IBM, Kyndryl Sued For Age Discrimination By Its Own VPs (theregister.com) 64
Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: Once again, IBM has been sued for age discrimination, this time alongside spin-off Kyndryl, for allegedly cutting the jobs of older workers while creating similar positions for younger ones. The complaint [PDF] was filed on Tuesday in New York City, on behalf of five veteran executives and employees who collectively served the two corporations for more than 150 years. The IBM plaintiffs include: Michael Nolan, former Director of Strategy and Planning for IBM's Software Unit; Karla Bousquet, former VP, CEO of Events at IBM, Karla; Jay Zeltzer, former Business Automation Leader; and Teresa Cook, former VP of Client Experience. Randall Blanchard, former Services Account manager, is suing Kyndryl, having previously been with Big Blue.
Despite IBM chief global HR officer Nickel LaMoreaux's 2022 rejection of what she characterized as "false claims of systemic age discrimination," the lawsuit argues the mainframe titan is still targeting older workers. The legal filing cites a 2021 case, Townsley v. Int'l Bus. Machines Corp, in which executive Sam Ladah, who is accused of attempting "to keep ageist IBM executive level planning documents confidential," said those documents from five to six years earlier were still being used for hiring decisions. To further support the claim that the targeting of older workers continues to this day, the complaint says, "A recently leaked video of [CEO Arvind] Krishna confirms that IBM has continued its practice of using secretive top-down pressure to gerrymander its workforce to reflect the demographic preferences of its executives."
The 2023 video, published by conservative political activist James O'Keefe, appears to show Krishna tying manager bonuses to diversity targets in a context where such targets are alleged to be discriminatory. Basically, IBM has been accused of threatening to withhold bonuses from bosses if they don't hire a diverse enough range of techies -- more Hispanic and Black people -- leading to qualified candidates -- Asian people and others -- being ignored on the basis of their race. The latest lawsuit also points to Wimbish v. IBM, an age discrimination complaint filed in September by two human resources managers. "In their complaint, these fired HR managers alleged that IBM's HR still constantly consider an employee's 'runway' when determining if that worker would be terminated," the complaint says. "'Runway' is coded language for how long IBM HR expects an employee to remain at IBM before they retire, a direct proxy for age."
Despite IBM chief global HR officer Nickel LaMoreaux's 2022 rejection of what she characterized as "false claims of systemic age discrimination," the lawsuit argues the mainframe titan is still targeting older workers. The legal filing cites a 2021 case, Townsley v. Int'l Bus. Machines Corp, in which executive Sam Ladah, who is accused of attempting "to keep ageist IBM executive level planning documents confidential," said those documents from five to six years earlier were still being used for hiring decisions. To further support the claim that the targeting of older workers continues to this day, the complaint says, "A recently leaked video of [CEO Arvind] Krishna confirms that IBM has continued its practice of using secretive top-down pressure to gerrymander its workforce to reflect the demographic preferences of its executives."
The 2023 video, published by conservative political activist James O'Keefe, appears to show Krishna tying manager bonuses to diversity targets in a context where such targets are alleged to be discriminatory. Basically, IBM has been accused of threatening to withhold bonuses from bosses if they don't hire a diverse enough range of techies -- more Hispanic and Black people -- leading to qualified candidates -- Asian people and others -- being ignored on the basis of their race. The latest lawsuit also points to Wimbish v. IBM, an age discrimination complaint filed in September by two human resources managers. "In their complaint, these fired HR managers alleged that IBM's HR still constantly consider an employee's 'runway' when determining if that worker would be terminated," the complaint says. "'Runway' is coded language for how long IBM HR expects an employee to remain at IBM before they retire, a direct proxy for age."
Losing the expensive old techies... (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Offer everyone 2 years pay for voluntary separation.
2) Maintain retirement benefits for those with less than 2 years to retirement eligibility.
3) Then all the people within 2 years of retirement will take the money and leave.
4) Regret the consequences as you lose all your most experienced staff overnight.
Re: Losing the expensive old techies... (Score:2)
Who needs experienced staff? (Score:3)
IBM doesn't charge less for an unexperienced consultant anyway.
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Is executing a field that changes and in which you need to constantly be learning new things?
