Too Old To Engineer???
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 มี.ค. 2022
- So you're an accomplished engineer who has been put out to pasture because you got too old to do tech. What do you do for the next 40 years of your life? Discuss...
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As a millennial engineer it makes me so angry when management gets it in their heads that they need to push out the "olds". They _know_ the experience is valuable, which is the real bottom line. They can pay young kids out of school pennies by comparison. As a "young" engineer, all it means for me is that I lose access to decades of experience in the form of these seasoned engineers _and_ I get paid peanuts for the privilege.
That happens in IT so fast that the average experience of programmers is 3 years, 3 years is not enough to learn the profession, which is why the same mistakes keep being made since 1995...
Its sad
@@monad_tcp You hit the nail on the head and I think this is a point that needs to be made clearer when people complain about the poor state of code or hardware. We've solved these problems already, but the people who did it are booted right out the door before the less experienced professionals have a chance to learn from them, so the same bugs, inefficiencies and security flaws stick around. The state of everything from personal technology to civil engineering won't improve if we don't get rid of this ridiculous mentality that fresh, cheap blood with "new ideas" is better than paying for experience.
Core problem is probably that you cannot really test for 'good management skill' the same as you can test for coding or engineering skills. And it does not help that in order to advance in a large corporation you have to leave engineering/development and become a manager.
In the mid to late 90s Big Blue threw huge sums of money, and resource into Knowledge Management methodologies and technologies. The acquisition of Lotus for Lotus Notes, later called Domino, was the tentpole of the push. Being honest, it was a case of the Emperor's new clothes, since any halfway decent document management system could do the same thing, but IBM has always liked that sort of semi-vapourware buzzword bull.
Interestingly enough I’ve seen the college hires in recent years getting paid twice what I got paid when I started years ago where I work. I’m glad to hear you are one that acknowledges and recognizes the experience many older engineers provide because it’s been 50/50 split with new hires coming in being overtly ageist and respectful.
I was "encouraged" to retire in 2018 at the age of 70. I was one of over 400 engineers over the age of 50. I was in better shape than the younger ones let go, having accrued more pension benefits before they were frozen. I was hitting my stride in the last 5 years, and took with me a lot of history, as did my fellows let go.
There really is a coupe to destroy America it seems. Sure feels like it.
I remember when Xerox did that in the late ninties, they called it"killing the Brain Trust."
hi Fran,
Your post today is (for me) one of the most interesting posts of your entire career on TH-cam. Yes, I'm one of the 'ones' that was forced from the 'ship' (as it were) , and for me that happened in 2002.
When I was forced off I was a Senior Staff Software Engineer with IBM. I had 'just under' thirty years with the company , and was 47 years old at the time; I am 67 today this year.
My specialty was AI and systems automation for IBM internal tools at the Rochester MN lab ( I have worked all over the United States with IBM , including KCMO, Atlanta, Chicago, Tampa Fl, and Rochester ) . I have the IBM internal distinction of being the 'first' IBMer (internally) to move my automation client / server models to GNU/Linux using off-the-shelf parts. I was instrumental (among many others) in getting IBM management interested in using GNU/Linux ; but, this 'dino-baby' cost toooo much in salary and benefits. IBM has been engaged in age discrimination for many decades, very actively since the John Akers days. I survived several rounds of forced severance since the days of John Akers, who left refusing to be the ONE at IBM who would break the model of 'Respect for the Individual' and the model of cradle-to-grave continuous employment ; all 'real' IBMers (including me) expected to be with the company for at least thirty years... I made it to 26.
Today IBM is irrelevant. They are right! They are behind their contemporary corporations, and they are lagging behind in innovation and that sense of fresh relevance that IBM always stood for in the past, when they valued their people, and when they valued their people above their other assets. IBM's famous leader Thomas J. Watson Sr. stated a challenge that anyone might take away his assets totally , just leave him his people , and he would build it all back again !
IBM since John Akers lost their three basic beliefs, most importantly the belief in respect for the individual ( respect for their people ).
To see the article you posted here is not surprising , nor is it new. This has been on-going for many many decades; and IBM is paying for it . When IBM lost respect for their people, and their customers, their people and their customers lost respect for IBM. IBM is a has-been company trailing behind the tech giants today (Starlink, SpaceX, Google, Amazon, etc etc). IBM will never recover.
PS: I still do engineering, and software development. Today I am using single board nano computers (Raspberry PI, Pine Board, various Python boards) and I'm still very much into AI and systems automation... just not for big BLUE. Part time I drive a school bus route, and the rest of my time I play the cello, and ride motorcycles. As one of the last 'real' IBMers, I keep my eyes open, and 'we' keep watching.
marcus
Sir, your remark about valuing its staff (and this story) reminded me of the 2006 story in NYT that IBM was eliminating their pension in favor of enhanced 401k only benefits. Its available in archives, and noteworthy in that it was speculated at the time that being the big tree in the forest other corporations would follow. What's galling is the spokesperson saying "We have the money to pay the outstanding obligation, but must eliminate this cost to remain competitive." Forget being competitive by being innovative and market leading....just break it over the back of staff.
@@vcv6560 , "Labor is a commodity, to be bought and sold" ---- George Will . When a well-known conservative author and big-business advocate tells you what his tribe values most, * believe him*.
I've read your comment. Sad story but corporations are like that. Wondering and interested if you are going to post some of your projects on yt. I'm sure that your perspective would be valuable to share with the world!
I am 71, mostly retired but self employed servicing and restoring electric guitars and amplifiers. I also collect, repair, restore, and re-engineer vintage equipment. Engineering solutions to problems is a daily exercise for me, and is challenging, creative, productive, and a whole lot of fun. My engineering skills are better today than ever.
ALL occupations have this issue and it's not just related to age or how effective/valuable the employee is. It is the PAY that the experienced worker is making. My wife was a reference assistant (librarian without master's degree). She had worked 30 years for the local library and had topped out in pay a few years before she left. They had a director that could only see $, not skill or value. He was gunning for ways to push the senior people out. My wife saw the writing on the wall and when the city had a retirement incentive to leave early, she bought a few more years of time to eliminate the age penalty and left at age 54, taking half of her department, who were also senior, with her. The library board was shocked and asked why all these people left. The director was replaced shortly after. She went to an academic library and does the same work for HALF the money and they don't appreciate the employees there either. Colleges and Universities would rather fire a coach that makes a million dollars plus a year and have to buy out the remainder of the contract, then hire another coach that demands more $ than pay their staff a living wage. My wife went from $26/hr. to $13/hr. The only reason she took the job was to have something to do for the time until she reached actual retirement age and to pay for health insurance cost that the city didn't provide. NO employer of a size that is responsible to a board or stockholders gives a hoot about the employees no matter how much BS they put in the annual report about how they 'value' their 'team' or look toward the 'future'. All they care about is the next quarter profits so the CEO can make his bonus and the shareholders get their 'value' and record profit dividends. The 1% get more while everyone else gets it in the a$$.
Quarterly accounting leads to so many bad short term business decisions that they should be banned altogether along with the officials that introduced this malpractice to the stock market (if those bastards are still alive).
My experience in the corporate engineering world: Corporations are lousy at developing and maintaining technical staff. What IBM has done to older technical staff has been broadly done in the professional work space. In my case, I felt that I was operating at about 95% of my personal peak. I was able to negotiate the end, but I could have continued to be more valuable than I was paid for a decade. But, corporations are dumb and I am quite happy not to be dealing with it anymore.
My experience in a F100 Corporation that excels at Engineering & Production is, that you’re required to show “Kaizen”, or Continuous Improvement, in both your work and yourself.
They provide plenty of “education”, not “training”, on their world-renowned and widely emulated Management & Production System.
If you want to go to night school and get another advanced degree, they’ll pay for $30K of certain degrees.
If you’re not operating at your Peak, you’ll see that in your annual review and your Bonus is based on that review. Shape up or get paid less.
This Smart corporation has a Global 5 Year Plan, Global 10 Year Plan, Global 25 Yr, Global 50 Yr & a Global 100 Yr Plan. They’re extremely Strategic.
They own every aspect of their diversified companies: Self Financed, own their own transport ships & planes, port facilities, diversified manufacturing facilities in other countries- in case of earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes hurricanes, local wars, parts shortages and more.
They don’t rent any buildings, they own them.
