[HN Gopher] IBM sued for age discrimination by former global sof...
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IBM sued for age discrimination by former global software director
Author : belter
Score : 185 points
Date : 2023-05-13 11:19 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| clnq wrote:
| Age discrimination is all over tech. But what's the argument for
| age discrimination after 40? What's the mindset that someone who
| is _for_ this discrimination would have, no matter how immoral or
| unethical? Is there a defensible view that supports
| discrimination at all?
|
| EDIT: Sorry for creating a downvote hole for some of you who
| respond. There are good responses immediately downvoted. It is
| important for us to understand the arguments behind these biases
| to effectively fight them. It is not productive to silence this
| discussion.
|
| Thank you for those who responded seriously and helped me
| understand the situation better.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Age is an undeniable factor when it comes to learning new
| things[1], whether any of us like it or not.
|
| Ultimately, the question to you as an employee is whether you
| can do the work demanded of you. While it would be nice for
| everyone to be judged on an individual basis, I can understand
| there needs to be some level of generalization to maintain a
| certain level of efficiency within an organization.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35595846
| belter wrote:
| You are providing a case of airline pilot training. It's hard
| to believe a experienced and high quality software engineer
| with 20 year of experiences, will not learn a new programming
| language faster and better, than a freshly graduated 22 year
| old child :-)
| belter wrote:
| Getting rid of expensive employees.
| rightbyte wrote:
| No I think it is more due to implied seniority due to age.
| The older the engineer the less BS he eats from management.
| d0mine wrote:
| Is it really that value/price becomes worse with age or the
| companies are just being short-sighted?
| yaseer wrote:
| I think the way you've phrased your question will invite
| negative responses.
|
| Perhaps a better way would be "I'd like to understand why age
| discrimination exists in tech. What motivates companies to do
| this?"
| xtiansimon wrote:
| > "I think the way you've phrased your question will invite
| negative responses."
|
| And?
|
| If you see nuance, and rephrasing the OP can help make your
| response on point, then please share. Otherwise I find this
| browbeating and condescending. You're just telling us how you
| want to hear the argument framed. Geez.
| yaseer wrote:
| Perhaps the tone and context were not clear.
|
| > And?
|
| A set of negative responses tends to make the quality of
| Internet discussions deteriorate. I thought there was an
| interesting discussion to be had, so suggested an
| alternative phrasing.
| clnq wrote:
| My earlier words weren't liked and got downvotes fast. But,
| we need to look at all sides of tough topics to really
| understand them. This includes the best reasons people give
| for discrimination, even if they go against what's moral,
| ethical, or legal. We can only substantially argue against
| these views if we first understand them.
|
| Even though age discrimination is very often illegal and
| probably always (maybe depends on the culture) unjust, there
| might be some sense to it from a managers point of view. For
| example, people with more experience often demand higher
| salaries. This is something we can't overlook when we're
| trying to reason about the ageism bias. And we can't really
| combat it substantially and directly if we ignore the
| strongest arguments for it -- steel-manning is a very
| powerful tool in changing minds.
|
| I probably could have phrased it better.
| serial_dev wrote:
| One argument (though, very cynical) for getting rid of 40+ yo
| people in tech: they cannot be so easily manipulated into
| blindly following company directives, and they are more likely
| to actually push back against bs rules/guidelines, whereas
| young people either don't know better, or they are more
| agreeable.
| christophilus wrote:
| Yeah. I'm over 40, and I expect a high salary due to my
| productivity and experience. You could replace me with 3 folks
| from around the world, and it's arguably a reasonable business
| decision.
| skylanh wrote:
| We're dealing with extensive loss of localized institutional
| knowledge in my workplace. The specific area I work in has
| one technically astute resource with experience dating back
| further than six years. There are other resources with that
| time-frame--but their knowledge is limited.
|
| This has been compounding the normal, expected resource
| churn.
|
| It's a qualitative stance, but a Big Brain with 10 years in
| an established area is worth more than three "fast brains"
| with 1 year of local, institutional knowledge.
|
| I might take the "fast brains" (especially if they have
| limited commitments) if we were in a different situation such
| as starting up.
| eitally wrote:
| I find it amusing when I hear people make statements
| assessing short durations like 6 years to be significant.
| Six years in many industries is enough to reach mid-tier
| level expertise, but it is absolutely not mastery level.
| I'm making this comment from the perspective of someone who
| cultivate an engineering management role in high-tech
| manufacturing over the course of 15 years (where I was
| reporting direct to C-level when I left, with a team of
| close to 150 around the world) before joining a FAANG,
| where I had the rug pulled out from under me (new
| leadership killed my team in the first six months and I had
| to find a new role or be on the street, and the new role
| was unlike anything I'd ever done before). I spent 8 years
| starting a new career before being summarily dumped in the
| RIFs of this winter/spring, and have subsequently begun a
| third career at a different company.
|
| The experience builds, and my experience is that the sweet
| spot is frequently hiring people in their 40s who have ~20
| years of practical experience in the domain or a related
| area, and who know how to avoid a lot of the pitfalls
| fresher employees might encounter while also _creating_ a
| lot of shortcuts by virtue of their experience & networks.
| It was interesting: over the course of my career, the teams
| I was managing had ever-increasing average ages, ranging
| from mid-20s when I was leading my first team of developers
| to late-40s over the last few years in big tech. Different
| functions (business vs technical), but while I appreciate
| the enthusiasm so many new grads demonstrate, the self-
| sufficiency + competency of mid-career folks is worth its
| weight in gold.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's maybe only a "good" business decision if you have very
| short-termist thinking.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Unfortunately most companies, shareholders, and execs care
| about the stock performance the next quarter and that's
| about it.
|
| A neat compensation package for a CEO would be "What will
| the stock price be in a decade?" But you could never get a
| CEO to commit for a decade because they know like we all do
| that job hopping is how you make more money and get raises.
| The system is messed up all the way down.
|
| https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-ceo-life-cycle
|
| > For instance, when we asked CEOs about the ideal tenure
| for the role, many mentioned the widely touted seven-year
| average. When we surveyed directors, they said that CEOs
| generally should leave the job after 9.5 years--a point at
| which, many believe, performance typically plateaus. Why
| these expectations? No one has a compelling or evidence-
| based answer. They are simply conventional wisdom.
|
| The graph in that linked article is particularly telling as
| it shows performance increases all come after ten years.
| dangwhy wrote:
| Do CEO's really job hop though? I am looking at top tech
| companies and they seem to have been there for a long
| time and none of them are job hoppers.
| clnq wrote:
| Yes in large tech outside of FAANG. But that is only half
| the story. A lot of decision-making often falls on vice
| presidents, presidents, or heads assigned to subsidiaries
| or projects. They job hop a lot, more often than every 7
| years in my experience.
|
| Phil Harrison is a known FAANG example, but in smaller
| companies, there are tons of Harrisons. Stephen Elop is a
| FAANG-adjacent example, having been the CEO of Nokia in
| its downfall and now job-hopping quite a lot.