Yes. It's one of the pillars Warren Buffett relies on [247wallst.com] (item 2). If, as an executive, you're not trying to figure out how AI may or may not affect your business, what its cost may or may not be, what new processes are coming along that might enhance or detract from your business, you're not doing your job. Does this mean you need to know everything about everything? Of course not. But you better be willing and ab
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age matters (Score:4, Insightful)
I am fucking old. I feel like I think the same way I do in my 20s but realistically .. I do not. The thing is, with age comes "wisdom" BS and also with baggage. Various things I've learned (I mean in a knowledge/experience sense not overt PTSD shit) .. it locks me into a way of thinking. For one thing I like to believe I am open to new ideas .. but I am really not. It's very hard for me to not dismiss things as bullshit. 99% of the time they are, and that just reinforces my commitment to just rejecting things as stupid. But worse than that, coming up with new ideas is hard, because the mind is happy with where things are. Not really seeing the gap in things. I may be good at managing and "advising". Think about how you do things .. and how dopamine is fired in your brain. It's different when you're older. No longer want to party for example. All the new music sounds like shit and is dumb. Also, you don't have friends like you did in school or even college. Though I notice young people nowadays don't have real friendships like we did back when I was growing up. When you are older you have to watch what you say or do even among your friends. When I was a kid you could have a fist fight with someone one day and the next day he's your best friend.
Do I think age discrimination is OK? No. But at the same time I believe you need to screen out for more BS when dealing with an older person especially for a startup. Are they going to burn the midnight oil for you? You need to be sure they're bought into the vision and will stick with it.
unlink healthcare from jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
unlink healthcare from jobs so that older people don't drive the bill up
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The corollary to this is "fire the old and infirm, who are driving our healthcare costs up". Way to go.
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I'm surprised that companies don't push for single payer healthcare. Yes, it might raise taxes slightly, but then they are not having to deal with the burdens of people who might be smokers or have existing conditions. The US spends the most on healthcare total and per capita of any nation... so anything done at the Federal level is a step forward.
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Oh please. Handing medical care over to the Feds would be a nightmare. They already mismanage Medicaid and Medicare, and the gap in payments for both is a significant part of what drives up healthcare costs for anyone not using those programs.
The Feds helped create this problem. Why give them the keys to the kingdom?
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Is that per capita or total costs? A quick search reveals Canada has around 41 million people..or barely more then California. The USA as a whole has about 340 million people.
Having never used Canadian health care I don't really know how to compare the two systems and I've heard horror stories from basically every countries healthcare sectors, so the truth gets a little hazy here.
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Canada was one of the countries to be affected most by the retirement of the boomers and it has made it difficult to find a doctor that is dedicated to you, and if you go to an ER you could be waiting around 12 hours if it isn't for something critical. Wait times for hips and knees used to be long but that is down to a few months now in most provinces. Basically they will get to you determined by your nee
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By they I presume you mean Congress which only recently approved allowing Medicare to bargain for lower drug prices and only on select drugs. And that is only one of the impediments Congress imposes on Medicare.
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Congress is schizophrenic; it sees problems that aren't there, and it sees solutions that aren't there, and it has multiple personalities that argue with each other. Nobody in congress wants to get rid of medicare, that would be an instant end to their political careers; but at the same time many of them want Medicare to fail. They then go and deliberately undermine Medicare, making it more expensive, then they go off to campaign on the topic of Medicare being too expensive.
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The Feds used to manage the VA quite well until recently. Right now, other than just letting people die if they don't have insurance, how can we have a worse medical system? People will say it is about money, but the US pays far more for healthcare, at least a factor of two than "socialist" countries like Norway. Maybe we can save on health care which would be money that could be used for other things?
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There might be some excuse for "burning the midnight oil" at a startup, but the compensation has to be commensurate. I'm sure that few here are strangers to firms who view "voluntary overtime" as mandatory, or "you're not a team player". And startups are no less prone to such abuse.
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Startups are more prone to such abuse, as they often don't have an HR team that knows the laws. Most of these mandatory 60 or 80 hour weeks come from peer pressure, not from actual mandates.
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I should point out that the screening should be the same young vs. old .. no difference .. just saying that the screening needs to be there. Discrimination means unfair application of screening .. fairly applying screening equally isn't discrimination. It's like if you think it's important for employees to be a certain way, make sure of it For example, if you think a lot of people don't know shit about a certain tech even though you assume they would then you should add that your screening of everyone.
