees in similar claims. She is seeking class-action status for some of the claims, though courts have yet to certify the class. Adam Pratt, an IBM spokesman, defended the company's employment practices. "IBM never engaged in systemic age discrimination," he said. "Employees were separated because of shifts in business conditions and demand for certain skills, not because of their age." Mr. Pratt said that IBM hired more than 10,000 people over 50 in the United States from 2010 to 2020, and that the median age of IBM's U.S. work force was the same in each of those years: 48. The company would not disclose how many U.S. workers it had during that period.
"These filings reveal that top IBM executives were explicitly plotting with one another to oust older workers from IBM's work force in order to make room for millennial employees," said Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer for the plaintiff in the case. Ms. Liss-Riordan represents hundreds of former IBM employees in similar claims. She is seeking class-action status for some of the claims, though courts have yet to certify the class. Adam Pratt, an IBM spokesman, defended the company's employment practices. "IBM never engaged in systemic age discrimination," he said. "Employees were separated because of shifts in business conditions and demand for certain skills, not because of their age." Mr. Pratt said that IBM hired more than 10,000 people over 50 in the United States from 2010 to 2020, and that the median age of IBM's U.S. work force was the same in each of those years: 48. The company would not disclose how many U.S. workers it had during that period.
Skillsets (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Skillsets (Score:5, Insightful)
for years IBM hasn't desired anybody with any skills. Any former clients of their global services division will attest to that.
Re:Skillsets (Score:5, Funny)
Even worse - I doubt that anyone with skills would pick IBM today unless the skills involves Cobol and EBCDIC.
Re: Skillsets (Score:1)
Re: Skillsets (Score:5, Funny)
I think if some of the management is complacent and no longer innovative or productive, and it is IBM's fiduciary duty to show them door. If you just look at IBM's stock, maybe they should be asking that management to leave and make room for new management with fresh ambition.
There, fixed it for you.
Re: Skillsets (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, IBM has changed its business model to not be loyal to employees, with layoffs and issues described in the article. No longer is my alma mater sending many graduates to go work at IBM, they're going to startups and other tech companies. At the same time, IBM's "you can never get rid of us" way of embedding themselves and creating dependence, along with aggressive sales tactics have made it so new tech companies know not to work with them.
If you went in for a job as CTO at a startup and said "I want to use IBM's cloud instead of AWS/Google/Azure" that would be the end of the interview. And IBM only has its internal institutions to blame.
Re: Skillsets (Score:5, Insightful)
I never get this kind of thinking.
Are the older employees no longer in jobs with responsibilities? Do they no longer have managers to give them assignments?
It kind of feels like this some kind of phenomenon where some manager has been given a big new project and told to assemble a staff from existing personnel and then realizes that they're mostly long term employees whose high(er) salaries mean the manager's project won't be the easy profit they were expecting. So they push to ditch the older employees for new hires working for peanuts.
Re: (Score:3)
I posted elsewhere before reading yours. It's not just the higher salaries. Often older employees have pension entitlements, which create more overhead cost...a lot more. My former program managers (I'm retired) often didn't want anyone like that, for the reason you stated.
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I don't know why the companies as a whole don't just focus on buying out older workers.
My neighbor worked for Delta and was 60-62 and as the pandemic started, he got a buyout offer that was so good it was literally a slight money loser to stay working. Healthcare coverage to 65, severance pay and retirement contributions that made it just not make sense to keep working.
Something that good may not be practical everywhere, but sure seems like they could get a lot of people 55+ bought out with lesser package
Re: Skillsets (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
IBM has a culture problem and a huge wage problem, I will always opt to get paid more to work for a less stuffy company. They would need to be paying a hefty premium to make up for their reputation which, anecdotally, they aren't even bothering to keep up with their competition.
"Skills" Yeah right... (Score:5, Informative)
LOL the kiddies have few skills and less experience. It's money, stereotypes, and yes-men. Their older employees can learn and more irritatingly, push back on stupidity due to prior experience. Mostly, it's COST and if they think the younger gen will be loyal when corp America has spent generations wrecking the whole concept of a loyal employee to all but the most gullible...
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
there's the old way of thinking, you don't need skilled workforce when you basically have no product to develop and you don't need loyalty when you set the bar low cause there will be thousands of replacements knocking on the door.
