Age Bias is Still the Default at Work But the Data is Turning (stanford.edu) 58
A mounting body of research is making it harder for companies to justify what most of them still do -- push experienced workers out the door just as they're hitting their professional peak. A 2025 study published in the journal Intelligence analyzed 16 cognitive, emotional and personality dimensions and found that while processing speed declines after early adulthood, other capabilities -- including the ability to avoid distractions and accumulated knowledge -- continue to improve, putting peak overall functioning between ages 55 and 60.
AARP and OECD data back this up at the firm level: a 10-percentage-point increase in workers above 50 correlates with roughly 1.1% higher productivity. A 2022 Boston Consulting Group study found cross-generational teams outperform homogeneous ones. UK retailer B&Q staffed a store largely with older workers in 1989 and saw profits rise 18%. BMW implemented 70 ergonomic changes at a German plant in 2007 and recorded a 7% productivity gain. Yet an Urban Institute analysis of U.S. data from 1992 to 2016 found more than half of workers above 50 were pushed out of long-held jobs before they chose to retire.
AARP and OECD data back this up at the firm level: a 10-percentage-point increase in workers above 50 correlates with roughly 1.1% higher productivity. A 2022 Boston Consulting Group study found cross-generational teams outperform homogeneous ones. UK retailer B&Q staffed a store largely with older workers in 1989 and saw profits rise 18%. BMW implemented 70 ergonomic changes at a German plant in 2007 and recorded a 7% productivity gain. Yet an Urban Institute analysis of U.S. data from 1992 to 2016 found more than half of workers above 50 were pushed out of long-held jobs before they chose to retire.
Running into this right now, sort of (Score:5, Interesting)
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And no one reads documentation, so that's not an option
Turn it into an app that includes social networking. Maybe that'll get them to read the documentation.
Re:Running into this right now, sort of (Score:5, Funny)
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I'll record everything in 15-60 second clips and host it on TikTok. That or build it in Minecraft. Make them dig to locate the information!
"The service hung when Mojang updated a redstone bug that we were using to implement direct RAM interactions. Downgrading to Minecraft 1.21.10 solved the issue."
Why worry about it (Score:5, Informative)
Once you leave it won't be your problem if management have been short sighted with the training and the company tanks. Most people don't stay at companies more than a few years now anyway as its been demonstrated many times in the last decade or so that people are norhing more than "resources" like paperclips to most companies, to be disposed off when profits dip.
Re:Why worry about it (Score:4, Informative)
Not just that, loyalty isn't something that's rewarded any more. Maybe they think that a loyal employee is too much of a loser to be hired anywhere else. The era of rewarding loyal employees was over in the last century
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"Once you leave it won't be your problem "
Once you liquidate your stock it won't be your problem.
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Re:Running into this right now, sort of (Score:5, Insightful)
A bit of unsolicited suggestion...
Start now and incorporate yourself. LLC or as I prefer a S-Corp.
Then when you retire, and they inevitably get lost and try to contact you...be ready to consult back to them 1099 at a few hundred dollars and hour bill rate.
This way, you'll get some good pocket money, they won't go down the drain AND if the bill rate is high enough they won't bother you for piddly shit....
Just a thought.....
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Why do you prefer an S-corp?
In my 50s, I was unceremoniously shoved aside. I had no voice or input via an involuntary transfer due to a fundamental lack of understanding about the scope and breadth of my work. I continued to warn them of the entirely predictable consequences of doing so. My new boss was awesome unlike my abusive former boss(es). Things began to blow up at the old duty station, despite documentation, instructions, and warnings. My new boss refused to make me available to my old duty station.
Re:Running into this right now, sort of (Score:5, Interesting)
Because with a LLC, ALL of your bill rate is subject to employment taxes (SS and Medicare).
With a S-Corp you can legally bypass this.
Example, say you have a S-Corp you are sole employee and President/owner.
You have a bill rate that comes out to $100K a year.
You pay yourself a "reasonable salary"...let's say $40K as an employee. Out of that $40K you do the normal payment of employer and employee employment taxes (SS and Medicare)...
You pay yourself "dividends" of the remaining $60K.
At end of year you pay personal taxes on the remaining $60K, but you save yourself paying the considerable employment taxes on that $60K.
Yes, it's more paperwork but can be worth it, depending upon how much you're billing through your company.....
Hope that helps. There are other benefits, but that's the main one I ran one for.....