Their production staff don’t unionize because they provide them and the cities they live in Benefits the unions can’t match.
The Corporate model is simple, make a profit.
So, what did you do instead? Retire, self-employment or work for a smaller not-so-corporate company?
I became a freelancer .
They pay me what I ask and meet my conditions or I tell them to screw themselves.
One corporation , Abbott Diagnostics, wanted to impose the same conditions they impose on their full time engineers such as accounting for every minute a job takes.
I asked the guy (sales executive) does he do the same when he hires a plumber or takes his car for a service and he couldn't answer me ,so I terminated the interview.
They employed a full timer who lasted six months and then another who left after a week.
Meanwhile Covid has given me more work than I can handle servicing PCR and Serology analysers.
At a point, they think that "promotion" to management is a solution, without realising that's not what most engineers want to do. We want to build and fix! Which is why individual contributors should have an entirely separate track from management that runs parallel. Sure, let us top out as fellows in a set of engineering councils to complement management, but... ye god's!
As an engineer who is nearly as old as Fran is, and "kicked off the ship" a few times as startups failed or got bought out, allow me to share some thoughts...
Be a DAMN GOOD ENGINEER in your area - both engineering and geographical.
ALWAYS be professional and positive in your dealings with colleagues.
Your reputation will spread among your peers - whether it is good or bad - so make sure it is good! Be kind, helpful, and a positive force on your project teams.
Don't be afraid to "dig deep" when it comes to problem solving. This helps on multiple fronts - you learn a tremendous amount from fixing hard problems - it almost always is a skill you can use later to speed projects along. If other people have failed fixing that problem, your engineering cred gets a big boost - especially if you dealt with everyone involved in a professional matter.
Use down time (between jobs especially) to learn new skills. I had to leave my last job due to deteriorating health. I'm a hardware engineer but kept seeing the utility of Python pop up more around my coworkers. So while recovering, I taught myself enough Python to be a little dangerous. I now use it regularly on my job - and get paid for it of course. They even asked me to do some C, which I had NEVER done before, so now I've got some of that under my belt. Bear in mind that the last time I learned a computer language, it was Fortran, and it was the '80s.
I still have health issues, and can only work part time, from bed - I have 3 collapsed discs in my neck and all the symptoms of a CSF leak. Doctors have told me there is nothing they can do, and surgery is only likely to make things worse.
But I'm still working (as a self-employed contractor) and paying all my bills, and still putting some away for retirement. The philosophy I've outlined above have kept me employed; and usually, old coworkers have been my best leads for new jobs.
Best of luck to you all.
" Bear in mind that the last time I learned a computer language, it was Fortran, and it was the '80s. " Oh, you are not that far off, most of the programming languages nowadays are stuck in 1995. You are still going to see something new ! most younger people use JS, that's from 1995, or Java, from that era too. You need to literally be older to go deeper to things like Haskell or OCaml, those are from the '80s, ironically... (still too hot for the market)
Oh, you learned C, that's so cool, now you know the second oldest programming language, not much better than Fortran (actually worse in a lot of cases, like mathematics, matrices, and anything that uses real computation instead of pointer arithmetics)
@@monad_tcp C is still going into brand new products even today.
Thank you Cynthia! Great post.
I didn’t hit my creative streak until I was in my 50s.
More power to you mate! I hope the streak never stops 👍😊
@@milanfixer Likewise!
Two great books: "The Mythical Man-Month" and "Death March" by Yourdon
Some 45 years ago - the young adults older than me by a couple years absorbed all of the jobs that were available. This was local - say 60 mile circumference. I was someone with multiple talents. Mechanics - Autobody - carpentry - construction - driver - to 18 whls. So for about 5 years or more - I was self employed. And I had to keep all the plates spinning - otherwise there was a big crash when i stopped. Slowly - the job market opened and I moved to that. At 25, I was a manager of people. My staff varied from 22 to 60. I very much worked to keep everyone in my crew happy. For 27 yrs, I had very low turn over. Maybe 1 every 7 yrs. To me - those older were assets. I valued them! And over time - I became them. I had to stop working at 51. I expected to get repaired and rejoin my crew within a year or two. I never did. Now at 61, And for a number of years - I just want to pass on tools to those younger than me. Most have no idea that almost anything can be repaired. But our society - is built on tossing out and buying the latest. Look at Cellphones as an example. Every 6 months - something is new and the lemmings stand in line, with a CC. Cheers Fran!
Know what we are thinking, if we are a toss away society, why not tossing away old companies too ? who needs IBM, its too old and crusty for tech, toss it away.
I guess the customers already did that, its too late for them, Time to go to company heaven see your peers, like Olivetti.
I want to quit but company wants me around, its hard to find young people that stick around for more than a month.
I'm in your younger self's shoes in a couple ways, it sounds like you were in a region that was similar to mine, in regards to the job market...
and I think I'm going to have to do something similar? Go the "Self employed route". *sighs heavily*
Back in the 1980's NASA working with Martin Marietta started blowing up launch vehicles left and right after they retired many of the senior engineers. They ended up having to rehire many of those engineers as private consultants to prevent further catastrophes.
Even Spacex hired a couple of older engineers when they started becoming a serious space company.
Well, over the decades, I've been on both sides of this issue :) The issue with ageism is cost, and for any company payroll is the largest expense. Older workers (like I have become) simply cost more. Generally speaking, they/we have valuable experience for which we generally expect to be paid. In addition, we cost more in terms of health care and other benefit costs. When I worked at Intel (back in the 80's/90's) we had a policy of firing experienced engineers and replacing them with NCGs (new college grads). The "letting go" bit was a policy to identify the lowest 5% of our team based on performance criteria, and send them packing. Then we'd replace them with cheaper NCGs who learned on the job. Now keep in mind, the older engineers were frequently NOT the lower tier performers but the policy was to eliminate the lower 5% every year - and by definition all of those let go were experienced, if only for a year.
By the way - we ourselves were NCGs once and learned our craft on the job. And I have not found an engineer worth his/her salt that wouldn't love to learn new technology, and most of them are the ones who design it in the first place. It's not about knowledge or ability. That's all an excuse. It's strictly cost.
I worked for one company a while back and was made redundant due to partly age and partly due to them thinking I was not pulling my weight. Got my severance package and off I went. The fall out has been a real pantomime. Rather than saving money they replaced me in the end with three engineers and the reliability of some of the products went through the floor. IE 1% failure rate when I had 10ppm. So they are now paying more for less. That's what happens with an accountant in charge, they know the cost of everything but understand the value of nothing.
Fran - what a video. I'm several years older than you are and am a long term tech worker (PCB Design, Analog, Digital, Mixed signal, RF) that left the corporate grind in 2008 to pursue my own consultancy. YOU SAID IT, it is not easy to be your own boss. It even works against you. Let me tell you though that because I jumped that ship I ended up being the last engineering partner of Bob Pease. Before Bob died coming back from Jim Williams send off in his old VW (Jim died a few weeks prior, another great loss to analog) we had been working on a photonuclear contraband detection system together for about 2 years and some change. I'd have never got to work with Bob had I stayed in the position I left in 2008 , or worked with other well-known names in the engineering field either so it was HARD but worth it in many ways. The "old man" Bob Pease taught me WAY more than just technique etc. He walked on the water as an analog engineer and was hands down the baddest azz engineer I ever knew even into his late 60's. He was 70 years young and going strong when he tragically died. Anybody that thinks age is a barrier to discovery and engineering breakthroughs is a fool. After 2011, and after that very intimate and complex engineering stint with Bob and after having him as a friend so tight we were almost family , I took away life lessons about tech ageism that have served me well ever since. Bob "was a kid of 70" , in his own words. The tech industry is beyond foolish to think they are making anything better laying off and forcibly removing their older experienced workers to make room for younger kid engineers that are more "hip". Bad idea, since- wait a minute... Didn't our generation and ones prior INVENT most of what is taught now in colleges? Uh, yes we actually did. I myself helped invent and apply the FM+ I2C and UFm I2C protocol standards and forged some of the first chips that use them. Some of us even were coding hard core applications from the 80's forward pre-C, so don't tell me we're behind the curve. We are the reason these kids have job interviews at all. We're the reason IBM and huge tech companies like them HAVE a corporation to hire from. I'm still going strong Fran, and you will too. Just keep the faith and keep it going! Bob once told me something funny but so true - "Just give it 5 more years every time you want to walk away or get disgusted and you'll make it." 100% correct advice but you have to be a real engineer to do that and not give up - They'll have to drag my corpse out of the lab when I finally succumb to the years...Just like Bob! IBM management and similarly idiotic fools in tech management can go to the place which is most South of my posterior. You got to adopt the same mindset Fran, and I think you have it already! I love younger engineers, I work with some, but the decent ones realize we have a lot to offer. The spoiled trophy-winning ones are the ones you need to be wary of - they just want top rate pay for mediocre laurels. A pHD does not an engineer make.