|
| As a completely unrelated side-note, I love this quote
| from Elop's Wikipedia page:
|
| > In his first speech at a Telstra conference in
| September 2016, Elop cited Nokia as an example of a
| "great" company that can self-assess and "transform" when
| necessary, referencing its success as a networks
| equipment supplier. He said that Telstra was also needing
| a necessary transformation to become more of a technology
| company. Elop was dismissed from Telstra as part of its
| restructuring on 31 July 2018.
| clnq wrote:
| Yes, the institutional knowledge lost would cost more than
| the difference of that salary a year in most cases. But
| companies definitely do not value institutional knowledge
| as much as black-on-white figures on their financial
| statements.
|
| Short-termist, but a lot of business decisions are very
| short-termist, so I think the argument is good. Someone
| might think that.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I honestly think it's mostly a set of connected biases along
| the lines of:
|
| a) "Progressivism", a bias towards thinking of "good tech" as
| the "novel/new tech". Or believing that success rides on quick
| adoption of new things, along with
|
| b) A bias that believes that that the older you are the less
| likely that you have engaged with new novel tech.
|
| c) A bias that believes that if you're still "just" an engineer
| and not management, there must be something wrong with you.
| Younger staff will accept "grey hairs" at the executive level
| but sometimes be bewildered by it at the individual contributor
| level.
|
| d) A bias against more expensive talent generally.
|
| e) A bias (among some) against talent that cannot be easily
| manipulated
|
| f) A bias (among some) against people with
| children/families/mortgages/elderly parents, etc. that might
| "slow things down." (This one is maybe the trickiest because it
| can express itself in ways that are not at all intended to be
| malicious but end up with bad effects. E.g. organizing team
| offsites and gatherings which are hard for parents or committed
| spouses to engage with because of their obligations. And the
| older we get the more likely we are to have such obligations)
|
| Most people who hold these biases hold them unconsciously. I
| personally look (or sometimes act) younger than I am, and get
| "surprise" from people when I tell them my age. Likely because
| they have bias about what that age should/could imply.
|
| Age bias is mostly "correctable" in most decent human beings.
| Where it gets malicious is when it gets in the hands of
| management who have a cost focus.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > a) "Progressivism", a bias towards thinking of "good tech"
| as the "novel/new tech". Or believing that success rides on
| quick adoption of new things, along with
|
| So much this. However, "progressivism" is hopefully getting
| out of fashions as things have got worse due to
| cheapification the last 20 years, I feel.
| clnq wrote:
| Thank you for taking my question seriously. These are all
| illuminating points.
|
| To continue on point e... I also think that older people tend
| to be more difficult to manipulate with long work hours,
| unreasonable deadlines, or incompetent management. With
| enough experience, we learn to recognise these things and we
| set some boundaries. Someone might dislike that and say that
| the more experienced people don't fit into the corporate
| hustle culture, without examining the reasons in-depth.
| eitally wrote:
| This is the sort of statement that isn't wrong, but which
| illustrates the echo chamber that is HN (or tech in
| general). There are plenty of industries and even more
| companies where "hustle culture" just isn't a thing, and
| management don't devolve into a default of employee abuse.
|
| Also, besides growing a spine and looking out for #1
| increasingly as they gain age & experience, most people
| also start realizing that their time is finite and they
| need to actively prioritize where to spend it. For many,
| this realization comes with relationships & children,
| something most white collar professionals don't experience
| until they've been working 7-10 years.
| op00to wrote:
| Old people are more expensive. That's it.
| wongarsu wrote:
| They will also push back on your plan to replace the existing
| system with a microservice data-lake using event sourcing
| with Kafka, using a service-mesh on a Kubernetes cluster on
| the distributed cloud. Either because they haven't kept up
| with the latest tech, or because they have the experience to
| tell beforehand that your vanity project may sound cooler but
| increases complexity for no real technical advantage.
| tyingq wrote:
| They are also less likely to cave into pressure to work long
| hours. Or to buy into silly kool-aid movements.
| gedy wrote:
| [flagged]
| HPsquared wrote:
| Neuroplasticity is supposedly on a constant decline after
| childhood. Also processing speed, working memory, long-term
| memory. Offset by increased experience, of course.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| That can be somewhat fixed.
|
| Not if your employer does drug tests though...
| belter wrote:
| The above post should not be down voted. Although as others
| mentioned, it could have been phrased differently, it was clear
| the post was about understanding the reasons behind age
| discrimination, not about endorsing or justifying it.
| walterbell wrote:
| 1000+ comments on age discrimination in tech,
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| ncphil wrote:
| Think about the level of executive stupid you're dealing with
| when a spinoff continues using the same literal playbook -- with
| identical terminology and resources (linking to former parent
| company servers) -- in executing a painfully obvious employment
| discrimination strategy. Well, either stupid or lazy. Either way,
| it's a situation that screams out for punitive damages. Here's
| hoping these cases send at least some of IBM's top management to
| an early retirement themselves.
|
| Going to say it again: feudal power structures are no way to
| organize 21st century business. Time for people (_especially_
| young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker
| co-ops. If you're not an owner with a real decision-making vote,
| you're on the menu for these guys.
| [deleted]
| ravenstine wrote:
| > Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider
| alternative arrangements like worker co-ops.
|
| Are there any known businesses that have engineering teams and
| work this way? I'm just curious. It's not something I've really
| thought about before.
| jlokier wrote:
| Igalia comes to mind. They do quite a lot of work on all the
| big three browser engines, Blink, WebKit and Gecko, among
| other things.
|
| https://www.igalia.com/
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia
| [deleted]
| bell-cot wrote:
| > ...feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st
| century business.
|
| Sadly - if you are organizing humans, at non-trivial scales,
| over time - the alternatives all have profound problems. Feudal
| power structures (whether or not a social anthropologist or
| medieval historian would officially certify them as "feudal")
| are so common because human nature very much favors such
| arrangements.
| eternalban wrote:
| This empirical data was gathered in context of poor
| connectivity in society. So the 'default' that you propose, I
| assert, is a default for a specific societal regime.
|
| As an abstract model, I propose _hierarchies of patronage &
| loyalties, capital & force, and service_ as the fundamental
| organizing principle of 'feudal' systems.
|
| We assume that there is -- it's an implicit in your stated
| view -- a natural system level emergent order that defaults
| to 'feudalism'. Looked at another way, we could ask the
| question as to why the substantial majority of people put up
| with crap all these centuries and in all these different
| places?
|
| I think PL-CF-S order optimizes for (information/)control in
| the 'super-organism' for long term viability. (This is simply
| focusing on society as a system, disregarding the subjective
| experience of individual members.)
|
| Why was hierarchical 'control' (think command and control) so
| fundamentally important to human societies (to date)? Per
| above sketch, I assert it has to do with _marshalling of
| resources in a 'poor' energy, tech and i/o environments_.
|
| You need a hierarchy if any significant action requires high
| level control of a huge mass of people. You need a huge mass
| of people if your making and killing tech requires 'hordes'
| of peasants, workers, and soldiers.
|
| You do -not- need a strict (and non-delegating) control
| hierarchy if significant societal action requires minimal
| human resources (the 'S' in PL-CF-S model), and operates in
| an environment of 'abundant' energy and amplifying
| technology.