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consult back to them 1099 at a few hundred dollars and hour bill rate.
With a minimum billing of 8 hours for any job.
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Or a prepaid retainer agreement with an expiration date for hours and a cap on hours worked per day and per week, waivable only in writing when confirmed by both parties. That way, they can't rush to jam in all the hours with 12-hour days at the end of the year.
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Fuck it, retire. No longer you problem if the company folds due to mismanagement.
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After 40 years of responding to other people’s problems, negligence, and outright stupidity, along with 20 years on call for Important High Availability, I’m done next month.
I gave a year and a half notice, just after my 65 birthday, that I’m retiring and they did not even check on contract / outsourcing until last month and decided that two people to my one at twice my total compensation with a 20% profit was way high to actually support on call. Now they might look at a new hire but have
LOL yeah right (Score:2)
"Makes them harder to justify it".
They don't *need* to justify it. They just do it, probably mostly reflexively now. It's not like they are going to get sued because they would never say "age" is the reason they aren't hiring someone.
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Expensive and reminder of death (Score:3)
1) The conscious, economic one.
Experienced workers cost more. While experience can generate efficiency gains, those gains rarely show up on a balance sheet after the first year. The loss of that institutional knowledge only becomes visible later—often when organizations end up rebuilding or reinstalling the very systems they dismantled.
2) The subconscious, psychological one.
Older people remind younger colleagues of aging and mortality, which creates discomfort and bias even when no one intends it.
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3) Older people make younger people more cynical, faster.
They put up with no shit, call bullshit bullshit in public and don't kowtow to stupidity. This does not sit well many managers.
PHB's don't like Reality Detectors (Score:3)
This is so true! I pointed out the silliness with sticking microservices on non-web-scale projects with relatively small teams, but was ignored because the new young "architect" knew all the buzzwords, claiming it created magic Lego-like modularity (despite the fact it was poorly documented and the seams were difficult to deb
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Here are few relatively minor corrections. Changes in italics.
"...But after that architect left, people admitted they hate working on those systems..."
"...those were the same promises OOP and XML-web-services made a decade or two earlier, but failed to fully deliver..."
"...There actually are places microservices could have helped..." [the existing ones technically work, but are a maintenance headache because they are tricky to change or debug.]
No they cost more and don't always do more (Score:2)
There are two main drivers of age bias: 1) The conscious, economic one. Experienced workers cost more. While experience can generate efficiency gains, those gains rarely show up on a balance sheet after the first year. The loss of that institutional knowledge only becomes visible later—often when organizations end up rebuilding or reinstalling the very systems they dismantled.
It's simple...pay more and get more?....good deal. Pay more and get less?....bad deal. If you're well paid, you need to deliver. You can't do the same output you did when you were 25 and 1/3 the cost. You have to produce higher quality work. I'm old AF myself. I am aware that I need to not only deliver high quality, but be someone they can rely on. My peers who chose to coast on their experience and not take schedules seriously?...they were laid off in the last round of layoffs.
Just because you're
A reminder of stability. (Score:3)
2) The subconscious, psychological one. Older people remind younger colleagues of aging and mortality, which creates discomfort and bias even when no one intends it.
Really?
Socially, it appears that the younger generation rather enjoys mocking the older generation of "Boomers" rather than feeling intimidated by them. If by "discomfort" you mean the younger ones feeling arrogantly entitled enough to already be owed some senior position by the ripe old age of twenty-something because social media told them so, then I say fuck narcissistic delusion right up the ass with a rusty credit card.
Older people in the workplace, should serve as confirmation of stability and longe
Maybe it's more about weeding out. (Score:2)
My observation is that the population groups are different between young and old workers.
It's not that individual older workers are more productive in any way, but rather that the young cohort contains all the people who will become drunks, drug users, who bring their sex problems to works, who steal and so on.
The young people who are not fucked up are often amazing, but the worthless ones cause more problems and bring others down, so on the average productivity is damaged.
The worthless old ones who have jo
Its harder to bully older people (Score:2)
We've seen and heard all the BS and veiled threats from various pointy hairs over the decades and its water off a ducks back. They can't handle that, particularly if they're young with large egos.
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A lot of it is simply increased economic power. If you are 60 years old, you are hopefully pretty close to financially being able to retire (especially if you have had a decent corporate gig for a long time). If they fire you, it just means early retirement with maybe a few less-plush vacations. If you are 30 years old, you are probably six months from having to move in with your parents if you get fired. It's a lot harder to scare someone who is financially independent with financial consequences than some
Re: Its harder to bully older people (Score:2)
True
Age Bias is Still the Default at Work But ARE Data (Score:3, Funny)
... But the Data ARE turning (Score:1)
Don't be too smug (Score:3)
In British English data is singular, not plural.
