HP Hit With Age-Discrimination Suit Claiming Old Workers Purged (mercurynews.com) 194
Hewlett-Packard started laying off workers in 2012, before it separated into HP Inc. and HP Enterprise last year. The company has continued to cut thousands of jobs since. As a result of the "restructuring," an age discrimination lawsuit has been filed by four former employees of HP alleging they were ousted amid a purge of older workers. The Mercury News reports: "The goal 'was to make the company younger,' said the complain filed Aug. 18 in U.S. District Court in San Jose. 'In order to get younger, HP intentionally discriminated against its older employees by targeting them for termination [...] and then systematically replacing them with younger employees. HP has hired a disproportionately large number of new employees under the age of 40 to replace employees aged 40 and older who were terminated.' Arun Vatturi, a 15-year Palo Alto employee at HP who was a director in process improvement until he was laid off in January at age 52, and Sidney Staton, in sales at HP in Palo Alto for 16 months until his layoff in April 2015 at age 54, have joined in the lawsuit with a former employee from Washington, removed at age 62, and one from Texas, out at age 63. The group is seeking class-action status for the court action and claims HP broke state and federal laws against age discrimination." The lawsuit also alleges that written guidelines issued by HP's human resources department mandated that 75 percent of all hires outside of the company be fresh from school or "early career" applicants.
The problem isn't that they're old... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's that they're expensive.
Purge? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Purge? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have old age, treachery _and_ skill, while most (not all) young ones have youth and nothing else...
Re:The problem isn't that they're old... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The problem isn't that they're old... (Score:4, Interesting)
Being expensive describes all the executives as well, who do less work than most employees. If parts are too expensive and are replaced with inexpensive ones, then you end up with poorer quality. For workers this is even more true, cutting costs on employees will always lead to worse quality. Of course a lot of companies just don't care about quality, they want a profit in the short run only.
Re: The problem isn't that they're old... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: The problem isn't that they're old... (Score:4, Insightful)
We lost IQ points from lead, you lost IQ points from ecstasy, so it's probably even.
Re:The problem isn't that they're old... (Score:5, Interesting)
More experienced employees usually have far better dollar-per-result ratios than inexperienced employees. That's why they make more.
I charge $250 an hour yet have more work than I can handle because it is 1/4 the price that companies pay for a large team to get a similar amount of work done. Am I expensive? NO.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't wonder. They don't care. H1Bs is all the rage.
I swear some of you are asleep. Outwardly some of these companies may seem like they want a homegrown workforce but watch where their political money goes and their hiring practices. We shouldn't need to have this kind of conversation as adults.
Re: (Score:2)
Which is why Carly is joining in on this suit.
Re:The problem isn't that they're old... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
We went from HP/EMC to IBM converged and from Vmware to Hyper-V.
It was a costly experiment: First IBM couldn't get their shit running for over a year (with no refunds for us, obviously) and then they sold it to Lenovo and Lenovo did not feel responsible for paing for going back to conventional networking.
The company supposed to install our Microsoft based private cloud took a look at the IBM hardware and went "I'll try my best". You can imagine how that ended up going.
So we've spent a lot of time and money
Re: (Score:3)
I think you mean they know what they are doing... unlike the inexperienced people who replaced them.
Re: (Score:2)
Expense isn't the issue. OIder employees with similar experience (and similar compensation) are also discriminated against.
It's really blatant in some of the ads.. "Looking for YOUNG, dynamic, candidate who works to deadline" has actually be used by someone who was stupid in placing their ad. Usually they use dog whistles or (Infosys) require your resume have the date you graduated high school (so they can cull you before you wall in the door - and yes it's illegal to do that).
IT is incredibly low status,
Re: (Score:2)
Expense isn't the issue. OIder employees with similar experience (and similar compensation) are also discriminated against.
It's really blatant in some of the ads.. "Looking for YOUNG, dynamic, candidate who works to deadline" has actually be used by someone who was stupid in placing their ad.
I remember a few years ago an Australian startup, which was then hitting the big time, putting out a similar ad. Except they were smart enough to leave out the word "young" and just hint at it with "dynamic", "eager to learn", etc, and mention that they would be joining a "young" team.
A couple of years later the company was in the news, complaining that they couldn't recruit skilled engineers
Re:The problem isn't that they're old... (Score:5, Insightful)
If they are good at their jobs, then they are actually cheaper overall, because the provide more additional value than their additional cost. If they are not good, they should have been fired for that quite a while earlier.