Re:age matters (Score:5, Interesting)
As a geezer, my bullshit detection horse-sense is fairly accurate, I must say. Too many good ideas get tossed chasing the latest fads. We should keep and tweak the good ideas of older tools instead of completely revamp them. Let's stand on the shoulders of the greats instead of kill them off and replace them with a Buzzword Baby.
The principles of biz/admin CRUD have not changed much since the mid-90's. I know that claim sounds git-off-my-lawn-ish, but I stand by it! Devs were more productive with good desktop IDE's. The Oracle Forms devs at our org still code 4x faster than the web devs (features per week) and need to type 1/4 the code to do it. "I don't care if it's fast and efficient and lean to code, it looks old and doesn't have enough buzzwords!" Why can't we improve on concepts PROVEN to work rather than ThrowOutAndStartOver?
(I know Oracle Forms has warts, but I've seen none that couldn't be conceptually fixed. We don't have to clone it exactly to get an OSS variation, just keep & tweak the best concepts. I've never used OF myself in production, by the way.)
Most internal apps don't need eye candy, web-scale, distributed computing, mobile, etc. buzzwords. Embrace ugly and save a thousand dimes. It Just Fucking Works.
For example, I've seen date fields fucked up gazillion different ways in different UI kits. It's comical. [youtube.com] You whippersnappers are doing something bigly wrong. Pointing that out won't get me a raise because nobody wants to hear the truth, they just want a bigger paycheck via bigger buzzwords. If you pay devs well to mow with tweezers, I swear to Zeus they'll do it.
CRUD is mostly about principles, not technology. And I 200% admit I'm not as good at chasing buzzwords as when I was young.
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An issue with this approach is you also have to train younger people in the older tools, or else when the geezers retire off there's no one to hire to maintain those products. And that means you have to find younger people to willingly spend time training in older tools.
I don't know about you, but when I was younger I didn't want to learn the outgoing COBOL, I wanted to learn Delphi, Java, Linux, etc, the brand new stuff. I'm sure there were plenty of geezers back then saying the COBOL interfaces were fine
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That sounds like an industry habit of catering to churn-and-burn product releases and egos. We got to find a way to break that habit so we have Vulcan-like tools instead of human-like tools. (Emacs? ;-)
Also, youngbies who want to go into the latest and greatest would probably select AI, not CRUD as a target career.
> if we did we'd be 20 years back in tech innovation, still manually-setting IRQ and SCSI IDs.
No, I'm not saying keep-everything-exactly-the-same. We improve existing tools or at least heavily
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To be fair, we were going through a much more rapid advancement in computer technology. You saw progress take places over months instead of years. Buying a new computer every other year saw huge increases in power. Now, you can use a ten year old computer and do 90% of the work you could do 10 years ago, no problem.
The industry is maturing and going through much less transformation. It doesn't mean we won't come up with new stuff but a lot of the core is indeed figured out. This is especially true with a lo
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Why can't we improve on concepts PROVEN to work rather than ThrowOutAndStartOver?
Why, because you wouldn't need a team of twenty-somethings to do that, of course! Sheesh ...
Dealing with trauma matters (Score:2, Interesting)
(I mean in a knowledge/experience sense not overt PTSD shit)
At any age, if a person does not deal with the issues in their life the allostatic load imposed by the mind on the brain will consume cognitive resources. It's the same with the body, if it is not maintained it will have reduced function.
Any person of any age who deals with and resolves their issues will have more cognitive resources available in the form of fluid intelligence, older people will also have static intelligence available, based on previous experience, that consumes much less cognitive energy
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Everything matters, pregnancy matters for instance. You're just legally obligated to pretend it does not.
I DO believe any discrimination is okay in the private economy because that goldi locks non discriminating "screen out" you propose is complete fantasy. You might not call it discrimination, but if it's completely indistuingashable from discrimation by legal standards AND from outside perspective is it really not? You're just rationalizing, it's discrimination when other people do it ...
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So what if "pregnancy matters for instance", if you as a male are unwilling to make compensations for women who are pregnant, are you even human?
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are you even human?
No, you're gay. Gay men don't have pregnant girlfriends, so why would it matter to them?
Or did you think that Corporate America backs pride month for no reason at all?
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Burn the midnight oil....Yeah, for MONEY!!! Otherwise, you just want someone that will take enormous amounts of shit because they don't know any better or think they are special or that the company can't survive without them (haha).