|
| Two trends are now opposing each other in that model. Certain
| technologies seem to require centralization (thus the 'old'
| model will apply) and other tech is getting in the hand of
| the plebes (aka the people history ignores or forgets that is
| almost _all_ of us). Now the 'old' order is resisting
| getting tech to the 'edge' of society. It is deemed
| "dangerous" and it fairly is that.
|
| IFF we assume that the hierarchical model is in fact a relic
| of a capability poor past of humanity, and that a new sort of
| 'human history' should begin, then we need to address the
| issue of technologies that tend to centralization. Possibly a
| combination of socialist ownership of those sectors and
| market enterprise at the 'distributed edge' could work.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Sadly - if you are organizing humans, at non-trivial
| scales, over time - the alternatives all have profound
| problems.
|
| How come our societies haven't reverted to a feudal structure
| then. I'm sure most countries are organizing people at a much
| larger scale than most businesses
| pjmlp wrote:
| Only a few countries around the world have proper
| democracies at all levels, same applies to most companies.
|
| Boss says jump, employee asks how high.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I suspect it's because democracy is one local maxima and
| feudalism is another local maxima. There's no good path
| from one to the other.
| wesapien wrote:
| When I read people on reddit say stupid shit like eat the rich,
| I always get downvoted for going against those coommie/anti-
| work types. But sometimes like now maybe they are right even if
| I know its wrong.
| tasubotadas wrote:
| How many coops have you started?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Any good way for worker coop interested (not necessarily job
| seeking but even aspirationally aligned) HNers to
| coordinate/share resources? The topic often gets shut down here
| as controversial topics that smell like Marxist Leninist
| communism even when they are anything but get flagged out here
| in my experience
| jasode wrote:
| _> Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider
| alternative arrangements like worker co-ops._
|
| The issue isn't philosophy. The roadblocks to worker-owned co-
| ops taking off are _money and capital_.
|
| Picture a Venn Diagram of 2 circles:
|
| (1) the circle of founders with some money (or don't have much
| money themselves but have the ability to get funds from
| investors) -- _are not interested in forming worker co-ops_.
| The founders want to _own the business_ and _hire employees_ to
| pay them wages.
|
| (2) the circle of workers who want to share the ownership in a
| co-op _don 't have the money_ to fund the business.
|
| Those 2 circles do not intersect for the most part. There isn't
| any alignment between the founders-with-money who want
| employees -- and -- the workers-without-money who want co-ops.
|
| This is why you don't see those with some money and/or access
| to money (e.g. ex-Google ex-Facebook employees creating new
| startups) creating co-ops.
|
| Likewise, examples of disappointed workers (e.g. tech layoffs,
| etc) who wished for a different corporate structure that gave
| them more ownership, are also not forming co-ops because they
| don't have the money. They're just trying to land the next job
| to pay the upcoming bills.
|
| That's why the repeated advice and lectures to workers about
| "form co-ops" don't seem to make any progress. The reality is
| the workers just don't have the money.
| jraby3 wrote:
| It just seems like a huge risk. Basically it seems like if
| you lose, you lose, if you win, everyone shares in your
| winnings.
|
| Stock options that allow the founder to keep control and to
| receive more significant profit for the extraordinary risk
| they take makes much more sense imo.
| tareqak wrote:
| You lose when everyone's contributions (including your own
| contribution) results in a net loss.
|
| Sometimes, a lot of the time hopefully, your loss would be
| negated by the combined efforts of everyone else. It would
| be the situations where enough people lose to result in a
| net loss that would require everyone to steer away from.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Basically it seems like if you lose, you lose, if you
| win, everyone shares in your winnings.
|
| More or less why communism is unproductive, because it
| takes away the incentive for individual achievement.
| aperrien wrote:
| What if people who come up with particularly effective
| solutions are awarded a bonus? That could put back some
| of the incentive.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Who decides the who/how/when of the bonus recipient(s)?
| You are back to square 1.
| jt2190 wrote:
| Exactly this. Startup employees are essentially compensated
| like this:
|
| * Base salary that is _very_ low risk because they have a
| "liquidity event" every pay period, and there are numerous
| legal protections that ensure that they get paid.
|
| * Incentive Stock Options, which are very high risk because
| they backed by a company that might not succeed, might
| never experience a "liquidity event", are not nearly as
| liquid, and have far fewer legal protections.
|
| It seems that more than a few people have not considered
| that ISOs will be a part of their overall investment
| portfolio, and they should think about how much of their
| portfolio they want invested in high-risk assets.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Making it illegal to have the company block/veto the sale
| of shares would definitely improve the picture. IMO it's
| a break in property law to have a contract that says "You
| own the property and have all it's liabilities (like
| taxes) but you do not have the right to sell that
| property to a willing, SEC qualified, and able buyer" ...
| NavinF wrote:
| > company block/veto the sale of shares
|
| Example of this happening IRL? I've seen right of first
| refusal and tag along rights that make it harder to find
| a buyer, but nothing that actually prevents sale of
| vested shares.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| As I understood the few contracts I've had they barred me
| from selling to anyone unless the company approved. That
| in practice meant I had no liquidity unless IPO or got to
| sell to investors in the next fund raise round (very very
| rare).
|
| And think about it a bit further, who's going to go
| through any due diligence if their research and offer is
| going to first hit the board/company and potentially
| completely vanish for them? I certainly wouldnt invest
| time/resources to see if I wanted to buy shares from an
| employee to potentially find out the company decided to
| buyback those shares instead. This property would
| massively lower the price I'd be willing to offer. (as a
| compensation for my risk taken)
| indigochill wrote:
| As I understand, you don't really need money to make a co-op,
| but what you need is cash flow. The most plausible route I've
| heard is freelancers forming a co-op where they pitch in some
| portion of what they make to a shared pot to even out the
| lean time in any particular freelancer's stream of gigs, as
| well as potentially sharing work if a client asks for more
| than an individual can do.
|
| Of course, that requires the participants know and trust each
| other, but it seems a plausible way for individuals without a
| bunch of money to start a co-op.
| jasode wrote:
| _> As I understand, you don't really need money to make a
| co-op, [...] The most plausible route I've heard is
| freelancers forming a co-op where they pitch in some
| portion of what they make to a shared pot [...] , but it
| seems a plausible way for individuals without a bunch of
| money to start a co-op. _
|
| Yes, your realistic scenario of a co-operative is something
| I already outlined in a previous comment of "consultants
| co-op office" :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14647223
|
| But that type of freelance co-op isn't really what most
| people are thinking about when the discussion follows the
| template of _" Big company <X> did something bad so why
| don't workers form a co-op <Y> instead of being screwed
| over by <X>?!?"_
|
| In this thread, the topic is "IBM" laying people who are
| "too old". In response, some observers think _" workers
| should form co-ops"_ to avoid being screwed over. In other
| words, the hypothetical co-op version of an "IBM" wouldn't
| lay off old workers. The "freelancers co-op" doesn't apply
| to this story of an IBM middle manager (MaryKathryn Doheny)
| being laid off.
|
| The issue is that companies like IBM, or Google, or Tesla,
| etc are by their very nature -- _capital intensive_ -- so
| there won 't be co-op alternatives for those.
|
| Still the same underlying economic factors: the car workers
| don't have the money to pool together and form a worker-
| owned car factory -- and the founders/investors who are
| motivated to start a new car company are not interested in
| sharing equity with a 100% worker-owned structure.
|
| That's why the employees who don't like Tesla's ownership
| structure can't quit and go work at a worker-owned co-op
| electric vehicle manufacturer.
