It's worth noting that for at least some firms, there was traditionally age discrimination that favored high-seniority workers. We used to call it "loyalty". But there was also the reality that they knew important stuff, and played a role in training new workers. But with technology changing so fast, that's arguably less relevant.

But the problem may be that HR just processes nominal data, without considering nuances like that. So they end up firing experienced engineers, based on superficial (and perhaps outdated) data.

I'm not a software engineer, or familiar with relevant business practices. I get that physicians, for example, are certified for various specialties. But is there a formalized system like that for software engineers?

For some stuff, I know there is, based on ads I've seen. But what about particular programming languages, toolkits, etc?

Edit: coherence

(IMO the same is true for mass surveillance vs targeted surveillance.)

This implies you have some reliable and realistic metrics for code quality, and/or that all workers in a team are functionally identical.

Neither are likely to be true in practice. This doesn't mean older = better, or older = worse, or older = identical. It means you need to assess the value of individuals in a team individually.

Otherwise you're just doing scorched earth HR, with predictable consequences.

Which isn't to say that HR doesn't realize that their approach targets older workers. Just that they can say that it wasn't intentional.

Then you were kind enough to just echo the initial part and call his/her attitude irrelevant. Please read more carefully and don't be so hostile to people offering their perspectives, particularly when they are in the very class of victims under discussion.

Incorrect. OP had set up an excluded middle between a conspiracy and an emergent behavior unrelated to bias. I pointed out that it could still be bias even if it's not coordinated.

> Then you were kind enough to just echo the initial part and call his/her attitude irrelevant.

I was calling only that part irrelevant.

> they are in the very class of victims under discussion.

So am I, and that is also irrelevant. It simply doesn't matter whether you, I, or s/he are in that group. It doesn't matter whether any of us, or the IBM employees have alternative strategies. It only matters whether IBM discriminated against them.

> Please read more carefully and don't be so hostile

Advice best taken yourself. I wasn't hostile to anyone, only to an argument that had no place in this discussion. Please don't be so quick to take sides and attribute ill intent to anyone who presents facts that don't support your "perspective" on an objective question.

Nobody said it was unrelated to biases except for you. What was being suggested is that it's not a conspiracy (a.k.a an explicit agreement) against older employees. Nobody is suggesting systematic biases don't exist, which is the strawman you are attacking.

>So am I, and that is also irrelevant. It simply doesn't matter whether you, I, or s/he are in that group.

It's relevant (to me at least) in discussions where you have opportunities to hear anecdotes from the victims. We aren't lawyers deliberating a case.

> I wasn't hostile to anyone, only to an argument that had no place in this discussion.

FFS, it's not an argument anyone was making. I don't know why you're being defensive because OP was not defending ageism or claiming that an age bias didn't exist. It was just a suggestion that it was a product of the complex layoff strategies rather than some backroom hand shake of "let's get rid of the olds".

>who presents facts that don't support your "perspective" on an objective question.

You didn't present any facts and I don't have a perspective to support on this matter. I just pointed out that you're attacking people you appear to largely agree with because you're not understanding what they are saying.

The language you're using is pretty abrasive and it can come off as quite hostile even if you don't intend it. You also get defensive when someone interacts with your easy-to-misinterpret comments and you gaslight them by saying they shouldn't be quick to "take sides" about your ripe-for-polarization statement.

Maybe you could take a queue from Linus. As you said in your own comment in reference to Linus admitting he had an attitude: "Good for him. These are hard things to admit, and he's setting a great example."

If I'm so lucky, I look forward to a quippy response about how that situation is totally different.

If anything, it's a great example of direct-without-abusive, something I wish folk like Linus would adopt.

Very general, very untrue, and very off-topic. Please re-read the comment guidelines.

> Maybe you could take a queue from Linus.

Cue.

[IANAL] "Emergent behavior" is a pretty weak defense, because now you have to prove that you had no idea that the bad thing would happen. Getting into a trap of "You're either evil or incompetent, and we're just deciding which." is a bad place to be.

For the individual being affected, whether it’s “right” or “wrong” is an academic argument. Anyone in tech who got lazy and didn’t keep there skills current, hoping to retire and get a gold watch have themselves to blame.

I’m in my mid 40s and I’m a developer/consultant/architect depending on the month and I’m way to paranoid to let my skills become outdated to the point where I can’t keep a job.

One of my former managers is 60 and “self demoted” to a developer after his kids left home and can keep up with anyone when it comes to knowing the latest technology.

Perhaps, but from a policy perspective that is far from the case. Wrongs needs to be addressed even if the victims recover.

> I’m in my mid 40s and I’m a developer/consultant/architect

Congratulations. I'm in my 50s and still going strong. But neither your age nor mine really has any bearing on this.

Why do you assume that 100% of the people affected by this action couldn't find other jobs? That's insane, but without that assumption your response is a total non sequitur. If you discriminate against me, even if I have no trouble finding yet another job making twice what you ever could, that's still discrimination. It's still forcing me into an involuntary action, disrupting my income stream (especially if options or RSUs are involved), abrogating agreements between us, and - most relevantly - breaking the law. I'd still have standing to sue, and I'd still win, for the same reasons that a thwarted robbery or assault is still a crime.