Bob Pease is a LEGEND. One of my idols in analog.
Yup Fran this is rampant and it has been for decades...Happened to my father...he developed software and eventually rose to the head of the department.....in his 50's......as he approached 60 they started to push him out......he had this wealth of knowledge and experience ......but the "kids'" didn't get it......he hung on....but died of cancer before they could eliminate him.....god rest his soul, and that was 30 years ago.......god bless you Fran......you are always a breath of fresh air to the world.....
Ooooooh yeah you hit a nerve with this one, Fran! I'm almost 58, worked at several of the FAANGs. For my 50th birthday my manager at the time gave me a PIP and subsequently fired me, despite having solved a number of high profile problems WHILE ALSO COMPLETING THE PIP REQUIREMENTS. Then another company game me Meets Most Expectations 3 times in a row (instant automatic termination), despite my having 1) refactored several thousand files with only one major error, 2) Wrote a module for a really high profile project (you would have heard of it) and got peer reviews like "he killed it", 3) Learned Hadoop and iPython to assist the data scientists with analysis of above project, to the point where they'd come to me before other inhouse experts. So yeah, at this point my intellect is curtailed, because I have such severe PTSD that I forget my own name half the time. I can't afford to retire, but I'm going to anyway.
Thanks Fran, ageism is very scary to me. 2008 automotive down turn got me, now after reinventing myself, I am concerned at age 51 of getting the boot again and I don't think I can reinvent myself again. Scary frustrating times.
When TI was actively getting rid of me as a product engineer, I went to interviews at the competition but they just wouldn’t give me a chance. I interviewed at Maxim and brought my “trophy” with my name on it for a product that exceeded $10M in revenue which I worked hard on. The interviewers said “why did you bring that”. After that ridiculous interview where it really comes down to if they like you I knew they wouldn’t choose me so I found their nearest trash barrel and tossed that pos in. It’s all about the young and the “diverse” meaning affirmative action crowd is what these loathe some big tech companies want and don’t forget TI and big tech want and lobby for unlimited green card holders who btw I helped train and they watched me pack. So employment laws and all aspects of society and laws and politicians are designed to protect big corporations who own and control our government.
Add to all this the fact that it has been "conventional wisdom" among the young ones that if you stay at one place for more than 3 to 5 years it means your career is stagnating and it's time for a move - regardless of how good you have it where you are. When I was an engineering undergrad in the 1980s it was even a prevailing opinion in our school that if you were still an engineer after about 5 years into a career and have not made the transition into management yet then you have somehow "failed". My problem was that I still had babyboomer values and I hung around in one company way too long and I didn't care one whit about managing anything.
I remember reading recently that the engineer who developed (and holds the patent on) the rechargeable lithium battery was over 90 years old at the time. And he just recently got a patent on an improvement to prevent starting fires!
Despite his age, he's still Goodenough.
Happily, in my career as an EE in aerospace, experience was respected. It takes so long to develop a sense of the key tradeoffs and the latest developments necessarily took a backseat to more mature and reliable technologies
At a job fair (lots of years ago) someone from Rohde&Schwarz told me that they reckon three years(!) until a new engineer hire is fully productive. Just because their stuff is so complex. They aim for long-term employment.
Am now 55yrs old as well. I have been saying the same thing since I was 26. Large companies treat us as chips on a chipboard. Why would we want to keep someone that has gotten years of promotions in place of someone fresh out of school willing to do more for less - even though they don't have the experience in the field to make well backed decisions. It's easy to win the game when you can change the rules.
I got *invited* to retire from A Big Electronics Company after 30 years of service during a big round of layoffs a couple of years ago at age 65. TBH it probably was the best thing to happen to ever happen to me. But the funniest part of the separation was that I had to sign a document stating that I understood it wasn't due to age, and to prove that they gave me a spreadsheet with all the employees in similar jobs and their ages, along with their status of being retained or severed. People in their 30s and 40s... all retained. People in their 50s... mostly retained but a few severed. People in their 60s and 70s... all severed! So the funny thing was, the document that they said *proved* it wasn't due to age discrimination - proved that it was!
PS the spreadsheet had the names redacted but you could easily figure out who everyone was.
Great post, a lot of excellent points. Class Action Lawsuits for IBM?
Fran, as you know, Sexism has been rife in “men’s fields” since day 1.
As a female architect, who’s now 60, I’m way past “done” proving my expertise to men (including Engineers) and have been working for myself for 20 years.
Years ago, I worked for Honeywell (computer division), and every December, Honeywell would lay off the older engineers that were about to be eligible for full pension, to avoid paying out the pension (and hire cheaper staff to replace the older ones).
I remember this happening back in the 90's, terrible then as it is now.
I was laid off in 2009 during the last economic downturn at the ripe old age of 57. I am a manufacturing engineer with a career mostly in aerospace. Fortunately, between severance and saved vacation time, I had 10 months of paychecks, which was good because it took me almost a year to find work at close to the same pay rate.
I'm happily retired now after working until I turned 66. For the record, the question of age never came up while I was seeking work, probably because the aerospace machining / CNC programming world is short on qualified people.
Well I guess I'm bucking the trend. I'm a UK based test/repair tech aged 54. In November last year I was hired by a well known American test & calibration equipment manufacturer at their UK branch. I have 30+ years of working in electronics manufacture, test & repair. I'm pretty sure it's that experience which landed me the position. I have a lot of transferable skills and adapt to a newer working environment with different requirements.
Within the organisation, there are many engineers & design techs who are around 40-50. Starting in the position I did, I have found that these folk have been invaluable in getting me up to speed with an unfamiliar piece of new tech test equipment. Sure, my experience counts for a great deal, but I still have to get to know the product, its intricacies and foibles and more importantly how to fix it.
This came after a long dry spell during the outbreak of the pandemic and I was out of work for nearly 16 months after compulsory redundancy. Many is the time in my career where I have had to take on jobs that were definitely not what I wanted to be doing, but do what it takes to keep bread on the table. Have I been lucky? Maybe, but I also took responsibility for where I found myself after taking on employment knowing fully the risks that went with it, those would risks would include short term contracts with potential to be shorter dependent on demand for product, customer changes in requirements of quantity of product and a volatile marketplace.
Is some of it corporate greed, mismanagement or having to meet requirements of government targets for diversity in the workforce? Possibly.
I too don't fully know what the future holds for me as far as retirement goes, or even if I want to. All my years of experience in life and career choice have taught me that there is no such thing as certainty, the only thing that is certain is uncertainty. No matter how much I complain about it and having to move from job to job I do isn't going to change that uncertainty. In my career I have had the great good fortune to work with folk much smarter than me and still do, I consider that a privilege to have done so. All I know is using all my life skills and job skills, I have always landed on my feet and am grateful for that.
I am one of those old folks that got RIF'd at 55. Finding a new job took many months. I went from managing a group of engineers to being a phone support tech. Now I am past 65 and still working as a phone tech. I don't want to retire because that is boring. I find helping folks a lot younger than me with GPS positioning, laser and optical technology very rewarding. Glad not to have to manage people any longer, just help them.
There are a lot of people like us. We like to work, and we've got the experience to literally do anything. I may have started out working in a library system, but with decades of experience in theatre, communications (voice & data), software programming at the OS level, and building maintenance (decades for each of those) I feel that I can do anything. But tell that to a prospective employer when you're in your 60's...
Hi Fran - I subscribed to your channel after your stunning Saturn V F1 presentation, but haven’t closely followed your work. Until now. This one strikes me personally to the core, and expect a followup contribution to the discussion after I digest everyone’s amazing stories and feedback. Short version, I bled Blue and loved IBM, and when I was RIFed it was as devastating to me as a divorce (which ultimately also happened). Being let go from IBM happened a few years ago, two jobs later I think I’m ready to mentally and emotionally come to terms with it and this ageism phenomenon you’ve addressed.