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| Unions have the money.
| robocat wrote:
| People start businesses because they want to make money. Co-
| ops and charities are usually set up for other purposes, and
| have other constraints.
|
| People also start businesses because that is the simpler
| default that you will be pushed towards: by your clients,
| your accountant, your suppliers, your lawyers, your mother,
| your bank, and most everybody else.
|
| > The roadblocks to worker-owned co-ops taking off are money
| and capital.
|
| That cliche just doesn't apply much to many professionals,
| because the biggest expense is salaries. Watch a new business
| form, and professionals can often afford to self-finance
| during the initial period. A few professions need to rent,
| but say lawyers and some doctors have cheap chambers and
| clinics to service the market for individuals starting out.
|
| And lawyers and accountants do form a type of co-op: they
| call them partnerships.
|
| There are a huge number of self-funded software startups
| because so long as founders can pay their bills, they can
| afford their salary. Most self-funding software startups
| could just as easily be formed as co-ops, yet they are not.
| The reason is not because they are forced to become a
| business because they need capital. Note I am talking about
| self-funded startups - funded startups are obviously
| different.
|
| Finally, co-ops are fundamentally unfair to the founders.
| Starting a business costs a lot more than money, and
| businesses are how we try to fairly repay that.
|
| And the #1 reason why co-ops don't exist? Because people have
| seen them and they don't want to join them.
| robocat wrote:
| > Finally, co-ops are fundamentally unfair to the founders.
| Starting a business costs a lot more than money, and
| businesses are how we try to fairly repay that.
|
| Here's a fantastic article about this point:
| https://www.startups.com/library/expert-advice/emotional-
| cos...
|
| Also a quote from https://michaelafreemanmd.com/Research_fi
| les/Are%20Entrepren... about startup founders:
| Who in their right mind would choose to be an entrepreneur?
| The barriers to success are virtually unlimited and most
| startups fail as a result. Entrepreneurs have lower initial
| earnings, lower earnings growth, lower long-term earnings
| [32], greater work stress, and more psychosomatic health
| problems than employees [33]. Why would anyone voluntarily
| accept the longer work hours, fewer weekends and holidays,
| more responsibility, chronic uncertainty, greater personal
| risk and struggle, and greater investment of emotional and
| physical resources required to be an entrepreneur instead
| of the security and long-term rewards of having a
| career[34]?
|
| Although some of it is selection bias versus cause: the
| paper seems to suggest many founders are literally mad
| before they start a business.
| jasode wrote:
| _> That cliche just doesn't apply much to many
| professionals, because the biggest expense is salaries._
|
| The context of my reply was this thread's article: IBM
| laying off a middle-manager employee like MaryKathryn
| Doheny.
|
| There isn't a co-op of "middle managers" charging an hourly
| rate. I previously explained that a "freelancers
| consultants co-op" doesn't apply to her situation:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35930165
|
| _> And lawyers and accountants do form a type of co-op:
| they call them partnerships._
|
| No, the professional partnerships like law firms are not _"
| 100% workers' owned co-ops"_ that people are thinking of as
| I've explained before:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31459215
|
| _> Most self-funding software startups could just as
| easily be formed as co-ops, yet they are not. The reason is
| not because they are forced to become a business because
| they need capital. [...] And the #1 reason why co-ops don't
| exist? Because people have seen them and they don't want to
| join them._
|
| Your chain of reasons is overcomplicating things and
| doesn't answer the mystery for the _workers who already
| know what a co-op is and want one_. On the other hand, I 'm
| explaining that the workers who already bought into the
| concept of co-ops -- _are not the ones creating new
| companies as co-ops_. Why can 't those pro-coop workers _"
| Be The Change They Want To See"_ , as the proverb advises
| and create those co-ops?!? Because they have no money.
| robocat wrote:
| > Because they have no money.
|
| My point is that money is not the reason co-ops are not
| created - it is just the cliched reason.
|
| Pick an industry where money is not the issue, such as
| self-funded software startups, and co-ops don't usually
| form. QED: needing money is not the reason. There must be
| other dominating reasons why co-ops are not formed - I
| have suggested what could be the reasons but I don't know
| I have hit the central reasons.
|
| Even with capital, you could structure a business to have
| co-op like features through share-classes or loans or
| structured contracts, i.e. even if you need money you
| could still form an equivalent of a co-op. That rarely
| happens. QED: needing money is not the reason.
|
| > law firms are not "100% workers' owned co-ops
|
| Obviously. My usage of "type of" was too subtle? But also
| co-ops are not '100% workers' as per
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31460457 simply
| because co-ops can employ people that are not members,
| directly, or indirectly.
|
| Finally, look at historical large co-ops and large
| societies: again and again we see members sell-out and
| the organisation become a business (at least that is my
| experience in New Zealand). They have enough capital, so
| the reason for deciding against a membership ownership
| structure isn't because they lack capital. QED: needing
| money is not the reason.
|
| It feels like deja vu making such an obvious argument:
| why do you cling so tightly to your beliefs about
| capital?
|
| Perhaps our governments cover most of the purpose for a
| co-op: many countries have 40% to 60% GDP devoted to
| government (including the USA) and large amounts of that
| are infrastructure, social welfare, and shared services
| for every member (citizen).
|
| I want to add one last perhaps-irrelevant quote talking
| about the VC ecosystem (most severely capitalist):
| one very real truth: the most talented, value-additive
| people in any industry are virtually never in it just for
| the money
|
| - https://siliconhillslawyer.com/2018/11/09/dont-be-an-
| asshole...
| jasode wrote:
| _> Pick an industry where money is not the issue, such as
| self-funded software startups, and co-ops don't form. _
|
| Because the owner/founder of the self-funded software
| company doesn't want to _dilute their ownership with
| workers_. Owning 100% of a self-funded startup and just
| hire employees with 0% ownership is seen as a bigger
| financial reward from the owner 's perspective. The
| employees get a salary and the owners get the excess
| profits. This thinking of how to split the pie is rooted
| in _money_.
|
| There may be some minor employee-ownership benefits such
| as ESOP (employee stock option plan) for retirement plans
| or ISO (incentive stock options) but the core reasons for
| co-ops not being popular is still based on money. Co-ops
| are not just arbitrary administrative slicing of a
| corporation; it is about _dividing the economic pie a
| different way that benefits some at the expense of
| others_. The founders of new companies must be willing to
| _give up significant and meaningful ownership percentage_
| to potential employees who have no leverage to fulfill
| the vision of a workers-owned co-op. Most founders won 't
| do it because of money.
|
| A bunch of lawyers and farmers forming "professional co-
| ops" are not relevant to this discussion that got
| triggered by an IBM middle-manager getting laid off
| because she wasn't a part-owner of a co-op.
| robocat wrote:
| I am arguing that the need for capital is not the primary
| reason co-ops don't form.
|
| You are talking about something else (I am not actually
| sure what you are trying to say - you appear to be
| agreeing with me).
