IBM fired up to 100,000 older employees to attract millennial workers, says lawsuit

BigThink ^ | Aug 2 2019 | Stephen Johnson

[rintintin]

IBM has been accused of firing thousands of older employees over the past few years as part of a rebranding strategy to appeal to millennial workers.

Some former employees have filed lawsuits against IBM. In one civil case, former VP of Human Resources Alan Wild said IBM had "laid off 50,000 to 100,000 employees in just the last several years" in order to make itself seem like "[a] cool, trendy organization," like Google or Amazon, and not like "an old fuddy duddy organization." These statements were obtained court document filed Tuesday in Texas

[duckman]

“...and not like “an old fuddy duddy organization.”
Stuff it buddy. It’s old farts like me that brought IBM through it’s glory days of the 60’s.

[snippy_about_it]

Good one. Fortunately the office where I live closed. I work for one of the other “Big IT” houses and now I work from home. Going to the office was like going to a foreign country!

[Myrddin]

That might be a positive development. As an employee of a large public corporation, I'm not certain if that offers any relief. November is not far away. The next sign up period should be interesting.

[Myrddin]

I've seen plenty of the empty suits drinking coffee and reading newspapers. That's not acceptable on a contract where the technical staff records labor to the nearest 15 minute increment. Next week gets more exciting. I have a set of JIRA tasks outlining my port of the current code back to the old platform. Thousands of lines of code that have to be adapted back from a Kinetic Data Request/Task environment with SOLR/Cassandra to the old Remedy/Oracle structure. Fortunately, all of the rework will target Java. It should be a lot more stable and easy to test. The customer wants to add weekly reports tied to JIRA. That extra labor to provide progress reports was not part of the original estimate and there is exactly one person doing the code. They are going to cause a schedule slip with distraction to allow them to look like THEY are accomplishing SOMETHING. Annoying beyond words.

[rxsid]

"these big tech companies aren’t replacing us older IT workers with American young people, they are replacing us with H1B foreign employees"

That's correct.

DXC Technology (HP Enterprise + CSC) has been doing the same. Older, experienced, white (mostly male) are "laid off", officially documented as "reduction in force", yet are directly replaced 1 for 1 with younger foreign H1B workers.

It's a total sham and wholesale discrimination.

Unfortunately, I know from personal experience.