On a positive note, I’m looking forward to listening to all of your previous work and yours is the first channel I’ll be a patreon to. Thank you for what you do, and thank you for this one especially.
I recently retired. My younger colleagues all commented that "we'll be screwed when you leave ".
No substitute for experience.
My boss said that to me :)
I'm 67 and "officially" retired, but busier than I've ever been, because NOW I finally KNOW some stuff!
Reminds me of the Project Centurion at Philips in the 1990s. Apparently breathing fresh life into a stagnant old company (Philips was established in 1891) they thought they had to do out with the old (employees) and sell off everything that made money. Look at what remains of it now. :(
As someone who works for Philips now, I can concur. When Gerard Kleisterlee took over in 2006, things actually were looking up for a while. I remember him saying on more than one occasion that the experience and knowledge of the employees were the company's greatest asset. And his actions seemed to reinforce that. But then he left in 2011, and it's been downhill ever since. When things got tight, they cut staff with no regard to experience or skill. Now they're on a kick where they're trying to offshore most of their engineering talent. "70% of our footprint (for this particular business unit) is in North America, and that's unacceptable" So they're laying off 200 engineers and sending their jobs to India to people with little or no experience. Yeah, that's a recipe for success..
Ive been seeing a bit of both worlds recently. I'm 41, I work in engineering and I do a lot of PCB design. Some companies have sort of a weird attitude with me about being my age yet not having "new tech" experience. But on the other side of the coin, Ive encountered a lot of companies that seemed to have lost older employees recently but they refuse to hire me due to my experience being "atypical". They seem to be looking for this goldilocks candidate who is super experienced, but also able to move at a moments notice.
The job market right now is a shit show
i'd suggest thet IBM is more interested in replacing long term employees with new hires because they are cheaper. Ageism is rife in hiring because of the perception that new graduates have a better handle on current technology; not always so, textbooks and courses always lag the cutting edge. Am engineer already in the field will of necessity keep up with new developments
I was laid off at 40 (a long toime ago now) and couldn't even get an interview in engineering. I was lucky in that i got called by another branch of the same company in another country and am still consulting there.
"Am engineer already in the field will of necessity keep up with new developments" Also, after a while you learn deeper concepts that can be generalized, so the new teach isn't really that new, but extension of what already exist.
This idea that creations appear like Eureka out of thin air is a myth, everything derives from another thing that already existed before.
You are probably right about it, ageism is the excuse to fire people and contract cheaper ones.
At least up here in Toronto, most software companies would LOVE to get some more senior developers. I am very lucky that my useless hobby back in the 70's (if you ever actually used computers back then, you will know what I mean) turned into what it did.
It all comes down to the 2 for 1 calculation. They can pay 2 new engineers for the cost of 1 experienced engineer.
I went back to work years after I first retired and then took a part time job dealing with electrical sells. Before I knew it I was offered a full time position and increase the produced sale by 50% . They are really pleased with my skills at 72 years old. They want my skill set I think.
Despite my moniker, I've never worked for IBM - I just like most of the systems they produced in many eras. You have hit the nail on the head with this for the ENTIRE industry. I built the helpdesk for the company where I was employed for twenty-two years - and the immoral bastards kicked me out at 55 right as COVID flared up.
Left with no health coverage and bills to pay, I have had to cash out any savings to survive. It is impossible to get re-employed - effectively forced into starting over at reduced wages. I started my channel to keep my sanity (of course, nowhere close to being monetized for a very long time) - if I ever get hired again it will be exactly as you describe, I will be working for the rest of my life.
I don't blame the younger people that are used to replace us - the FUCKERS that are doing this are our own age group. It is more typically done within the IT fields - and at younger ages - but any job termination that is done for someone from their early 50s needs to have an external review and oversight to make sure that it wasn't done for agism. Sure, I understand that more regulation introduces many other factors, but we need to get this behavior out of our workplaces.
I was fortunate to have a job at a large bank that didn't seem to care that I was in my late 70's when I retired. I could have kept on working but they offered a good severance and I decided to hang it up. I was well respected for my engineering knowledge and experience and never felt like I was being shunned because of age. Sounds like this is not the way many businesses operate today.
I worked for a local IT retailer/MSP in 2010 and worked with an engineer that had been with them since owners dad started it out. He was a good dude, age was bout late 50's, and seemed confident and good at what he did, system admin and the typical IT business support duties. Well the current owner just didnt mesh well and overtime they ended up letting him go, which seemed bs. After I left and joined another IT firm literally starting at the point where they had just bought a computer repair shop store and I had to get it up and running. I kept in touch with said co-worker and to my surprise had remained unemployed, so I got him in with this company but even so, these owners were not paying him as much as whatever he was making at our previous job (along with myself) but again with him, myself and 2 other guys, we busted ass, set up a couple service benches, cubicles, and a server for our managed service and network deployment, we successfully got that business up and running that still exists till this day ( ran by a completely diff team) It is a shame that talent with so much experience from years of work is a hard sell for companies that clearly are needing, because of age along with the fact that they want to pay cheap (thus the leverage they can use on a red bull drinking, Bang energy drink snorting, 20 something fresh out of college person.)
I'm a jewelry artist and work for myself. I love it but you are absolutely right that you have to work harder. Love your channel!
Well done and timely Fran. Thank you.
I'm in the millennial range and I don't understand why they would do that. I've learned so much from those "old" employees. Makes me sad that some people don't see the worth of knowledge gathered from years of experience.
Good segment! I’m an engineer in the semiconductor industry. When I was laid off in 2018 it was together with an entire dev department , with corporate moving our cutting edge tech design work to India to save money. So I didn’t feel singled out although I was 58 years old. I had a hard time getting a new job mostly because I would not relocate and jobs were limited where I live. The irony is that with the shortage of engineers and work from home norm due to Covid , in 2022 there should not be a problem getting hired if your skills are up to date. Ultimately though, the job I did get was based on common work history and good relations in previous work experience. People undervalue this but the truth is that many many hiring managers want to work again with previous colleagues whom they trust to get good work done. More do than you ‘d think. Perhaps it’s easier to accomplish outside of giant corporations with big mandates. Not to diminish the problem of age discrimination but rather be encouraging here. In the 90’s I was exposed to the aging engineer problem while working in Japan. Since they could not lay off anyone, older engineers were pushed to the side and basically left to float with absolutely nothing to do. It was another kind of bad and very depressing to witness.
Exactly either as you say pushed off with nothing left to get paid for or flooded with a multiple of the work load nobody could handle turning you into a modern days slave. Both are perfect reasons for getting fired. It's a shitty world we live in.
Yeah, networking is HUGELY important. Barring one job, every job I've ever had has come by virtue of my network and their awareness of my skills and expertise, still went through the usual hiring process, but the only reason I got that far to begin with was my contacts.
I'm 57......."retirement" to me is spending my days in the workshop doing what I want to and at my own pace. Can't wait for it!
This pretty much happened to me in the late 90s. This is why it’s important for an engineer to always keep on learning. It’s interesting that the people that sit on the boards of these large companies are well up on their years.
Yes!! I'm a 20 something and I have respect for the experience that time brings, but there are some 50+ year olds who are not willing to accept new knowledge. Those are the ones that are frustrating since the company I work for is unionized.
Consider yourself lucky that your company is unionised. Another thing you kids don't see the value in. Until one day...
Fran, you are an amazing engineer. You teach me so much. You're an amazing person. Thankyou, Fran.
Kieran from Glasgow.
Thank you, Fran, for taking on this difficult topic. I personally haven’t run into ageism yet (I’m 58), but am extremely aware of it every day. I try very hard to be relevant, stay relevant, and prove relevancy. There is always pressure for that. Learn something new every day!
I'm 71. I used to work at HP, TRW, IBM, and SONY, and I supplement my Social Security by running a small company doing tech repair work when I'm not working on more fun projects. As technology continues to advance, AI and sophisticated CAD programs will replace the need for most engineers. I'm glad I'm old.
I love these newspaper readings! Keep it going Fran!
In the early 90's, my brother was a 27 year old IBM Fellow when I convinced him to quit and start a company with me. [ I worked elsewhere as I was not eligible to be hired at IBM because of my grades and credentials]. [ I have that in common with Wozniak, Gates, etc. LOL].