|
| I also gave you two other independent reasons (see QEDs)
| to fortify my primary argument: I did not give you a
| three legged chair where you could knock one leg out.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Why cant the workers pool their available capital, and if
| they're sufficiently productive why cant they do some to
| generate more?
|
| Tech workers are considered to be highly paid, so if anyone
| could accumulate capital it's them.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Why cant the workers pool their available capital, [...]
| Tech workers are considered to be highly paid,_
|
| The highly-paid workers _can_ pool capital... if we 're
| speaking in _hypotheticals_. The hypothetical tech workers
| can hypothetically pool their capital together to form a
| 100% worker-owned co-operative.
|
| On the other hand, my comments are explaining what _real_
| people have been doing in the real world. E.g. ex-Google
| employee Kevin Systrom didn 't form Instagram as a workers
| co-op. And ex-Yahoo employees Jan Kuom and Brian Acton also
| didn't form WhatsApp as a workers co-op. They could have --
| hypothetically -- but they didn't. (Those startups did have
| Incentive Stock Options but that's not the workers
| ownership people are thinking about when speaking of
| "workers co-op".)
|
| We can see that most ex-employees with access to money do
| not form co-ops. Why? The ex-employees-now-the-founders see
| no financial incentive to do so.
|
| The workers who actually _want_ co-ops are not the ones out
| there creating new companies.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Harry Hardworker is also not going to want to share his
| compensation equally with Dan Deadwood.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Tech is most primed for it thanks to open source and other
| things that make it easier for workers to afford automation
| and distribution with sometimes up to near 100% margins /
| zero unit cost. So the most challenging cost becomes free
| time. Which wage labor does make challenging to find, but
| that's not as hard as also not being able to afford the means
| of production at all as in other fields/industries
|
| I'd like to start writing playbooks from experience on how to
| optimize this approach vs big capital up front style. I'm
| bootstrapping off b2c+b2b app revenue and spinning up worker
| coop structures a lil to start scaling up as fast as I can
| give at least livable share of revenue in addition to equity
| share for help to grow the businesses. I bought
| indiedevstack.com to blog and productive this approach but
| haven't set it up just yet
| goodpoint wrote:
| You are missing a massive blockers. Coops are often
| ostracized by private corporations. To the point that coops
| have to build coop networks to resist.
| nickpp wrote:
| Interesting. In what way ostracized? Can you give some
| examples?
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| People with money would like to control what they buy with
| that money? Interesting...
|
| The issue could be organizational, though. You, Bob, Mary,
| and I form a company legally. Then we work to get capital for
| that company, however anybody does that. But we decide
| beforehand that we are equal part owners, and when we need to
| find more people to help with the work, we sign them up as
| part owners instead of as conventional wage employees.
|
| I think that technically, stock options are a version of
| this, but the disparity in ownership between "founder" and
| "twentieth employee" might be so stark that the latter is
| better off taking a wage. Maybe the founders _could_ decide
| to give everybody a bigger piece of the pie, so to speak,
| with proportional increases in responsibility to those hired
| and difficulty in finding people. It would be a different
| kind of company.
| gruez wrote:
| >we sign them up as part owners instead of as conventional
| wage employees.
|
| That's basically how startups work. They pay less, but they
| presumably make up for it in terms of equity. However, the
| common advice when it comes to startup options is to value
| them at $0, which makes sense given how much risk there is.
| I can't imagine many people taking up on the "you get
| equity instead of wage" offer. The "options are worthless"
| problem doesn't exist for large publicly traded companies,
| but then at that point shares in the company and cash is
| basically interchangeable. What real difference is there
| between $300k in meta stock vs $300k in cash? I'd guess
| most people would still rather take the cash than the
| equity so they can have some sort of worker co op.
|
| >but the disparity in ownership between "founder" and
| "twentieth employee" might be so stark that the latter is
| better off taking a wage. Maybe the founders _could_ decide
| to give everybody a bigger piece of the pie, so to speak,
| with proportional increases in responsibility to those
| hired and difficulty in finding people. It would be a
| different kind of company.
|
| The problem is that in terms percentage ownership of the
| company, giving out equity is a zero sum game. You can't
| give everyone a significant stake (eg. 5%), because that
| would wipe out the founders/investors.
| Animats wrote:
| > I can't imagine many people taking up on the "you get
| equity instead of wage" offer.
|
| Autodesk did that. Everyone who took that deal became
| rich. This is unusual.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| > The problem is that in terms percentage ownership of
| the company, giving out equity is a zero sum game. You
| can't give everyone a significant stake (eg. 5%), because
| that would wipe out the founders/investors.
|
| I agree that it's a problem, but only if the founders
| think that they are due a much bigger share than anybody
| else. It's only natural to think so. But, if you're doing
| the cooperative thing, you have to share. I don't really
| know anything about it, but that's why I described it as
| a different kind of company.
| gruez wrote:
| >but that's why I described it as a different kind of
| company.
|
| You mean... like a partnership? It works well for
| professional services (eg. lawyers, accountants,
| consultants) because there isn't much capital required
| and are limits to scalability, so you giving your
| partners equal share isn't that much of an issue.
| However, I can't see it working for tech companies where
| there's a massive amounts of capital required, and the
| impact of a single contributor can be enormous. Why would
| investors invest the "different kind of company", the
| returns will only be shared among the workers? For the
| founder that has a $1 billion idea and has the skills to
| execute on it, why would he create an organization where
| he gets the same share as a junior developer who care
| barely make a CRUD app?
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| I agree with you.
|
| > For the founder that has a $1 billion idea and has the
| skills to execute on it, why would he create an
| organization where he gets the same share as a junior
| developer who care barely make a CRUD app?
|
| Presumably he wouldn't hire a developer who can barely
| make a CRUD app, and his decision to share more than he
| has to would be on ideological grounds.
| Aunche wrote:
| Even if you solve the problems that other people mentioned,
| there is simply very little incentive for a successful co-op to
| hire extra workers to share their prosperity. For example, say
| a co-op has ten people and sells 100 widgets at $100 a piece
| for a $20 profit. However, their widgets are constantly out of
| stock. If they hire 5 more workers and sell twice as many
| widgets at the same price assuming economies of scale, now each
| worker may make $30 of profit. However, it would be much easier
| and more profitable for them to simply raise their prices to
| $120, and make $40 of profit.
| bombcar wrote:
| coops work best in cases where the product is relatively easy
| for competitors to start their own coops; things like
| farming, building, etc.
| indigochill wrote:
| How's that a problem? Co-ops' purpose isn't job creation.
| Aunche wrote:
| It means that co-ops will usually lose out to traditional
| companies in economies of scale. If you somehow force all
| companies to be co-ops, then you simply end up with the
| same in-group out-group dynamics as capitalism except
| everyone is worse off.
| jdasdf wrote:
| Good thing there is nothing stopping you from starting up such
| companies. If they truly are a better way of organizing
| businesses, they will soon become the norm.
|
| If they aren't, the only one harmed is you.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _If they truly are a better way of organizing businesses,
| they will soon become the norm._
|
| What do you mean by "better"?