The whole idea of "if an employee sticks around long enough will will continue to pay them until they die" is long gone and its a lot of the reason American companies cant do much in the US, kind of hard to develop new and innovate things when you have to pay grandpa billy bumble
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there's the old way of thinking, you don't need skilled workforce when you basically have no product to develop and you don't need loyalty when you set the bar low cause there will be thousands of replacements knocking on the door.
The whole idea of "if an employee sticks around long enough will will continue to pay them until they die" is long gone and its a lot of the reason American companies cant do much in the US, kind of hard to develop new and innovate things when you have to pay grandpa billy bumble fuck most of his wages 25 years after he retired from his button pressing job
It seems like you are arguing both sides here. Pick one, it will make your argument more coherent.
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no its pretty one sided, you don't need to have skilled workers to the point of becoming extremely expensive and difficult to work with, or enforce the "work for us for life, and we will pay you for life" cause to the company both are downsides.
If you were IBM what would you rather have, a bitchy old coot that cost oodles of money just cause he stuck around the office and knows 68K asm, then pay a pension for the rest of his existence. Or any other option on the planet
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I don't think they are under any illusions about the younger gen. being loyal, nor do I think they care. They'll simply install turnstiles.
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And if they have simplistic products the turnstyle approach might work. And a lot of places do seem to orient themselves to cookie-cutter workers. If you buy only Microsoft and it's mediocre products then you can get away with only hiring mediocre cookie-cutter cogs, and it might actually work. I think IBM is in a mediocre phase and that may work for them. But that model fails badly if you need to innovate, have engineers who can think about and solve complex problems, and be able to adapt quickly to a c
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"Skills" Yeah right... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
I find that at almost every non-tech job I have worked at as well.
It drives me crazy when the reason given not to change is that "we have always done it this way." If there is a reason not to change, then give the reason. The fact that the process is older then new employees is not a reason unto itself.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: "Skills" Yeah right... (Score:2)
Or maybe you need to relearn why yo start wit. A lot of corporate secerts are we have always done it this eay. Not why we did it this way.
Right now I am cleaning up 15 years of a mismash of people not updating pricing structres and not learning all the steps in the various sturctures yhey created. Thus the company was losing money on every item sold as it was being priced and discounted incorrectly. Something that requires a specific person to not only know how it was all setup but to mame certian it was
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't mean there isn't a reason, it just means they were never told.
Sounds like you didn't really learn the important part to begin with. Maybe you should have asked, and that's no reason to avoid trying new things. Sticking with an inefficient system could be even more of a waste of time and effort.
I suggest you either start asking questions or be more willing to follow those who ask and try new things.
Re: (Score:2)
If there is a reason not to change, then give the reason.
Um, how about, "If there is a reason to change, then give the reason"? The first reason NOT to change is that change always costs money, so to justify making a change you have to demonstrate that the benefit of the change more than repays its cost.
Re: (Score:2)
As an (aging) developer, you have to move on even when there's no good technical reason, trying to stem the tide of useless change is career suicide.
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I find that at almost every non-tech job I have worked at as well.
It drives me crazy when the reason given not to change is that "we have always done it this way." If there is a reason not to change, then give the reason. The fact that the process is older then new employees is not a reason unto itself.
How about giving them a reason to change first? If it's not broke, stop trying to fix it.
Chesterton's Fence (Score:2)
> The fact that the process is older then new employees is not a reason unto itself.
You're right, that "we have always done it this way" is not a good reason not to change ... but it IS a valid one.
On the one hand, you have a proven method, with known costs.
On the other hand, you have a method that may-or-may-not have been proven, particularly in the way you wish to apply it. You'll have foreseeable costs: capital and/or training costs. But you'll also have unknown-unknowns that you'll have to work
Re: (Score:2)
The skills are a real problem, in several industries. Ie, find someone under 30 with good C skills. Or even C++. Schools don't teach it, and learning from a book ends up badly. Surprisingly, quite a few do seem to know unix and shell scripts, possibly exposure to raspberry pis and other home dev kits. Too many don't know low level details; programming seems to have turned into how to tie together different libraries, as opposed to how to write the library (heretic, the sacred wheel was written by the god
no reason not to lie (Score:2)
even if they lie, nothing will happen.
the discovery should be really interesting. the sociopaths at the top on full display.
they are going to tie this up for 20 years in court.
justice delayed is justice denied.