Otherwise, yeah, your post feels spot on.
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Do I think age discrimination is OK? No. But at the same time I believe you need to screen out for more BS when dealing with an older person especially for a startup. Are they going to burn the midnight oil for you? You need to be sure they're bought into the vision and will stick with it.
Nice. You almost had me... until the part at the end about startups gave it away as a copy-paste troll.
IBM is not a startup. The article is about people with decades of service at their jobs being replaced by cheaper younger employees in an illegally discriminatory manner.
Try to keep up old man ;)
I’m a bit confused (Score:5, Insightful)
But.is there some law that requires companies to keep a highly-paid veteran employee on the payroll, if the job can be done by a rookie? If a company can lay-off a 30-year veteran that makes 175k per year, and hire one or two 20-somethings that can do the same job for 60k per year, is there some law that requires the company to hold onto the older employee? That means there was no need for such a highly paid employee in the position in the first place. The job was overpaid.
Is that cold? Yes. It’s also simple economics.
Now, the company had better make that judgement correctly, or they lose the veteran’s huge body of knowledge and experience. Cost-cutting has it’s own risks.
Technically, they should probably offer the veteran the opportunity to stay on at a lower rate of pay, but for some reason our society considers that rude. So companies just fire and re-hire a lower paid youngun.
As employees get older, they get more productive, but then peak and eventually become less productive. But their pay generally trends only upwards. If companies don’t fix this, their costs keep climbing while their productivity goes down. In a capitalism, that means that some other company is gonna eat their lunch.
Where is the line between this and true age discrimination?
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Where is the line between this and true age discrimination?
Doesn't matter. You win.
There is no way for anyone to justify their own job if you can line enough people up to do it cheaper.
You know Chernobyl was cheaper. How did that work out?
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How this applies to such high (and highly paid) positions as Director, CEO, and VP could be tricky, since it's assumed you don't reach such high positions merely be "meeting standards" or "functioning as expected." They got these jobs by excelling, so merely reverting to
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Why have jobs as such, just make all positions freelance.
Generally you need a mixture of everything.
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But.is there some law that requires companies to keep a highly-paid veteran employee on the payroll, if the job can be done by a rookie? If a company can lay-off a 30-year veteran that makes 175k per year, and hire one or two 20-somethings that can do the same job for 60k per year, is there some law that requires the company to hold onto the older employee? That means there was no need for such a highly paid employee in the position in the first place. The job was overpaid.
Two things about that.
One response is, well, maybe ... if there was an implied career to be had, by devoting your working life to the company. Yeah, yeah, we are all supposed to be too cynical for that now, but it's a tad cold to fault people for believing what a company publicly tries to say or imply about being a family, a place to have a career, etc.
But much more importantly - you are making the implicit assumption that the "one or two 20-somethings" actually can do "the same job". Maybe they can ... o
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This will work for exactly two product cycles, the first alienates customers, the second looses them forever.
For the C level MBAs that's enough to get the big bonuses. For the company it's a big loss in credibility and customers. No worries, the MBAs have a fix for that: Massive layoff
Re:I'm a bit confused (Score:2)
But.is there some law that requires companies to keep a highly-paid veteran employee on the payroll, if the job can be done by a rookie? If a company can lay-off a 30-year veteran that makes 175k per year, and hire one or two 20-somethings that can do the same job for 60k per year, is there some law that requires the company to hold onto the older employee?
Yes. Yes there is.
Bad Management (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporate America is incompetent, by and large. Some would say deliberately so.
They build an army consisting of nothing but self-congratulatory three-star generals leading intimidated PFCs and recruits. Then they wonder why they lose.
Ask any military man or woman. Who is the backbone of an army? The sergeants. The captains, majors and lieutenant colonels. They bring experience to the rank and file. They do most of the training. They lead by example.
If your company has no sergeants or captains, you're going to lose, and you deserve it.
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You're talking common sense for long term success, which doesn't align with asset striping and the quick return sadly.
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Yes, but are sergeants web scale?
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THIS
"Who is the backbone of an army? The sergeants."
I have half a dozen or so Assoc. Engineers. And I'm bringing them up. Soon enough ( a few more years ) I'll be out, but they will be trained.
And I will have done my job.
the magic number 75 (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked at IBM for quite a few years. It was a bad company to work for from day one, many unpleasant experiences there. The company had always preferred to hire recent graduates and assumed they would work their entire careers at IBM. I was one of the few experienced hires at the time.