| rajin444 wrote:
| > feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century
| business
|
| The efficiency gains and - more importantly - resiliency gained
| by having a single leader with a strong vision are enormous and
| the reason a single ruler is so prominent among humans.
| Democracy is weak to balkanization and demagoguery.
|
| That being said the real issue here is corrupt elites - which
| no system can fix. The blast radius from a bad ruler is much
| worse than bad actors amongst a democratic system, but the
| potential gains from a single ruler are much higher.
| kevingadd wrote:
| I think there's a degree of survivorship bias here. Single-
| leader feudal power structures are common in business because
| they're the standard model for businesses here, so you have
| plenty of examples of them being wildly successful. But there
| are also lots of examples of failed feudally-structured
| businesses!
|
| Personally I can think of multiple examples of successful co-
| ops in one of the two industries I work in (games), in part
| because there is less of a stigma against less-traditional
| business structures there. Co-ops have successfully built and
| released wildly successful projects in a repeatable way. I
| think we simply don't have enough data to decide at scale
| whether co-ops are inferior to the way we run corporations in
| the West.
| BazookaMusic wrote:
| Any citations for this broad statement?
|
| Perhaps it has been easier historically to converge to the
| single ruler model due to the available knowledge and
| resources. Is there any research concluding that one ruler
| systems offer higher gains in modern societies?
| wanttocomment wrote:
| What kind of citation would satisfy you? A survey of
| organizational structures and success rates? That doesn't
| sound conclusive.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| and Single leadership is weak to overfitting to a broken
| model. example: Look how china efficiently built empty
| cities.
|
| Thousands of CEOs each at the helm of a small business is a
| good model though because though its centralized command and
| control at the business level, it's also distributed and
| experimental in aggregate.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Worker-coops would be great, but at a minimum I feel like we
| need, as a profession, a dues-funded professional association
| which can do things like:
|
| Analyze and fight bad IP assignment, non-compete agreements,
| etc.
|
| Hire lawyers to write alternative agreements that employees can
| suggest as a "standard" alternatives during negotiations.
|
| Collect salary data for the profession across all regions and
| open it in a transparent un-biased way for members to use
| during negotiation.
|
| Provide legal resources for people involved in mass layoffs.
| Analyze the severance packages and give advice.
|
| Help connect people in our profession with good employer /
| position reviews. E.g. glassdoor without the bullshit, and for
| professional association members only.
|
| And, yeah, staying on topic with this thread: analyze for age
| etc. discrimination and provide resources to deal with this.
|
| (I would stop short of using the "u" word, and stop short of
| full collective bargaining and strike powers only because those
| are _far_ more controversial.)
|
| I lack the ability to organize such a thing, but would _gladly_
| pay a monthly fee into such an organization.
| selimnairb wrote:
| But without the ability to withhold labor en masse, workers
| don't have much leverage. I'm afraid some form of union with
| collective bargaining and the ability to coordinate strikes
| are unavoidable to achieve the laudable goals you lay out.
| Otherwise you are at the mercy of the good graces of
| employers, which employees may occasionally benefit from.
| However, when the rubber meets the road, the coercive law of
| competition will ... coerce employers into favoring their own
| interests.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If you are right, everybody would be at minimum wage.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| This is all true except for the fact that our profession
| has the advantage of scarcity combined with high-demand,
| and therefore higher intrinsic bargaining power. At least
| for now.
| easytiger wrote:
| > Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider
| alternative arrangements like worker co-ops.
|
| Go start one. Let us know how you get on
| jossclimb wrote:
| I don't think its right, but I understand their view of why they
| perhaps wanted to do it.
|
| I had contact with quite few folks from IBM when I was at Red Hat
| and met Distinguished Engineers and Fellows and all they seemed
| to do was make slides and go on meetings. Literally powerpoint
| would be used for everything, Architecture? do it in powerpoint?
| Documentation, do it in powerpoint. Do it in powerpoint, and then
| invite lots of people to a meeting to share your slides, get as
| many people on the meeting as you can. These would be endless
| meetings scheduled into eternity, where the goal of the meeting
| was 'alignment', the same people going around and around not
| really getting much done, apart from agreeing on some things, and
| disagreeing on others. I stopped turning up, as it was a waste of
| time, so it was 'escalated' to my boss 'why is jossclimb' not
| coming to our alignment meetings?!?'
|
| They were also clueless about how to deal with us. Had folks
| 'escalate' as we would not agree to something that first required
| it be accepted upstream in a community. Would have to say to them
| 'my word is not worth much, we need to get consensus in the
| community', this was read as us being difficult and not following
| some VPs wants to the letter. "This is very important to Arvind"
|
| I will get shit for saying this, but half of them could disappear
| into the ether and you would not notice anything (apart from SWEs
| having more time outside of perpetual meetings around powerpoint
| to put their heads down and build some software).
| lisasays wrote:
| _All they seemed to do was make slides and go on meetings ...
| They were also clueless about how to deal with us ... Endless
| meetings scheduled into eternity ... the same people going
| around and around not really getting much done_
|
| So you're saying that on the basis of the above, you
| "understand" IBM's point of view that the way to fix this was
| to start firing the older workers?
|
| Because that's, like, obviously the root cause of this malaise,
| right?
| dangwhy wrote:
| so what you are saying is that i need to get really good at
| powerpoint presentations if i need to get anywhere in my
| career.
| clnq wrote:
| That might be an IBM-specific quirk, but to get C-suite roles
| in large tech companies, one definitely needs to re-
| specialise from SWE/SDE roles to sales. All deep technical
| knowledge is not necessary for those roles (it's a nice-to-
| have).
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| You've described a company culture problem, not specifically an
| age one. I saw similar (sans powerpoint) in the past at Disney.
| It was mostly fixed through a reverse merger/brain-transplant
| from Pixar.
|
| Basically, management that needs to be replaced not all older
| workers. This is where Blue Hat could shine.
| blastonico wrote:
| IBM accused of age discrimination sounds like a home for elderly
| accused of age discrimination. Absurd.
| cde-v wrote:
| 64 year old believes they are the exception to aging.
| qgin wrote:
| Would love to hear this line of thinking continued
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| People reject claims of ageism in tech for lack of evidence, and
| when the evidence comes around they no true scotsman the
| evidence.
|
| Ageism is real in our space. Older people are not slow, out of
| touch, or overly grumpy (to counter some common cliches).
|
| Young people please wise up because I know you feel
| exceptionalism, but in truth you will gain a competitive
| advantage by leveraging the experience of older people (even if
| you think the experience irrelevant). And one day you will also
| be old, do unto others etc.
| tasubotadas wrote:
| Lots of old people refuse to learn. Actually, a lot of
| experienced employees refuse to learn because they mistake
| their experience with knowledge.
| trashface wrote:
| I suspect there will be a lot more attention to ageism in about
| 10 years when the current of cohort of tech workers starts
| getting replaced by younger new college grads. Right now the
| population affected by ageism is just not big enough. It mostly
| affects Gen-X, which isn't that big and didn't have that much
| tech presence in the first place, most went into more
| traditional fields. When it starts to hit the mid-millenials,
| it will be too big to ignore.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Wouldn't it solved by market automatically very easily. Let's
| say older people are paid less or discriminated in some way for
| the same skill. Then the company which employs them are at
| financial advantage on average leading to more demand till
| return on investment becomes same for both old and young
| employees.