Re: (Score:2)
even if they lie, nothing will happen.
the discovery should be really interesting. the sociopaths at the top on full display.
they are going to tie this up for 20 years in court.
justice delayed is justice denied.
I doubt that IBM is going to tie THIS up for 20 years. They want this to go away not be a persistent PR nightmare that shows them as a risk for government contracting.
If this is proven, they are ineligible for government contracts. This will come up in all bids. I predict that this is going to go away quickly.
What goes around doesn't seem to come around (Score:5, Insightful)
I heard rumors of "greening the workforce" at my previous job (large defense contractor) and that people let go (quit/fired/laid-off) wouldn't ever be rehired. Don't know if anything ever materialized, but think things like that are short-sighted. I will note that upper management always seemed okay with retaining older people in their ranks ... Also never noticed any millennials on the Board of Directors -- hmm ...
They've been doing this for decades (Score:5, Informative)
The upshot was it made it super easy to fire them with the excuse that you were flattening management. And from the outside this looked like getting rid of useless managers. On the inside it was firing a lot of experienced but costly engineers to replace them with younger folk who could be bullied into lower payer, less benefits and longer hours (like companies tend to do to young people).
Re: (Score:3)
Then the problem arises - either you have a skilled person with high salary that knows exactly what to do and solves the problem within an hour or you have unskilled labor that will do a half-assed job of solving the problem in a week.
But when the company can bill by the hour and not by the skill then cheap slow labor gives a better immediate profit but also slows down the progress and the ability for the company as a whole to escalate to the next level.
Re: (Score:2)
There's an effective solution to that problem (Score:2)
And when I say we stopped and forcing antitrust laws I me
Re: (Score:2)
And when I say we stopped and forcing antitrust laws I mean that.
I think you mean we stopped enforcing antitrust laws.
Eventually, all will turn 50 (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel sorry for them.
Re: (Score:3)
They'll still be bitching that they have to deal with crappy software that wasn't written in RustyJavaScript.NET which would have solved all of the problems automatically.
"We miniaturized as much as possible, so your smart watch will only weigh 3 pounds with a battery life of up to 5 minutes."
In public comments, wording matters (Score:5, Insightful)
"IBM never engaged in systemic age discrimination"
I have no doubt that, before making that statement, the word "systemic" was carefully chosen. I expect the company's leadership is ready with a list of mid-level executives to throw under the bus, if necessary.
Re: (Score:2)
They only peddles in specific age discrimination.
And millenials aren't going to save the company that's by now rotten to the core.
Re: (Score:1)
Problem is... the mid-level managers don't sign the contract with the HR consultancy.
Funny thing, those contracts - and what they spell out in them... that the consultancy is only giving advice. That client should check with their own lawyers if what's being recommended is actually legal.
Re:In public comments, wording matters (Score:5, Funny)
There always were jokes about IBM being a legal team that moonlights as a computer company.
Standard Operating Procedure (Score:3)
This has been ongoing for years. They have enough systems in place to cover their asses for doing this. Working for a company and retiring from it is a long lost dream, unless you are part of a very small minority.
--
Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real. - Tupac Shakur
dinobabies? need more lions (Score:5, Funny)
Two lions escape from the zoo and split up to increase their chances. When they finally meet after two months, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says, "How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army to chase me with guns and nets, it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass." The fat one replies: "Well, *I* hid near an IBM office and ate a manager every day. Nobody even noticed!"
lol (Score:2)
"IBM never engaged in systemic age discrimination," he said. "Employees were separated because of shifts in business conditions and demand for certain skills, not because of their age."
"Well, that, and for being "dinobabies". But it definitely, definitely didn't have anything to do with age discrimination.
"Er, sir, don't your own words point to a contrad ..."
"Ok, boomer."
The sad thing is (Score:2)
Most of these executives are probably in the same age bracket as those they're trying to force out at lower ranks.
Finally got rid of MVS and DB2 (Score:2)
GenX (Score:3)
So in some ways they are robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Re:GenX (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the issue. We figured out that we need a work/life balance but large corps. don't care about this. They want to hire at 22 and work folks to the bone until they are 40 and discard them. 'Murica! SMFH.
Cartoon from the 90s? (Score:3)
We'll be around for millions of years (Score:3)
"Dinobaby powers, activate!"