The pressing fact which convinced him to join me in our endeavor, was IBM's open announcement that it would essentially consider consider my brother's gender and race for promotions, only as a last resort and my company had adapted similar "affirmative action" policy. This turned out to be a blessing and we were successful beyond our dreams in a non tech industry, in part because we brought tech to our new industry. We sold the company and "retired" before we were 50 and now I have time to enjoy Fran's prolific work.
Fran, I'm just a few years behind you age wise. I've never worked for IBM, but I have been working with IBM mainframe and midrange systems since my late 20s. I was laid off in December when the nearly one hundred year old company I had worked at for a quarter of a century announced it was ceasing operations. Having only been there a quarter of a century, I was a company "youngster." There were quite a few people throughout the company, including a couple in IT, who had been with the company forty or more years. I was very lucky and found a new job with another company fairly quickly. I'm still working with IBM midrange systems, and now find myself working with a great group of fellow Gen Xers.
@Ralf Stocker - It makes me cringe to read you write that, but you are too correct. I left IBM in early 2000’s to become an AIX and IBM storage sysadmin, and could literally walk into any company and find IBM products to work on. I ended up working as a storage engineer for a medical imaging company that was bought by IBM for the Watson initiative - one of the happiest days of my life, coming back to the company I loved and respected. But it was a different company, completely, I hardly recognized it - so much internal, useless social media requirements, and IBM was ditching and selling off so much of it’s technology that had brought in so much revenue. And making such desperate purchases (Merge, the company I worked at, Softlayer, Cleversafe, RedHat) to make a move into Cloud - does anyone even use IBM’s cloud? It was completely missing from the Gartner Quadrant and it’s hard to fathom how they missed the Cloud, especially given their vast kingdom of datacenters (which they couldn’t sell off fast enough) and their presence within so many companies. Looking back, Sam set the stage for IBM’s decline, and Ginni put it in it’s coffin. I know Lou Gerstner made some crucial errors, but the current of energy flowing through the labs and training facilities was tangible, there was so much excitement around the Power4 hitting 1ghz and the hardware virtualization possible on that chip used in the p690, p670, p650 on down, it made the hairs on your arms stand up. When we were lucky to see Lou in a lab training facilitie im PeachTree, most of us were between classes hanging by the rails. When he came in on the ground floor, he came into four floors of people standing and clapping for him, the man wjo turned us around. Everyone was proud, happy building something important, people having meetings at the lunch table - it was,crazy good. And now, irrelevant. How old were Sam and Ginni? Maybe there is something to ageism and gutting a company that was a worldwide household word.
Hopefully RedHat can stay relatively independent, but even the change to the CentOS model smells like IBM short term think. It makes me so sad watching historical technology, Cold War and space videos where IBM seemed to be everywhere - SAGE, Apollo guidance systems, ICBMs to name a few. Hardcore effort on the Power chips and making AIX the leading Unix platform, superb storage subsystems, of course mainframes. It seems they were trying to anticipate the Linux takeover, but their purchase of RedHat seems to indicate they missed on their own. Nowadays it’s a real struggle to find an AIX posting, and even rare to find a job ad specifying IBM storage - and forget about IBM Cloud.
Ageism, sure, it’s always existed, but IBM seems to have been busy divesting itself of it’s hard-earned resources for short term profits to keep it’s Ivy League, blue chip status. Letting go of older but high value personnel just feels like another boardroom strategy - bringing in more millennials to balance with other companies seems like an opportunistic smoke screen. When I got RIFed, it didn’t feel like ageism, but with presentations like Fran’s, ProPublica’s aggregation, Liss-Riordan’s class action lawsuit, it’s hard to argue against it - I certainly fall into the category.
Even sadder, I was so proud to be an IBMer, so proud to say I work for IBM, and so proud to be a part of an organization with such rich history and so integral to society. I was so looking forward to end my career (laf, that is, at the close of my working life) there. A part of me still loves IBM, and I do think of trying to get back in, even after some of my IBM mentors still with the company say they haven’t heard of anyone wanting to come back in a long time. It is really difficult to correlate my circumstance to ageism, but I saw it with the two companies I’ve worked at since, and frankly, I’m almost terrified to job seek even in a good market like in Phoenix. It’s difficult to shed the mindset of working for a large corporation, and as Fran mentioned, a lot of people don’t want to be self-employed or even freelance. Both of my parents have always been self-employed, and it’s hard and even risky. They’re still working even while in their mid-eighties! - although admittedly, they really don’t have to. But Fran’s right, you have to work twice as hard to make a similar living, and I’d add, sometimes you even get to do what you love, and don’t forget the success rate of starting your own company and making it a success. Hint, it’s not high. Most people don’t want that, they want to clock in and perform their functions (hopefully they like it), put of with the corporate nonsense, clock out, collect a stable and predictable paycheck, watch their family grow, and plan for retirement. That was kinda the deal, reinforced with the initial and ongoing seminars with HR about investing our money into 401ks to prepare for retirement at 65 or 70. Repeat - SIXTY-FIVE OR SEVENTY. This crisis at getting let go in my late 40s because of what now appears to be a strategy is ageism. I wasn’t let go for performance reasons; the company I worked at used multi-vendor hardware, and I broke my back getting thing swtched to IBM hardware - storage first, then servers. I even worked on a team that came up with a NAS implementation using Cisco Blades (Cisco was a preferred Intel provider IBM partnered with (don’t get me started on IBM selling off the X-series Intel line)), loaded with RedHat running IBM GPFS (Spectrum Scale now - for any millennials who may have heard of it after discovering IBM exists). The blade were 16GB fibrechannel to the storage and 1, 10, 20?, and 40Gb (servers were at 1Gb but switched to 10Gb). I did my thing on the storage subsystem, presented the volumes to the GPFS cluster, configured NFS access with GPFS, presented rhe GPFS NAS shares to the server clusters, build the server cluster, configure the appropriate shares into useable volumes, import the useable volumes via nfs on the server cluster, load the databases and apps and let the whole thing sing. It’s now marketed as IBM’s NAS solution. The NAS team got together and we basically just used my architecture. Not surprisingly, since they were quite young. IBM had a solid solution rebranding NetApp as the N-Series, well-liked, obviously by every customer and CE alike. IBM trashed that relationship to go it alone, and created a solid NAS solution appliance to bolt on their V7000k, actually a pretty strong subsystem. I certified this config right away and managed to sell several fairly soon. With Merge’s hundreds of clients eventually needing hardware upgrade, IBM litterally had a captive market. But they canceled it right when we provided a long term sales opportunity with no competition. Short term gain wins again. I’ll have to return later to tell,about building a few INM ESSs and Cleversafes for Merge’s clouds, which were heavily utilized by it’s customer base. Odd thing was, after I got let go, my buddy moved all the IBM gear, including Cisco and Cleversafe equipment, back into a corner by the truck. Mind you, that was about $15 or $20million in servers, blades, storage, disk and ssd, software lices and a lot of networking. A year later it must’ve gotten lost track of, and my buddy threw all of it into the back of the truck of a recycler. Maybe computer years are something like dog years, and they experienced their own form of ageism. With disloyal IBMers like that, it’s no wonder IBM’s fading. Granted, most people resented the IBM purchase, perhaps subtle sabotage was done to keep their staus quo
I think the other aspect of this is when you push out the old and hire the new, you can eliminate grandfathered benefits and salary costs and keep the young ones on fixed term at lower prices for years and years. If the race to the bottom keeps going, and that workforce is highly educated, it will make less sense to be an employee.
I thought the jokey acronym IBM - I’ve Been Moved was outdated. Apparently not.
It’s also Idiots Became Managers , remember ?
Up your dose you were not listening, no such slight occurred
I have spent the last few years before my retirement encouraging the youngsters to bring new techniques to the company, using modern programmable devices and software. My company appreciates experience, so it's the opposite to the problems faced by those IBM employees.