Maybe if the IT industry would stop firing people that have experience, the products would finally get better....
Re: (Score:3)
A 2-3% pay raise is actually reducing your buying power year on year. That employee was getting severely underpaid for the position, it didn't even give them an increase for increased experience and being better at the job over time. You do realize that there is this thing called inflation? If you don't give people raises of at least that amount, then you are paying them less than the amount you paid last year, even if the raw dollar value is more.
http://www.usinflationcalculat... [usinflatio...ulator.com]
Fetal position (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
WTF. That sounds like a guy who needs to man up.
Hey don't get me wrong, I am an old programmer... and I feel the fear. But rather than resort to a fetal position I am preparing for the inevitable.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously? He probably knows 20-30 languages if he's been developing that long.
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously? He probably knows 20-30 languages if he's been developing that long.
You get rusty if you do them serially. I've forgotten more languages than I know.
Yet people still seem to like me doing what I do, even when I don't.
Re: (Score:2)
That is what people seem to miss about the kids coming out of college. They have learned, what, 5 languages? An old timer has learned at least 10 over the years due to the new hotness changing over the years.
fresh from school or "early career" = h1b (Score:4, Insightful)
fresh from school or "early career" = h1b
Outed at age 63? (Score:1)
removed at age 62, and one from Texas, out at age 63
How is this not a good thing? Is America that low on the scale of employee rights that they didn't get an epic win out of this? We recently closed a plant and made everyone redundant. One of the guys was 62 and on the day it was announced he opened a $10000 bar tab and made sure everyone drank for free after his huge windfall. He forcefully retired on a wheelbarrow of money.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow!! Well if one guy can do it, they all can do it. Maybe you should tell them all this, I'm sure they'd listen to you.
Re: (Score:2)
No it's not a point of one guy vs another guy.
It's a point of a country and a policy protecting and rewarding those who are vulnerable and who have shown the dedication.
This example isn't one guy being lucky, this example is one guy being old in a country where forced redundancies get really expensive for people with a lot of age and experience which incentivises them to be kept on.
Re: (Score:1)
I am sure gov can help in putting people where they belong. I am sure you will belong to the ones that pour the gas into the showers not vice versa so it is all for good. At least from your perspective.
Re:Outed at age 63? (Score:5, Insightful)
Step closer so that I can hit you with my cane.
Tell me that when SSI requires 63-70 to retire. (Score:1)
Some people need to keep going because their SSI check won't cover their living expenses unless they put in that extra 3-10 years. Some people won't be able to retire even then, either due to having a divorce, or getting started late on their Social Security payments, or only getting paid minimum wage for most/all of their life, etc.
There are lots of reasons for people to keep working well into their 70s or 80s, maybe some of them have health reasons that they SHOULD retire for, but unless *YOU* are going t
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
You can certainly keep doing it. You may not be able to get paid for it.
Re: (Score:2)
No place for old men (Score:1)
Re:No place for old men (Score:4, Insightful)
If that's their stance, that's like athletes, who pretty much retire around 35 or so. If they don't want old guys as programmers, better pay high salaries to young programmers, just like how athletes get paid. So they can retire or find another job when they are "too old."
Retire early (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, Tech is bit too wild west to trust over the long term. Live frugal and save like mad. Once you have enough money stashed away to guarantee you won't starve, then work if you want to and it all becomes extra FU money. You can't trust tech as a career beyond 50, and maybe not even to 45 in certain specialties.
Re: (Score:3)
My current plan is to own a house, and have it fully paid for. Once that is done, all necessary costs of living are just peanuts and I could live comfortably on less than minimum wage.
I should be able to pull that off some time within the next 3 years.
Re: Retire early (Score:2)
Re: Retire early (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, Tech is bit too wild west to trust over the long term.
I think it points more to your government policies which allows companies to treat employees like disposable trash. In many parts of the world getting rid of an employee near retirement who has had a career at a company would be an insanely expensive activity that wouldn't pay for itself with H1Bs let alone with simply younger labour and that's before taking into account the inexperience young labour brings.
Re: (Score:3)
Where are these tech jobs that pay enough early in your career to save significant amounts of cash? Between rent/mortgage, transport costs, student loan repayments and general living expenses a lot of people can barely make ends meet.
People starting out get pressured to go a minimum wage internship to get some cash, then a junior position that just about covers their ramen budget, because later in their career they will earn big bucks and it will all be worth it. Except now you are saying that they need to
Re: (Score:2)
Move, lots of places you can. Especially if you head up North.