"Dinobyte!" (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I thought Mega-Byte was that super powered shark from Suicide Squad?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Cargo cult managment (Score:5, Insightful)
"...company’s apparent strategy of replacing older workers with younger ones and argued that it followed from the determination of Ginni Rometty, then IBM’s chief executive, to seize market share in such cutting-edge fields as cloud services, big data analytics, mobile, security and social media. According to the ProPublica article, based in part on internal planning documents, IBM believed that it needed a larger proportion of younger workers to gain traction in these areas."
Of course training, organizational strategy, and competent leadership have nothing to do with: "cloud services, big data analytics, mobile, security and social media"
Re: (Score:3)
I have an older boss who had never heard of "cargo cult" before. I described what it meant and he was saying "wow, that explains so much of what I have dealt with!"
says the 60 year old! (Score:2)
It's also nothing new. It's the reason "over 40" is considered a protect class by the EEOC.
https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discr... [eeoc.gov]
What needs to be done here is a massive class action law suit and go after some of the over bloated salary and stock options the exec's took despite revenue shrinking by billions:
https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
The best part (Score:2)
Scum⦠(Score:3)
At one of my former employers, the moved all of the employees to the first floor away from the younger employees. Then, each week, they one go. By doing it at such a rate, they didnâ(TM)t have to disclose the sex, age, and title of those let go. I was 47 at the time and a software architect.
They also made us sign a document where, in very tiny print, it said that we would not sue under the age discrimination act. If we refused to sign, we would not get severance.
The average age of âoecontractorsâ (contract and W2 employees) was between 32-36.
The executives were all over 60.
Re: (Score:2)
They also made us sign a document where, in very tiny print, it said that we would not sue under the age discrimination act
Having that in a contract should be de facto proof of age discrimination.
Re: (Score:2)
No lawyer would have ever let them put that in the contract. I call BS.
Whatâ(TM)s really sad (Score:2)
Is that so many here think older technical workers have nothing to contribute if not âoekeep upâ.
Older workers know when to set limits do that they arenâ(TM)t working 60-80 hours a week and taking Red Bull intravenously.
They work efficiently so that they can enjoy a better home/work life balance and Soren quality time with family.
Most older tech workers stay in tune with latest tech do that they can provide the most benefit to their employer or client.
And, their employer realizes they are pay
I think (active) age discrimination is unlikely. (Score:2)
IBM has intentionally restructured their support infrastructure to favor large teams of (low-skill) highly specialized/silo'ed personnel. They're a lot cheaper and easier to find and replace, and workplace churn doesn't hurt nearly as much. They still want to locate and assimilate highly skilled personnel, but they only need a few at a time, and they do go out of their way to prevent churn among their more valued assets.
From outside, it sure looks like age discrimination. Unfortunatel
It's not a matter of room.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Younger workers are avoiding IBM not because there's no room for them, it's because IBM is such an uninteresting company to work for, in a market where there are tons of more interesting opportunities.
Get rid of all the 'dinobabies' they want, they still won't see quality applicants come along while those applicants are flooded with offers from Apple, Microsoft, Google, or a bunch more of other recognized brands from their life. IBM perception is the once-relevant company that has been largely superseded save for some 'legacy' market share by other companies (they withdrew from any product line that might have given them exposure to students).
If you do bother to investigate the company, you find lots of disgruntled laid off people and even current employees aren't exactly passionate about IBM. Their culture is one that views business leadership as supreme and technical acumen should be just a commodity with fungible people and technical people raising to strong compensation is a 'bug' to fix.
When it comes to compensation, they pay less than many of the other employers.
So in short, they have no relevant product to their applicants and largely look like a 'dead' brand, no signs of an exciting or otherwise fulfilling working environment, and to add insult to injury, they pay the least of the options a candidate is likely to have.
Well obviously (Score:2)
Irritable Bowel Movement (Score:1)
My daughter just asked if IBM stands for Irritable Bowel Movement. I can neither confirm nor deny that it does ;-)
Another Reason (Score:2)
It's not just age. Many older employees are entitled to pensions. The overhead cost increases for those folks. Before I retired three years ago, I was a middle manager at an F500 company, and program managers often didn't want older employees on their programs because of the added cost.
Old Guys (Score:2)
Get off my lawn. Stop calling.
Is this how IBM became so "successful" ? (Score:2)