This was great topic to bring up, because I see it happening to me right now in this field! It doesn't take but 15 seconds to get eliminated from a job. I remember in the 80s the TV program 60 Minutes had a episode about this happening. My father warned me, as a female, that I would be seeing this in my time. Now I'm 58, and I'm feeling it. Keep in mind you couldn't be more accurate on how dangerous this is for us down the road. About two decades ago in Louisiana, they tried this in the state legislature. They tried to rule out the old guys and bring in the new thinkers. That went over like poop in a water bowl. I understand we have to keep looking forward to future, and keep fresh thinking in our forefront. But at the same time, we have to remember the old thinkers are the foundation that brought us all here. So what's the strategy to avoid being eliminated? Move on to another company, I suppose, before it happens to you. Sad isn't it? Thank you for this post. Love you. Good luck with getting settled at.
Hey Fran. You know, as we get older and 'slower' we get 'wiser'. It seam's like wiser as more weight!
Roll with it. love from Montréal.
Love you Fran interesting topic today keep up the Great work!
I never thought I would want to retire until I watched two coworkers, one younger than me, die. Unbeknownst to me, my supervisor who suggested that I retire was himself dying of lung cancer. He passed away about six months after I hung up my pocket protector. As much as I enjoyed engineering, I quickly managed to adapt to not going into work each day. Fortunately, I am lucky enough to have the funding necessary to be retired, even if I do not live high on the hog. It's been three years and we seem to be doing fine.
You mentioned that you didn't think Social Security will be there for you when the time comes. I believe that is still up to us. It turns out that older people are also much more likely to vote than younger people. We do have power if we decide to use it. As the population ages, this should be a major issue. It's certainly more important than nonexistent critical race theory and passing anti trans legislation. We need to make it so.
Here's my take. After decades working with a stable company you get bored with engineering detail anyway and then naturally evolves towards management automatically. That is have grads and whizkids do all the fine detail for you instead, they prefer doing that than be burdened with responsibility and hassles of leading the project that's more 'legal' than is engineering. The older engineers / project leaders have the big picture of how everything fits together, a framework, the older employee knows which persons have which skillset for building teams for new projects. The fresh intakes lack the commercial experience needed with the a design process to deployment to support - all which takes years. Smart older engineers keep their ear to the ground for financial news especially looking out for company takeovers. For example if the company internal version differs from the public version, or there's suddenly an unexplained sudden investment in capital, these are sure signs there's going to be a round of lay-offs coming so it's time to tip off the headhunters you're available. After several decades of electronic engineering and enjoying it one typically becomes a consultant and freelances.
I teach English and technical theater and I design scenery, too. I'm 63--yet, I can still do these jobs quite well. It's hard to find a young person who has over 100+ designs under their belt.
I have been in that situation as well, but decided to leave the company by myself instead of waiting for the impending layoffs. Psychologically, I find this is a much better position to be in. I lost the severance pay, but was much happier. I would have felt devastated being escorted at the door by security with my box of personal stuff. Anyway, I'm plenty busy with taking courses, learning new stuff, building furniture, 3D printing, fixing appliances and electronic equipment for myself, family and friends, etc. Also, companies will find that managing millenials is a lot of work (high expectations, little loyalty), but it is their choice in the end.
Same
Not a good look bemoaning about agism and then being agist yourself by talking about millennials like they're children that "need a lot of managing" especially since _millenials_ are 30-40yo... I'd understand your point if you were talking about people in their early 20s but even then you'd be generalising a lot as I've known plenty of 50+ year olds who are more childish and irresponsible than some 16 year olds I've had the pleasure to meet...
Clearly IBM is being absolutely ridiculous here, but there is a point to be made about the constantly raising retirement age (which is an issue that exists in most of western world) and how it's causing a situation where younger generations are not advancing in their careers as quickly as the previous generations as there's only so much room at the top (not to mention the effect such an phenomenon has on the maturity or at least perceived maturity of people, such as millennials, who are talked about like they're barely grown up adults or even like they're children _at worst into their 40s_ , something that quite frankly is insanely disrespectful and would probably have earned you a swift punch in the face just a few decades ago)...
Mind you this is not the fault of baby boomers etc (or at least _not entirely_ their fault, they've certainly communally contributed to the culture of dismissing those younger than you and many of not most of the financial trends that have caused wage stagnation, raise in the costs of living, the absolutely ridiculous raise in home prices and many of the other phenomenons that are making it so much harder for younger generations to succeed to the same level as previous generations) but just a natural consequence of the reduction of family sizes and lowering birth rates (meaning the younger you are the bigger percentage of other workers are older than you, with more experience and better connections etc)
I personally think that the solution is for governments to do a lot of monopoly busting, breaking up some of the absolute monolithic companies that have formed in the last few decades, fixing a lot of tax loopholes, building better and more comprehensive social/welfare services and passing laws that force companies to limit their profits (that have gotten to absolutely obscene levels, especially in certain industries and especially in mega-corporations) and instead spend more on growth, the welfare of their employees (including better wages that at the very least match inflation rates and the raising costs of living) and in general contributing more to the betterment of society instead of doing absolutely anything they can to maximize the profits no matter how it affects human beings or the society at large...
Personally I think the the whole battle of generations is largely a ploy used by power players of the society to distract people from how they're exploiting and robbing ordinary people on constant basis, when ordinary people are busy blaming eachother for everything wrong in their lives they often fail to notice the rich and powerful taking 90% of the capital and resources for themselves and doing their best to get as much of the remaining 10% as they can or at the very least have some control over how that capital and those resources are being used and what for.
Self employed late 50's Engineer here ...
Well said.
I worked at IBM as part of an acquisition from 2010 till I retired in 2018 at age 69. The last few years there I received regular letters from the company asking me to "consider" transitioning to retirement. Subtle pressure but I could read the writing on the wall.
Most companies moved employees from the asset column to the liability column a long time ago. If a company decides "X=$40,000", they just look at the chart and whatever does jive gets removed, reduced or replaced. Adding the the equation that older employees typically cost more with heath insurance claims, may have stake in older "less cost efficient" company programs, and may have more restrictive available work hours. They will spin it, but it all comes down to money and keeping the shareholders happy. By reducing people down to a number on a page, it makes it more palatable for others to make the broad strokes that they know will be detrimental to individuals. The PR groups add the sugar to try and sell it to the general public, which is composed of the same people who either were removed from their career because of the actions of companies like-minded and a much inexperienced workforce reinventing the wheel because the experienced people were removed.
thank you Fran. you're an awesome person.
I feel it's going to become a "bubble" (to borrow from the financial world) of missed experience, where things just start breaking because we got rid of all the people who'd've seen these issues coming a mile away due to their years of experience.
As an engineer turned teacher I couldn't wait to retire at 60. However That didn't mean I stopped being an engineer. When people ask me what I do with my Time I tell them I make things. I have more time, more dispensable cash and more ideas than I ever had whilst working. I try to keep up with current ideas and materials. I have a modest workshop as my time is plentiful and working by hand is very satisfying.
Totally agree with you Fran, it is mind boggling to see this ageism and the consequential outcomes are the race to the bottom of the Engineering barrel and the designed obsolescence of modern products... "You reap what you sow" so perhaps these managers will find that the model they are so determine to make work will result in these big corporations going the way of the Do-Do too...
I must admit that about 20 years ago I rejected a job application from someone my current age, because I expected them to be too used to be more manager than engineer, given their most recent job title. Never gave them the benefit of an interview. The young person hired instead turned out to be have a muddled brain and taught me bad habits that I still regret.
I've owned an IT company since 1998. Almost all of the people that swoop in and fix everything when nobody else can? Those people are in their 40s. 50s. 60s plus. Those are the people who have the knowledge and experience to implement it. Purging people with experience pretty much always yields a period of time where everything works badly, followed by everyone sticking stuff together with duct tape and bubblegum. Then? They get experience. They learn. They get good. ...then they get purged. Wash, rinse, repeat.
As a 55 year old, with 20 somethings as “bosses” this resonates with me heavily
As a 20 something, I absolutely love and respect the wisdom and knowledge I can obtain from speaking to someone older than me. But age and experience means nothing if the person is not willing to adapt or accept new knowledge.
A 50+ master electrician who just pays to renew his license at this point is worthless when it comes to automation maintenance. If this sounds like a very specific example, it is. I don't even have a degree and I have to babysit an old man that gets paid 3 times as much.
Just a reminder to keep an open mind to different perspectives.
Edit: I said 50+, but his actual age is 64. The age isn't what matters though, it's the mentality.