Hope they win.. (Score:1)
But may be difficult to prove without a smoking gun, email etc. Otherwise company will claim they were purging more expensive employees for cheaper ones.
Typical corporate garbage, which is why no one in their right mind wants have a career now in Corporate America, b/c they know once they reach their 50's they become too expensive, outdated and replaceable in the eyes of Corporate America.
Re: (Score:2)
Everyone above (and including) VP should be executed. But HR should be raped with codfish wrapped in barbed wire first.
Then beaten and buried. Then executed.
FTFY
Haha America (Score:5, Insightful)
mindset issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, unfortunately, most opt for the former rather than the latter choice.
Re: (Score:3)
No surprise, because good managers have this issue that they do not take crap from the higher-ups either.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
From my experience, your guess is accurate. Fortunately, I have this experience as an outside consultant, and if they want me to work overtime to fix their screwups, I can smile friendly and tell them what my rate for overtime is. That ends the discussions pretty fast.
Re: (Score:2)
And the decline of the USA continues. Experience shits all over youth. At 22 I couldn't code for shit. At 31 I can do 20x what I could at 22...
Well sure, but by the time you're 40 you'll be so senile you'll barely be able to log in ;-)
Re: Haha America (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Matches my experience. Although coding is not my core-competency these days, I still do quite a bit of mostly pretty advanced coding at 47. Most of that I would have found much more difficult 10-15 years ago and pretty much impossible 25 years ago. And I have been coding since I was 14.
One of the most important shortcomings of young coders is that they usually have no clue what was tried in the past and did not work or did not work well. Hence they are re-inventing the wheel like crazy and mostly badly. MS
Re: (Score:2)
I'd bet that 200 seasoned 40-65 year olds could build a much better OS than Microsoft or Apple could
So why don't they?
Build a start-up, make this incredible OS, get rich. My guess is that your definition of "better" doesn't translate to a product that people actually want.
This is just ageism. If it were possible for 200 older developers to produce these amazing products, someone would have realized and tapped that resource by now. Self driving cars would be perfected, instead of having to wait years while the young whipper-snappers learn the lessons you already know and get their shit together.
Re: (Score:2)
Something being the best on technical grounds is not what wins in the OS market. Microsoft has proven that barely good enough is just fine. It is the other parts of the bussiness that engineers usually don't pay as much attention to that lead to wins, and that is why we never understand why sucky stuff wins.
Re: (Score:2)
Managing a 200 person team is a fucking nightmare.
Re: (Score:3)
Very much so. Apple had a moment of sanity (or maybe they just realized their limitations) when they based OS X on BSD Unix, and Microsoft found that taking a networks stack, also from BSD, I believe, was a good idea. Other than that they are repeating mistakes made decades ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Which makes it a BSD-Unix. The alternatives would be SysV (like Solaris, for example) or Unix-Like (like Linux or QNX).
First they fire employees (Score:5, Insightful)
then whine about not being able to find talent.....
Re: (Score:2)
They need 5 years experience on 6 month old technologies, for graduate wages, living near their offices where property prices are 5x normal. There is a severe shortage of people meeting that criteria.
It's not just the US either. I get regular spam for jobs paying £40k based on Reading or London, where a £40k salary will buy you a shed with one light bulb and a gas hob for your instant noodles.
Re: (Score:2)
Funnily enough, a £40K salary in London would be enough for me, as an older employee. I've paid off my mortgage and the commute costs would be about £3/4K.
I've got experience, I can add value and if the job was interesting I just need enough money coming in to pay the bills and leave a little over for the odd luxury.
My point is that sometimes us older workers are in situations where we can be good value if we're given the chance.
The problem isn't that they're old (Score:1)
It's that CEO CFO COO and other top execs wanted to break the law and pad their bonus payments at the expense of older American citizen workers
Again, HP (Score:1)
Now I'm sure that is curry I smell in the break room.
Age discrimination elsewhere.... (Score:2)
(sorta) down to socioeconomics (Score:2)
Put your money where you feel it's best-served... giving your money to companies that support (possibly) repressive and/or un-environmental policies need not be given more strength.
If you're an older person that feels companies routinely practice this policy, then don't buy their product.
There's more than one reason I don't shop at Wal-Mart... Whole Foods just made my shit-list.
The worst part is, and I understand this all-too-well, how does one get internet without supporting Comcast, AT&T, etc.?
Smoke and mirrors (Score:1)
Executive compensation and excess is at an all time high, and yet they've convinced people to fight the elderly for the leftover scraps.