That being said, I am probably younger than all y'all and I've been trained to remain in constant motion on the skills treadmill. I don't know if that's a good thing for either employers or employees. (I certainly feel under-utilized.)

(I am on the treadmill, so clearly I believe they are.)

You're also not giving me much to go on here. I've had to infer 90% of what I think you meant. I think there's a solid argument that older skills are battle-hardened and therefore better for productivity and maintainability. I'm not going to try to make it though, because I'm on the treadmill focused on acquiring newer skills, and therefore would be arguing against my own self-interest. (Eg. why do we need to know capistrano if we have kubernetes?)

But maybe those older skills are not so much maintainable, if all the newer employees on the block are discouraged from acquiring those skills based on the treadmill. You see why I'm not so sure about this treadmill business? I already learned a bunch of skills that I'm afraid we won't use, because they are already asking for newer ones (serverless!) Maybe my employer would be better served by asking me to spend some time to learn Capistrano, if they're not going to let me use Kubernetes skills I went off and acquired on my own. (Let's make this real, I'm using a real example from my own life. I don't have to be convinced that Kubernetes is more valuable, but I do have yet to prove it in the context of my real job, where our deployments all still run on Capistrano not K8s.)

My situation is likely a bit unique and I don't think my employer engages in age discrimination in any way but we have to capitalize on these newer skills to give them value. An abstract sense of "having skills with high marketability" does not deliver any value to the employer (or employee) unless they are capitalized somehow.

In any case, we're arguing about nothing, because

> get a $35/month PluralSight subscription and watch the job boards to see what you need to be studying?

we don't have any numbers on how many of these canned IBM employees actually did this and got canned anyway. Its relevance as a factor is questionable, if the employees with advanced age are simply more well compensated like you said that has also made them a bigger target. They may have kept their skills current and been terminated anyway. This is a 100% speculative argument.

I spent 9 years at a company in the 200x’s that stayed stuck in 2002 - C++, VB6, Perl hosted on IIS, classic ASP, etc. I didn’t know anything about modern development practices. Can you imagine what would have happened if I stayed another 10 years like another developer did? Last I heard they were transitioning to VB.Net and were still using Perl. So yeah, I know first hand what it looks like to let your skills stagnate and find yourself barely marketable.

When I finally left, I took a job as what for all intents and purposes was a junior .Net developer instead of a higher paying position as a C++ developer because I knew the market was moving away from C++ (at least the local market).

I spent the next decade watching the job boards, talking to recruiters and making sure my resume was matching the skills in demands and changing jobs about every two years as I learned all I could from one company and always for nice bump in salary.

I didn’t mean to jump on the “newest” technology just to keep up with industry trends. As much as I love Hashicorp’s Nomad and so used it since it worked with more than just Docker, I would never suggest anyone learn it if they already know kubernetes. That’s where the market is.

So yeah, it is about being able to find a job quickly and being more marketable to employers.

My own m.o. is to be a true “full stack developer/architect”. By full stack knowing a marketable technology on each layer -

- web

- server

- database (RDMS/NoSQL)

- cloud hosting and knowing netops/devops/ and development using their cloud native features.

- continuous integration/deployment best practices.

- and just general best practices.

You don’t have to jump on the new and shiny, the further you go down the stack, the more stable it. Sure things are always being added at each level but you don’t see the rapid changes like you do in JS land.

As far as learning things that pay less, I’m not a strong front end developer. Companies pay me because I can go very deep in the stack and can guide development and architecture from the back end. Web developers are a dime a dozen and pay seems to be stagnating for them. But I still want to learn the latest web frameworks to be more marketable in a pinch even though they are getting paid less than what I make now.

we don't have any numbers on how many of these canned IBM employees actually did this and got canned anyway. Its relevance as a factor is questionable

I wasn’t thinking about keeping thier skills up so they could keep their job at IBM, jobs are disposable and interchangeable if you stay marketable. Someone in technology with marketable skills can have a job before thier next mortgage payment is due if they are either in the right part of the country or are willing to move.

Sounds like you are stereotyping them based on knowing nothing apart from their age.

But that assumes bias actually exists in the first place. This argument is eerily similar to the religious argument of "just believe [that god is real]". No, prove it first, then I'll believe. And inb4 "they fired more old old people so that's bias". Correlation does not equal causation. Show me the causation.

> does not change the fact that discrimination is wrong

Moral platitudes are irrelevant to this discussion.

Not really. It only assumes the possibility of bias. At the very least, one must look for it. There's a lot of subjectivity involved in deciding who to hire or fire, and unfortunately a lot of people in tech seem to think they're perfect rational machines immune to bias, so they never even look. Don't have to look far for examples.

In any case, causation can look an awful lot like correlation when you've got many layers of indirection and noise to account for. So for practical purposes, they very well could be the same thing. You can shout "correlation is not causation" as loud as you like, but reality doesn't work on the basis of popular slogans.

And causation is pretty much completely irrelevant to law.

You lost me there.

Exactly. Which is why I call out unsubstantiated claims (or "slogans", as you put it) whenever and wherever I see them. The most common places I've observed them happen to be with blanket leftist allegations of sexism/racism/ageism in the tech industry.