@@urano4810 I don’t disagree at all. At one point “I”was the 20 something and I worked for older people who were “rusty” (to say the least)
But that means nothing considering YOU will someday be that 64 year old lol. It’s all relative.
Unfortunately I cannot even say I’m making anything CLOSE to twice as much as they are… the way it’s worked is when I was hired some 28 years ago, the “going rate” for my position was nowhere near what it’s “crawled” up to be now. So my incremental raises came much more slowly than the starting rate way back when.
I don’t mind this, as I’ve had my “fun” in the heyday years, but at some point, it’s time to go, but the question is where does one go?
I think that’s what Fran was saying. Starting out at 55 is nothing like starting out at 20….
@@MrJruta I appreciate your willingness to forgo stereotypical immediate internet disagreements. The point I think that most people are missing is that you shouldn't "need" to work at 55. By then, you should have already set a plan to cruise through the rest of your life financially and you're only working for the joy of it. Not just the joy for yourself but the joy of teaching the next generation. At least that's what my plan is for when I do get to be that age.
Also, I understand some day I will be that age. I can't wait til I'm 60! Believe it or not.
I can't wait to have that much more experience so that I'm able to teach those who seek to learn.
@@urano4810 Thank you.
You must understand that retirement at 55 isn’t the norm (unfortunately)
For me, I had no ability to make “great financial choices” as my childrens mother elected to step out of their lives, leaving me with the inability to invest…. My priorities were as a father and sole financial provider.
I have no disillusions whatsoever that a “20 something” is certainty qualified and educated enough to be my “boss” I certainly had the opportunity to rise to administrative level, but purposely chose not to for a multitude of reasons, and I have no regrets to this day (lol all of them are miserable)
These days I’m almost looking forward to a second career, and I believe the majority of people do not spend that amount of time in the same job. Question is, who will here me?
Lol it’s all good, life is good in general 😊
- that was meant to say I have no disillusions that a 20 something CANNOT be qualified…
Lol it was meant to be recognition, not an insult lol
As a retired engineer, many of the millennial engineers were bright, I often learned from them and called it mentor-up, but others made me question what universities are teaching. For most companies the higher cost of senior engineers is not in proportion to their productivity compared to new-hires.
It happens all the time Older engineers tend to be paid higher and often earn higher levels of benefits like vacation and personal time, etc..Many in my company were let go in their 60s - some with over 40 years continuous service. .
My great grandfather was the boiler engineer at the Erie Railroad roundhouse in Jersey City, NJ. One day management informed him that he was going to be replaced by a college graduate engineer. After a week or so the college educated engineer almost blew-up the whole roundhouse. My great grandfather was quietly brought back and stayed in charge of the roundhouse boilers until he retired at a normal retirement age (70 or so). I have a copy of his NJ boiler operators license somewhere (dated around 1906?).
There are a few intersecting issues here. I think what IBM was reacting to at a high level is getting their butt kicked by silicon valley startups over the past 30 years. When their consultants and stockholders and the media are all telling them that this old company has to get more nimble, and start adapting to the move fast and break things culture that is taking over tech, what should they do? Does making an old company change its ways necessarily mean bringing in a higher proportion of younger workers? No, certainly not, but, it is an easy way to "force" the change.
So then, what would it mean for a staid and conservative corporation like IBM to become more nimble, without turning over its workforce? I think anyone who has worked at a company that has struggled with this kind of attempted culture change can recognize the challenge. Yes it's absolutely a stereotype that "older" workers resist change, and are more conservative. But, it's also a stereotype, because it is frequently true! Two things I would interject here: First, it's obvious that these attributes, especially in a properly functioning team, are not downsides! Experience, conservatism, and tradition are helpful aspects in engineering. And second, I would bet people like Fran, who as she pointed out, have to be nimble in running the business, or perhaps others who have worked in the start up culture through the career, might not appreciate just how easy it is for people at a slower moving institution like IBM to fall into a pattern of resistance to change.
What then is the answer? To be honest, I don't think there is a solution for a company like IBM that is being asked to change its culture. To succeed in turning a ship like that either takes a long time, or is catastrophic and soul destroying. I'd rather see IBM remain as a conservative institution, offering its products and experience as a needed counterpart to the fast movers of silicon valley, and likely over time, "dying a natural death" as they get split up and subsumed, and wither away.
That doesn't really respond directly to the issue of ageism in tech, but on that, reading between the lines of my thesis above, I guess my view is that people who do well in a more conservative corporate culture, should end up at more conservative companies. If those conservative companies then decide that they should change their culture by 'force', then yeah, trouble ahead.
In any case, obviously it would be better if we could evaluate individual workers' cultural and technical fit without resorting to stereotypes like 'ageism' (and sexism!), and we should push and fight against that on all fronts, but also recognize the kernels of underlying truths there. If you are an older worker, think about the ways in which you fit that stereotype, and what you might do to counteract it. By which I don't mean spam more memes on the slack :P. And if you are in management, or just working on a team with 'older' workers, try and see them for a whole person, not just a stereotype. Mixed experiences and perspectives always make for a more robust end product, so a culture of listening and incorporating that is a winning recipe, but it does take good leaders to make those teams work. Too easy to go towards a monoculture, at any end of the spectrum, as a way to avoid dissent.
From what I've seen/heard, USA employment law & practices are among the worse in the world. The corporate idiots who encourage a culture of ageism will suffer from their own efforts in due time. Oh they probably think they will be wealthy enough to retire age 50 or it won't happen to them but they have no way to be sure of that. I'm nearly 52, an unemployed physics graduate and I get people suggesting I "pursue a career in a different field of work" such as cleaning or warehouse operative.
I think they want the young staff because they are young enough not to know that the corporation who wants them to "feel part of the family", will crap on them just as much as any other. In employment, you're only wanted as long as you say "yes please" to a pay cut or extra hours. The young uns don't feel comfortable managing people old enough to be their mom or dad and being comfortable is what young folks like the most.
Seriously though, I think there is a problem with younger managers who want to employ people they could see as being their friend, their genertion, in their gratuation year.
Really good points made here. I followed up on my latest video in a broader sense -- inspired by your vid. I really enjoy your work. Cheers!
It's been a few months since youtube's algorithm was not presenting me with Fran's channel. so today I searched for it and here I am. Let's hope youtube knows that I like this channel and I want to watch it daily.
I always feel like the shift to current cloud technologies is itself intended to oust older engineers who actually know what they're doing. All of the current technologies that are intended to make things "easier" really just make things harder to understand and cost more money, by design, and this goes hand in hand with getting rid of people who know better, simpler ways of doing things.
This all goes hand-in-hand with how many software jobs these days are things that you can learn from a "bootcamp" rather than long-term experience, and it's all building things based on a recipe rather than having to take time and attention to think about solving actual problems.
"Bootcamps" produce code monkey. Who snap together reusable object to build bloated almost functional crapware.
@@dadillen5902 Absolutely agreed. And unfortunately the kinds of code they snap together are what 95% of software jobs are these days. It's maddening.
It's all about getting 2 newbie engineers for the same salary as one experienced engineer. It's a smokescreen to cover their butt. Non-technical management thinks of all employees as replaceable cogs and leaves the remaining staff to repair the damage. Lastly, I think this is an American problem where virtually all top management is from marketing or sales instead of engineering.
Looks to me like Europe takes over American management styles with a delay of five to ten years. I had a HR person in Germany mention this to me in around 2005 "I'd rather have two temps than one fully-trained engineer." - Why? - "Availability.". Easier to get and cheaper to hire.
That in some industries this just cannot work because getting familiar with the field already takes two to three years is something they don't understand. And they don't care because they job-hop every couple of years and don't see the result of this attitude.
This is happening in the retail industry as well, not just limited to the tech world.
Hi Fran.. Bench looking good!
I was born in Korea in 1967.
My parents ran a small farm.
I moved to the city in 1978 and
I first saw a computer in 1980.
After that, I did some computer studies.
I bought an Apple 2 computer in 1985 when I was graduating from high school.
After that, I majored in electrical engineering at university, and since then I have been working on computer-related assembly language-related work.
.....
Good video.
Not everyone is cut out to run their own business, it takes quite a lot of drive and some resources to do that. Contracting is a middle ground which is more likely, but still you need to sell yourself and develop contacts.
I think the problem is companies equate youth with innovation, so by getting younger staff they are hoping for more eureka moments that will lead to some breakthrough and help the company. Current culture is a thing that needs to be considered when developing any tech, and the pace of cultural change is faster than ever.