Not just HP and also in Japan (Score:5, Insightful)
Trying to decide whether or not to name names, but in a sense it doesn't matter. As near as I can tell, ALL companies hate old employees. Various companies have various reasons, but I think high-tech companies (like HP and my former employer) might be the most hateful.
Experience is NOT an asset when no one has experience with the latest and greatest technology. Even if the old folks are willing to work as cheaply as fresh hires, and even if the old folks are fast learners, salary cuts are intrinsically demotivating. You can try disguises like "declining health", but they don't work well and job satisfaction tends to decline. Anyway, the bean counters at the top prefer fresh meat. Cheap.
In Japan the situation is especially critical because the demographic transition is resulting in lots of old people and very few young ones. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) has actually put out "guidelines" that strongly encourage companies to keep older employers who want to work until at least age 65, but the companies are just playing games with the rules.
Without naming names, I'm going to try to summarize "a friend's" experiences. For brevity, AF. The managers started pressuring AF to retire around 55, but AF declined. AF's job and working conditions were steadily made worse and then AF was shoved out the door ASAP, which was AF's 60th birthday. The MHLW had a response. Rough translation: "They aren't supposed to do that if AF wanted to keep working, but tough titties."
Anyway, I'm just an old philosopher, so I get to say "That's too bad" to AF. In philosophic terms, there are four quadrants to consider. Everyone wants to be in Q1 with good work and good compensation, and no one wants to be in Q4 with bad work and bad pay. The interesting cases are Q2, good work with bad pay, and Q3, bad work with good pay. AF wanted Q1 or Q2, but got shoved into Q3 and then Q4.
Me? I'm just an old bum who's outlived my usefulness. Insofar as most of my career was spent in Q1 and Q2, I can't complain too much. However, at this point it appears that my best outcome is to pass away before I exhaust my savings. I would contribute more to the economy if my new focus wasn't on minimizing my expenses, eh? You'd think the companies might be smart enough to worry about the loss of business from all of those penny-pinching retirees, but they obviously aren't that smart.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Experience is NOT an asset when no one has experience with the latest and greatest technology.
Experience ensures fewer mistakes are made no matter how "old" or "new" the technology in use. I would pass up five young inexperienced engineers in favor of a known good senior architect and senior project manager EVERY time and easily justify the decision to management. Same cost.
Me? I'm just an old bum who's outlived my usefulness.
Sincere question - why do you say that? Experience is supposed to bring value to the table. Are you not able to bring value to the table with your experience? This isn't a personal attack - genuinely curious.
Myself as AC
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like your company may have made the transition that I think my former employer is secretly working on, and if so, I understand why you didn't mention the name... I'll call it the Price Waterhouse model because of a friend who joined that company just after getting his MBA.
PW overhires fresh meat with the deliberate intention of eliminating almost all of them within the first two years. The cream of the cream are the only ones they want to keep, or at least that was how he described it those many year
Class Action Suit (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Only if people from Dell have a similar complaint and then manage to come across the same attorneys.
the differing values of ages (Score:4, Insightful)
fresh out of school:
+ willing to work some to much OT without extra pay
+ will settle for less pay and benefits
+ cheap to replace if necessary
+ unlikely to give a big fight if fired ("easy to fire")
+ little to no lost assets if fired or quits
+ more open to new ideas and changing tech
+ cheaper insurance costs
experienced / old-timers:
+ heavilty trained and experienced at their position. efficient. certified.
+ has learned "the big picture" in operations, understands subtle effects and can head off future problems
+ has valuable and possibly unique organizational knowledge (undocumented information and processes)
+ has formed working relationships with other employees, improved efficiency and communications
+ more reliable attendance
+ less likely to leave suddenly
But the big issue I have with this article is how they act so surprised that a company more frequently ends up replacing someone with another person that's younger. Um, people get old. If you keep replacing your workforce with people of the same or greater age, eventually you're going to be running on a staff of people all hanging around retirement age. You have to get new blood in continuously, it's required for a business to continue. I don't see validity in calling "age descrimination" on hiring. On selective firing, YES, definitely. But not on hiring. I don't agree with the "equal opportunity employer" thing, I believe that a company/owner should be able to decide who they hire. Once you've established the business relationship with them, then some rules need to kick in, to avoid "disposable/throwaway employee" resource issues.