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Isn't datum the singular for data?
indeed it is, kind sir. if only we could educate these philistines on how to use the english language we'd be in business. see now that comment was smug. the initial one had more of a jokey, anal-retentive vibe.
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In UK English, data can be a collective (uncountable) noun (like water). It does not have to be.
If you have two data sets, and fling them all in the same database. What you had in the database before, and what you have after, is still just data.
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A Datum is a single data point.
In UK English, data can be a collective (uncountable) noun (like water). It does not have to be.
If you have two data sets, and fling them all in the same database. What you had in the database before, and what you have after, is still just data.
in the words of the great alice cooper: i was not aware of that
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Is it prounced dah-tah or day-tah?
Or maybe even day-tur if you enjoy intrusive rhotacism.
Because that's the only factor (Score:1)
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At my last job it was the middle aged guy with the FJB sticker on his truck that got phished his first week there. He gets an email from the CEO saying he's busy in a meeting and needs some gift cards right now. Idiot buys $500 worth of gift cards and then asks for reimbursement. The company somehow let him keep his job.
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You've had ten more years to watch and learn. It's not generational. It's just how people are and how our perceptions of one another change as we age. I see plenty of lazy shits at every age bracket and hard workers at every age bracket. All in the same building.
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I've seen your last line in real life and yes, I agree it's quite jarring. One of my best supervisors is a zoomer and a couple of his direct subordinates are also pretty awesome. All early to mid 20s Zoomers.
Of course, then we also have a large contingent of the "barely potty trained". Those ones are quite scary because there are just so many of them. Everything is a crisis for them as well. Everything.
They don't want that... (Score:2)
putting peak overall functioning between ages 55 and 60.
They don't want too much experience as they also have the experience to recognize the leverage they hold, demand appropriate compensation, and not put up with abuse that more inexperienced people will take.
I have seen time and time again companies faced with two possible paths forward, one that will work and will work better, and even frequently cheaper, *but* some key people will become "indispensable", and that risk is so high they will do all kinds of things to avoid it. Basically, if you become too goo
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The general practise now that "Human Resources" runs the world seems to be to deskill the work as much as possible so people become interchangeable cogs.
That also means your organization goes to shit because no-one knows anything but at least they don't have to worry about "Bob The Guy Who Knows Everything" getting hit by a bus.
Not my experience (Score:2)
When I started out on a new job, doing FAA certification work for aircraft systems, as soon as I figured out that it was mostly bullshit work to keep the regulators snowed, they moved me aside (same company, different job).
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and the correct answer is ...
Fully armed fighter jets fall on central London, and YOU get the blame!
The extremes need using (Score:2)
Ditto older guys, right up to 70+ guys, who have always been keen programmers.
These groups need handling differently to the normal guys one would choose ( and to each other ) but both can do fantastic work.
Salary (Score:2)
The folks they're forcing out are the ones who have higher salaries. Oh, but they'll replace them with AI, right? They won't need people with experience, *or* people with no experience!! /a
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The folks they're forcing out are the ones who have higher salaries. Oh, but they'll replace them with AI, right? They won't need people with experience, *or* people with no experience!! /a
The salary consideration is a very important one. Which has a higher correlation of worker termination, age or salary? Older workers tend to have higher salaries, but it would be interesting to test the tails of age and salary distributions. Is this phenomenon motivated by productivity decline or cheaper workers?
Not that much of a problem for Gen X. (Score:2)
I'm smack center in the Gen X demographic and am not too worried about ageism, since the demographic decline is going to be in full swing once I close in on retirement age and we're then likely going to need every able body to pitch in. ... AI and robots actually have me more concerned, given the current situation.
A lot of older engineers don't want to change (Score:2)
They get tired of new frameworks and new languages every five years or so, and (rightly) point out the stupidity of all that needless change. But the programming world doesn't stop for them, or for common sense. Pretty soon, the older guys start to fall behind and get drummed out.
At 59, I'm still doing very well thank you, and keeping up. I recently taught myself Vue.js and am now teaching it to others. There has been no age ceiling for me, or for other older developers I work with who have made the decisio
The answer is simple... (Score:1)