This should be a wakeup call to develop networks outside your workplace so you can jump ship if need be, and someone else might put in a good word for you at another business, or help if you decided to go consulting/piece meal work.
You do need to follow the office politics just to have a chance to predict what might happen and how it will affect you.
"You do need to follow the office politics just to have a chance to predict what might happen and how it will affect you."
I just want to do my job - but I was in toxic employment where performance is seen as a threat to your supervisor, and co-workers stab you in the back. Seniority meant nothing. Getting them through their failures and lack of planning meant nothing.
Easy enough to predict and how it affected me...
Hey Jan, I'm 63 and still have no idea what I want to be. I just work away in my own little lab and ignore everyone else. Friends say I'm incredibly talented but I don't have the time to analyze it :)
When I moved to the US and despite the fact that I lived very close to IBM TJ Watson in Westchester, NY there's something about the company that never ever made me want to send a resume there. The contents of these sealed papers tells us all everything we need to know.
You mentioned Accenture. I remember working with them when they still were called Anderson Consulting. I worked on a large project for a drug store chain as part of a team of people that exposed mistakes and other errors, fixed said errors and documented. They were able to use that documentation to claw back some of the roughly $4 Million that was being forked out every month. Seems like a lot of places they go they mess it up big.
Example: "Andy we want to analyze why these disks on the app server are so hot (99%). It turned out it there was a core file that was always "current" because a particular transaction service had an undersized buffer. So a transaction would be dispatched to it, crash, and be restarted with the same transaction. Really fun when multiple instances did that. I got the debugger out and found it and they corrected it. If they had been a little more humble about their work they might have actually arrived at that themselves. At least one of these every week or so.
Huh! I left school and went to college to study for computer and information sciences. I admit that the early 90’s was a nightmare for trying to get jobs in the entry level jobs. Government encouraged us to train for sectors that there’s no job security and an NC or HNC in IT I had to take anything jobwise because employers wanted degrees and job experience. I ended up in food/hospitality then retraining and disabled rehabilitation services forced into the never ending training for work schemes. Last job was casual Library and information Assistant. I eventually had to retire through medical reasons. Now at 49, the UK government just passed a new law, sadly despite your qualfications, experience etc.. you have 3 weeks to get a job in your field or you’ll have to take anything that we will give you, even if it’s a cleaner. It’s worse when the Government decides that even medically retired are scrutinised and I have just found out that I both got autistic and AHDD, with PTSD-C. Now having an energy limitation disability on top of that and Post covid disability it’s quite a bit of pain in the arse. Not my fault for having a multitude of health problems and employers do not want the disabled in the workforce.
Yep! I'm a victim, and also 500 others from toy Giant Hasbro in Rhode Island. Sure we got enhanced severance deals with full pay, medical,
benefits and a pension, depending of course on how long you were employed. For me I got the pension and three full years of pay etc. And yes we had to sign our life away not to sue IF we accepted the deal. Those who didn't accept had no idea how long they'd stay employed. However, if, (I mean when) they get axed, they will not receive the enhanced package.
Bottom line is most big companies do this to reduce costs. They can get younger workers for less pay that us "old Timers" and that also means
less medical expenses, you know the drill. Welcome to corporate America.
I first heard of it 30 years ago from a then mid 50s engineer. He described it as "Wage discrimination", it was just better value to the company to get people at lower cost. Of course that argument has been applied to H1B visa holders too. I look it as a continuum, I was at a small company going through hard times, our little EE department went to 50%, 4->2 in staff. The 60 yr old let go, the 30 yr old (me) staying I believe I was 50-55% of his salary. We shared an office for 3 yrs, he taught me so much. Fast forward ten years, at a small SW firm I, just turned 40 was let go, while the mid-late 20 somethings stayed on.
Save your money.
Finally, looking weird and (sometimes) smelling strange is part of the game; rise!
Another excellent rant. 👍
Hi Fran, I am two years older than you and I cannot tell how how many times I have been passed over on positions I am more than qualified. I have suspected ageism for a long time and for that reason I don't show my complete resume. I go back only 15 out of my 3 years and use expression always "More than 10 years experience." Maybe these are flags, but I figured that most people pad their experience.
When I lived in Germany (14 years total) for a period of time I was laid off after 4 years of work as an employee. I took job as a contractor/employee for another two years. After this ended (the company imploded) I went to the state employment agency and they told me (I was 42) that I wasn't at the age to hire, but rather to fire. That turned out to be a blessing as I was able to start a "Me, Myself and I" company (Ich AG) and ended up making nearly double and got perks like getting my car down payment given to me because of VAT. In the United States it's more difficult to be self-employed, but in Germany rather easy.
My last job was at a large insurance company and they define diversity and inclusion a bit different than I had suspected (betraying the fact that the entire department was drawn from the same race). They stated that there are five generations in the workplace and you routinely see people well into their 70s in the cafeteria.
I have become more convinced that the loudest millennials (a lot are big youtubers that can't go a paragraph of dialog without disparaging Boomers) espouse everything that they hate.
However they ARE companies that actually prefer seasoned employees
"They talk weird." Yeah, I remember a song titled "If I Were A Carpenter" - i noticed "were" being replaced with "was" in the 1990s. No one (even in the USA) says among anymore, suddenly everyone says amongst. Nevermind the changes in words themselves and their meanings, I never dreamed I'd see the day when broken syntax would became common. Such as sentence fragments.
I just got a recruiter messaging me wanting an expert COBOL programmer. I forgot I had COBOL on my resume - I had one quarter of it in college and never looked back. Probably half the trick to writing a resume is knowing what to take off, as well as what to put on. One trick I was told was remove the dates of attendance at college, and drop your first job or two, so you look younger and it's harder to tell how old you are.
I read EETimes and the other trade magazines last millennium, ageism and the expectation of engineers going into management was discussed (as A Thing you have to be aware of and work with, not fight back against) back then so I have no excuses. I recall some article in advancing your (technical) career, maybe in EDN. One point was "practice your swing." Yes, they literally meant play golf, because the golf course was the place where business (which has no age limit for participation) gets done.
Some embedded programming blogger(s) have been writing about the "full stack developers" adding embedded to their resumes. I found something from Michael Barr, and I ALMOST found something from Jack Ganssle but no, he was talking about testing code for a "nearly full stack." It seems everyone's a generalist AND a specialist thesedays. I wonder if the full stackers know how to set a resistor value (resistance AND power rating) to go in series with an LED.
Here's my advice to anyone in a technical field maybe 25 or 30 years old or older: Skip out on learning that extra language, framework or whatever, and concentrate on improving your social and business skills, especially The Art Of Kissing Ass.
That's been a practice for some time now. Even in other sectors. My mother went through the same thing working for Milwaukee Co. There was a push to get fresh faces in that were essentially yes men/women that worked for half the pay & came into the scheme of things after the pension cutoff. Which is a wonderful thing.... if you're a county bean counter. All that was 35 years ago already. Can't say much has changed since.
I think you point out the real reason for cutting older employees - cost (in terms of dollars).
I don’t think it’s limited to engineering, I believe it’s cultural. I’m 71 and have been an engineer for over 50 years. I have seen this throughout my career in medium to large companies. It’s happened several times to me and my older friends. When it happened again two months ago I decided to just retire.
I have found the contracting yourself out has been acceptable for the more "experienced" workers. Even when they won't hire you as a W2, but they will contract you.
When I was still in college about 10 years ago, IBM was pushing hard to try and recruit CS majors into their company once they graduate. It felt really off to me and after hearing about this article, it all makes sense as to why they tried so hard. I didn't pursue the opportunities they were pushing because of how it all felt at the time, but I did get a neat IBM Watson pen that broke recently. :(
The irony is that the younger developers don't want to work doing maintenance on their old crap no one cares about anymore.
Perhaps IBM is too old for tech, how about retiring ? companies should have an expiration date.
I have some startups and I don't even kid myself thinking any of them will last 100y, its insane, the needs of society will have changed in 100 years, why do we even want those crust old solidified dinosaurs that won't die because they have so much stockpiled money to keep kind of alive zombie company that does nothing useful anymore.
@@monad_tcp , perhaps any person or group establishing a corporation should be required to have a defined end date or "sunset" provision.