| datathrow0007 wrote:
| Not when you optimize for:
|
| 1. Paying less than what a worker is worth
|
| 2. Owning a serf rather than establishing an engagement with
| a professional
|
| On #1, older, more experienced workers are not going to
| accept bottom-of-the-barrel compensation for the outsized
| impact they make relative to. Generally, this is just "free
| market economics" looking to maximize returns compared to
| costs. The easiest way to get costs down is to keep payroll
| down (in service-based businesses, as many tech and tech-
| reliant firms are, payroll is going to be your highest cost).
| It's low hanging fruit; and by the far the easiest way to
| increase the bottom-line (see: startups).
|
| On #2, this is mostly more relevant in large, established
| companies. The main goal on everyone's mind is no longer to
| make money, but to climb the ladder. Yes, costs and profits
| are important, but only in times of "bad vibes." In better
| times, everyone is trying to justify why they're a part of
| the gravy train, and to get a bigger portion. Usually, this
| is achieved through utilizing "human resources" to work on
| "big projects" (that usually do not materialize anything of
| note -- but generate impact, i.e. intrigue ). In other cases,
| a newly-minted lord will not be given sufficient bodies or
| budget to expand his realm, so he'll need to squeeze as much
| as he can out of what he has in order to make do. Older
| workers are less tolerant of bullshit and being squeezed for
| no material reward to themselves.
|
| Generally this means that older workers will not be the
| first-pick for startups (cost-conscious, "scrappy," i.e. #1)
| or well-established bigcos (reliant on transmuting human
| souls for the enrichment of the faux-nobility, as in #2). In
| either case, neither type of company is looking for great
| technical talent, but just a body to achieve an end. Any
| schmuck can fill either role -- because competence isn't
| necessary for the success of whoever controls the purse
| strings. Unfortunately, these two types of companies are the
| prevailing sort; thereby "ageism" can be seen in tech, the
| same way educational box-ticking has become en vogue: it is
| politically more advantageous.
|
| Companies with sane leadership, and bodacious-yet-grounded
| vision, that are looking to actually offer something of
| substance will value competence over anything else (look at
| old SV startups for an example). But once again, they're an
| unfortunate minority, and they most likely will not be doing
| cold recruiting (as it is insane).
| jzb wrote:
| "Solved by market" is such a bullshit concept in this
| context. Firstly, the idea that the "market" is this self-
| correcting process that works out fairly is demonstrably
| bullshit.
|
| Secondly - who gives a fuck if "the market" in the abstract
| solves a problem when you, personally, get fucked because of
| ageism? People need to stop spouting off abstract market
| theory bullshit in response to real people being harmed as if
| it's any real consolation to the actual humans involved.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| There is no evidence of age discrimination mentioned in the
| article.
|
| > The complaint asserts that not only is Kyndryl using IBM
| terminology like "Resource Action," but it is providing
| affected employees with the same information resources to do
| so, right down to the letter.
|
| Unless I'm missing something, the argument here seems to be:
| IBM discriminated against older employees during layoffs, and
| the IBM spinoff company hasn't changed their layoff terminology
| or resources, therefore they must still be discriminating
| against older employees.
|
| Not a lawyer, but it sounds like they have nothing substantive
| to work with here.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Precedent was set that the past behavior is ageism. New
| company is repeating the precedented past behavior. Seems
| obvious to me?
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I cannot imagine why a new engineer or CS grad would want to go
| to work for IBM. Their reputation is that of a company that was
| great before you were born but forgot how to innovate long ago,
| except for a brief foray into AI that made them famous on a game
| show but was useless for everything else. Then they bought a
| Linux company but it's been subjected to the same capricious
| layoffs as the rest of the company so there's no job security.
| Most of their revenue seems to come from sending C-grade
| "consultants" to other big low-tech businesses to keep their
| computers running, which makes the customer's CIO happy but
| screws up the computers for everybody who actually works there.
|
| I don't get it.
| somenameforme wrote:
| While this is somewhat dated knowledge, I expect it carries
| over at least somewhat. IBM recruited hyper-aggressively at my
| university for internships. And at the internship you had
| minimal obligations and a quite comfortable salary which
| carried over into full-time employment. Why they were grabbing
| every warm body just to have them sit around is probably just
| the left hand not knowing what the right was doing, but it
| created a pretty nice opportunity for people whose main
| motivation was freedom.
|
| Of course I expect those departments/divisions may well have
| eventually been "slimmed down", so everything comes full
| circle.
| jonfw wrote:
| I enjoy working for IBM, I've been there my whole (relatively
| short) career and it's been a great mix of interesting work,
| opportunity to advance my career, mentorship, and work life
| balance.
|
| It's a big company and every team is different so YMMV.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| At least IBM _has_ a reputation. The overwhelming majority of
| CS graduates will go to work at companies that have _no_
| reputation outside their fields because no one 's heard of
| them.
|
| This is just how work is for most people.
| jzb wrote:
| Maybe they didn't get an offer from one of their first choices?
| Maybe they could live where they want working for IBM instead
| of having to live in SV for a FAANG? (Less of a thing now, but
| seems to be making a comeback...) Maybe they did get an offer
| from a FAANG or something but didn't like the culture. Lots of
| reasons people want to work for IBM or at least feel like it's
| better than alternatives.
|
| I've known lots of folks who worked for IBM who enjoyed it.
| (And plenty who didn't, or did and then didn't...)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >I don't get it.
|
| Because reputation and reality are two different things. IBM
| still produces significant amounts of research, for example in
| semiconductors. It's usually the top or among the top companies
| in terms of patents per year, which is a decent measure.
|
| It's the same with Oracle. Has a bad reputation among the
| hipster internet crowd, but researchers or engineers generally
| earn good salaries and have significant freedom and problems to
| work on for probably any domain of CS you're interested in.
| dangwhy wrote:
| They seem to be getting on the AI bandwagon with their watson
| stuff again.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > I cannot imagine why a new engineer or CS grad would want to
| go to work for IBM.
|
| I might have submitted a resume to IBM back in the day, when
| you still used paper ones at college career fairs (maybe you
| still do?).
|
| In retrospect, I'm glad I never heard back from them; but
| people need money to pay off bills and loans, and so did I. It
| had nothing to do with me sharing IBM's vision or strategy for
| "innovation" in any way.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, If you are actually choosing where you work, you are one
| of the lucky few. Probably 99% of us don't get a dozen offers
| to choose our passion from when job hunting. We get one offer
| after a lot of searching and take it because we like to have
| a roof over our heads. Sure, we vaguely "choose" where we
| work by deciding where to send our resumes, but a vanishingly
| small number wake up and say "my passion is to work at Apple"
| and then walk through the front door.
| paxys wrote:
| Not every new CS grad has offers from Google and Meta waiting
| for them when they graduate. If you exclusively follow online
| discussion about the tech space you'd think that all engineers
| naturally go to the FAANGs or some well-funded startup, but in
| reality 99% are employed by consulting companies, small
| regional shops, BPOs, IT divisions of non-tech companies and
| others who are way worse than "old tech" employers like IBM.
| remeq wrote:
| They can resurrect themselves with Quantum computing. Big,
| fat,extremely specialized, room-sized machines was always
| something IBM was good at.
| wmf wrote:
| Quantum computing isn't real though.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| Sure... Like the earth is flat you mean? ;)
|
| Quantum computing is very real.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| I immensely enjoy my work at IBM Research and have been here
| 10+ years. Most of the people I interact with are top notch
| experts in their respective fields.
| petercooper wrote:
| Interesting this came up around the same time as this story also
| about IBM getting sued for discrimination but under very
| different circumstances: https://www.neowin.net/news/inactive-
| ibm-employee-who-hasnt-... .. he's been off sick for 14 years and
| is suing IBM to get similar pay increases as other employees.