A lot of companies seem to see their HR as a source of funding they can tap into when times get tough, "reducing staffing costs" by canning the seniors and hiring cheap replacements. This rarely works out well for them. They don't need government rules to bring the pain, they bring it to themselves. Radio Shack just got done committing "suicide by seniority-culling". They fired everyone that either was doing well or knew how to run the stores, and replaced them with cheap labor that was inexperienced, idiot, or both. (they did several other stupid things that are OT, but this was one of the "big three" that took them down) And down they went. It's a self-limiting problem. If HP wants to lobotomize their human resources, I say let them. We'll see them bought out under duress after they tank a few years from now by someplace like walmart.
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't have anything to do with skills. It's HP laying off older, higher salaried workers to make their bottom line temporarily look better, regardless of what it does to future productivity. Which is age discrimination, and illegal.
Is Arnold working in HR at HP now? (Score:2)
HP intentionally discriminated against its older employees by targeting them for termination [...] and then systematically replacing them with machines
On August 24, 2016 Skynet became self aware and started terminating those who were old enough to be a threat, or at least look up from their cell phone occasionally. Fortunately for humanity, John Connor (in 2027) sent Kyle Reese back in time to save them...
Kyle Reese: You've been targeted for termination!
Arun Vatturi: What? You're going to have to speak up sonny.
Kyle Reese: Come with me if you want to live!
Arun Vatturi:Sorry young man, my hearing-aid...[falls to the floor after multiple gunshots]
Kyle Re
HP employed fifty-year-olds? (Score:2)
In Silicon Valley, employees feel the hot breath of age discrimination when they hit thirty.
This is a fact of life for us older developers (Score:2)
I agree that it is BS on many levels, but it is what it is... an old story. This is the case for most older workers.
I personally am positioning myself for the inevitable. Learn and actually use some new skills, have a decent work portfolio, learn some soft skills like public speaking, and so on. Pay off all debts, and saving my ass off... basically making hay while the sun shines so when that axes comes it won't be a catastrophe, and be able make do with a lower paying job.
Prunes? (Score:2)
Re:Age or Wage Discrimination? (Score:5, Insightful)
Older workers tend to get paid more and have higher health insurance costs. It's probably more about the wage than the age.
Yes, but older workers bring experience to the job that younger workers don't have...
I myself am willing to pay older employees more for that experience. A 50 year old developer who indicates that he/she is willing to continue to learn and improve themselves is a valuable thing to me.
I have hired 65 year olds who want to keep working part time and are bored with retirement...
Age is just a number...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, it indicates your distance from birth. Maybe you should look up the definition sometime?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe distance from birth and proximity to death are strongly correlated [wikimedia.org] for humans above age 20?
Re: (Score:2)
Not that much. And you also failed statistics 101, because that is _not_ what this graph says.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Not every position requires "experience". Do you think McDonald's would hire MBAs as cashiers at quadruple the price of their other cashiers because they would value the "experience"? The MBA's real talents would be completely squandered in that role. This is an extreme example, of course, but it works for other positions as well. You wouldn't hire someone with a PhD in Computer Science, specializing in artificial intelligence, so that they could do odd jobs like write a tool for IT to help manage their i
Re:Age or Wage Discrimination? (Score:5, Interesting)
A company is not just a day care center for adults. There are real products being built and services being sold. If you have cheap ass workers then you end up with a cheap ass company. The leaders of these companies probably don't even care that they have a lousy company and a lousy product, as they'll destroy company after company while collecting huge incomes along the way.
Re: (Score:3)
That seems to be very much the core of the problem: No negative consequences for management that is bad for the company and for society as well, but huge financial benefits for the sociopaths doing it.
Re: (Score:2)
Even 60 year olds aren't about to keel over. Once of the best software engineers I ever met is in his 70s, he's runner, and he's damned fast. Young engineers busy chugging soft drinks and vending machine food are more likely to die.
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. Not even close. Look at https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS... [ssa.gov]. Out of 100,000 men, about 10% will die in the 60s. Not remotely close to 60%.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a company issue, not an age of employee issue. I've worked with young guys who couldn't figure it out and old guys who kept up with tech. It's the person, not the age.
Re: (Score:2)
Very much so.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: sounds right (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Director" jobs at HP are a joke. Mostly someone who knows someone or has something on someone. They get paid lots for doing not much anything.
Sort of like the old "Grand Poo Bah" positions (less the funny hats).
Re: (Score:2)
Why should they make room for the weak? They survived this long as various Darwinian forces weeded out their ranks. They are going to move over for a whining baby? I think not.
You're going to have to shove them out. If you can (which I doubt).
Re: (Score:2)