After having been there a few years and surviving several waves of layoffs I learned from various managers that there was a pretty simple formula of vulnerability. If your age plus your years of employment added up to 75 or more you were automatically on the shit list. It clearly was age discrimination.
I wasn't aware that the formula applied even at the executive level, but I have zero sympathy for those people. They helped perpetuate the policy.
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I worked at IBM in bygone days when things were not bad. The AIX developers and the OS/2 developers were respected because they made new and useful things, and IBM was a "one stop shop" for businesses. One could get an entire IBM stack, be it desktops, servers, UNIX machines, file servers... you name it, and just have one number to call if stuff went wrong, and if you had two places playing the XLOB game with you, you just asked for a duty manager, and they unfucked stuff for you.
Those times are different
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" If your age plus your years of employment added up to 75 or more "
By a total coincidence I'm sure, the rule of 75 is when an employee becomes retirement eligibile in many companies.
( Including mine )
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At IBM (in the USA at least) there is no actual 'retirement'. Unless being laid off due to your age counts as a form of retirement.
People prefer clones of selves (Score:4, Insightful)
Regarding alleged DEI quotas, I've been on hiring committees. It's clear to me people prefer to hire clones of themselves when the qualifications are roughly equal. It's not necessarily blatant racism, probably just social comfort.
Thus, left to their own devices, it will be a constant mitosis of the good-ol-boy network (GOBN). DEI quotas might be an ugly fix, but without them, GOBN lives on and on.
Clarification (Score:1)
Clarification: "when the qualifications of the hiring candidates are roughly equal..."
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DEI quotas might be an ugly fix, but without them, GOBN lives on and on.
Thank you for admitting that.
I mean, it's still wrong, but I have much greater respect for those of y'all who are honest about it. At least it doesn't have that crazy-making, totalitarian flavor of everyone denying that they are doing exactly what they are doing.
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Why is it "technically" wrong? It's correcting for an unpleasant aspect of human nature.
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I did get into a bit of an argument at my previous job on this.
I gave a talk on how to write job descriptions that appeal to a wider range of demographics and where to look and how to broaden the pool of applicants. I also mentioned what the industry averages were and if you found yourself too far off the average then it's possible you're doing something which keeps the pool you're hiring from somewhat narrower than it could be.
The response I got from one notable manager that this is bad because he wanted t
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> produced vast quantities of wildly overengineered, over generalized, unmaintainable shite.
Abstractions and reuse are best when the abstractions are thin and re-composable at the sub-part level. If they are not easy to back out of if they stop fitting, they are probably over-engineered. I like to say: date abstractions, don't marry them.
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It was, as I say this as a dyed in the wool C++ nerd, almost entirely template masturbation.
yup (Score:1)
The 2023 video, published by conservative political activist James O'Keefe, appears to show Krishna tying manager bonuses to diversity targets in a context where such targets are alleged to be discriminatory. Basically, IBM has been accused of threatening to withhold bonuses from bosses if they don't hire a diverse enough range of techies -- more Hispanic and Black people -- leading to qualified candidates -- Asian people and others -- being ignored on the basis of their race.
What's more, everybody knows that this goes on. Even those who froth at the mouth denying that it does.
And if you just point out this obvious thing going on - "um, yeah, that obvious thing happening over there? it's happening" - why that's just proof that you "are" a "racist" who hates the intended beneficiaries of it all.
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No, it just means you are perfectly happy with managers who hire people just like you, clones with no ability think beyond their common boundary.
back in the early 90's (Score:2)
New headline (Score:2)
Yep, seen that before. Anyway, gtg, my Microsoft Azure training/refresher starts in 4 minutes.
Easy fix (Score:3)
Start fining and throwing the executive level folks of a Company in jail for this practice and it will come to a dead stop real quick.
Old vs New Mindset (Score:2)
I recall an incident where I was consulting to a large pharma company with a young staff.
Their CTO had a "new" and "exciting" idea he "invented". I told him we tried something very similar (same, actually...but couldn't say that) 20 years prior. I explained why our attempt failed. And, given today's faster and more powerful tech, it might be possible - I asked if he gave attention to the issues we saw with our approach with his? Crickets.
My advice and experience were ignored. They tried to build it any