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| UK: The employee described himself as 'medically retired' and
| has been on 75% pay since 2008 under the terms of an IBM health
| plan. The arrangement will finish when the employee reaches 65.
| I'm sort of wondering if his pension contributions are based on
| 75% or 100% of pay scale. This kind of arrangement is not by
| any means normal in UK, and I wonder if the plan is still
| available to new employees.
|
| Most companies and public sector employers have a sickness
| policy that pays full wages for some _months_ then declines
| steadily until employment is terminated, around a year in the
| case of my former employer.
| badrabbit wrote:
| I hear/see this type if stuff but what are you supposed to do if
| you're not litiguous? Companies calculate cost and take risk
| aware decisions like this with no ethics or moralit y considered.
| It's like they corner people and expect them not to fight back or
| to accept what little fighting back they do. I feel like to avoid
| extreme measures, individuals should be sued ar least instead of
| companies.
|
| I wanna see a lineup of low level and executive managers alike
| all on the hook personally for 10s of millions of dollars with no
| financial assistance from the company. I want to see HR, legal
| and direcr manager of this lady owing her 10mil+. You can fine
| IBM $10B and they'll just add it to their risk calculation over
| time. It is individuals that make these decisions, are they
| really protected from a civil suit?
| FredPret wrote:
| Something to keep in mind when deciding how much of yourself to
| invest into a corporate job. Every employee is expendable.
|
| Get the experience you want ASAP, invest as much of your salary
| as you can, and then job hop.
|
| Cynical? Maybe, but I don't think so. Effective? Definitely. The
| free market only works if all the people in it continually chase
| their own best interest.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| As you get older, job hopping starts to come with a lot more
| costs. It's easy when you're young and have nothing more to
| hold you in one place than the cost of breaking your apartment
| lease.
|
| Once you have a family you'll find that they are not excited
| about moving every few years and having to pack up, abandon all
| their friends, go to a new school, spouse find a new job, find
| a new house, find new childcare, unpack, etc. Can still work if
| you live in an area with a lot of jobs, but not very practical
| if you're in areas where job-hopping implies moving.
|
| People used to be more willing to do this, but that was at a
| time when most households had one working partner and one at
| home taking care of the house and kids. Most people's lives are
| more complicated now, and moving is a lot more hassle.
| serial_dev wrote:
| The things you mentioned are only relevant if you relocate.
|
| If you job hop somewhere close to where you live, or you are
| job hopping into remote work, all the hassle of moving your
| family is not an issue.
|
| There are still some downsides, for example, you might get X%
| higher salary (something you know upfront), but instead of
| having 4-5 hours of work with autonomy, few meetings easy-
| going colleagues, you might get annoying people, boring work,
| micromanagement, and endless meeting (which is something you
| can usually only know for sure after switching)...
| clnq wrote:
| > Once you have a family you'll find that they are not
| excited about moving every few years and having to pack up,
| abandon all their friends, go to a new school, spouse find a
| new job, find a new house, find new childcare, unpack, etc.
|
| This is the reason tech professionals worldwide are resisting
| the Return-To-Office (RTO) mandate. The vision is an industry
| free of this unnecessary hindrance. It's not solely a hurdle
| for older individuals seeking a career switch, but it extends
| to anyone committed to their families and communities. It's
| also a significant concern for individuals with disabilities,
| who have tailored their homes to accommodate their needs, and
| students who cannot continue their education from overseas.
|
| Regardless, relocation is always stressful and costly. In
| essence, job transitions come with this hefty toll, which
| employers sometimes exploit to exert additional pressure on
| employees before they resign. This is particularly true in
| towns where the industry's potential employers are scarce --
| sectors like robotics, space, automotive, and similar are
| prime examples.
|
| A person can endure considerable work hardships before
| deciding to uproot their family and relocate to a foreign
| country, starting from scratch. Imagine grappling with no
| credit history, a lack of local language proficiency, no
| familiar community, no personal vehicle, no trusted family
| doctors -- essentially, nothing. For those working in sectors
| like aerospace, opportunities in most countries are
| restricted to one or possibly two employers. This keeps
| employees locked into toxic workplaces and helps neither the
| worker nor the company which can become complacent and feels
| no pressure to act right.
|
| The remedy is remote work. Global, ideally. But regional is
| enough.
| GalenErso wrote:
| > Get the experience you want ASAP, invest as much of your
| salary as you can, and then job hop.
|
| This works in tech but not necessarily in other white collar
| fields like finance. In finance, there is an unwritten rule
| that you are supposed to settle with a firm by ~30-35 and stay
| there for the rest of your career. Many firms don't hire
| laterally unless they have no other choice. Professionals like
| investment bankers and CFAs are recruited straight out of
| university and groomed to assume leadership positions in the
| long term.
| FredPret wrote:
| Very interesting, I didn't know that.
|
| If you're determined to stay in finance, you'll probably have
| to stick to this model. But for a finance professional, there
| are many opportunities in other lines of business.
| jraby3 wrote:
| It's not cynical. But it is a two way street. Most people feel
| that any job is expendable as well, don't they?
|
| Very few people wouldn't take more money and better
| hours/benefits if offered to them.
| FredPret wrote:
| The reason I advocate hopping is that more responsibility,
| cooler work, more money, and better hours are never offered
| on a platter. It is available, but you have to go looking for
| it. So go looking for it!
|
| I've seen so many engineers and managers spend 0.5 - 2.5
| decades at a job, getting gradually more stagnant, adding a
| fraction of the value they could if fully utilized.
|
| For these people, a minor shakeup would do a world of good.
| The companies that employ these people have grown complacent
| and assume these people are part of the furniture; it's bad
| for them too.
|
| I remember one engineer and his manager who worked together
| for thirty years. The manager took 100% of the credit, and
| the engineer put up with this for the entire time. Eventually
| the engineer retires, and the manager is now screwed. A
| couple of months later it's obvious he hasn't used his brain
| in decades, and gets fired right before retirement. That
| manager was once really smart too.
|
| Both of these people would have done themselves and the world
| a favour by job-hopping many times in that period.
| geodel wrote:
| Well thats one way of doing thing. It only works when some and
| not everyone do it. There is simply no additional rewards
| waiting for hoppers if 80% of tech workers just keep changing
| job every year or so.
|
| Further lot of tech work is nowadays done by external
| contractors in enterprises so workers anyway have to hop even
| if they don't want to.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Typical large American corporation.
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