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An ongoing age-discrimination lawsuit against IBM by one of its former star cloud salesmen has this week blown the lid off Big Blue's inner struggle to reinvent itself as a hip'n'cool place for millennials.
Buried in court paperwork filed by lawyers acting on behalf of ex-IBMer Jonathan Langley, is, among other explosive insights, the revelation by one-time IBM HR veep Alan Wild that 50,000 to 100,000 Big Blue staff have been axed in the past five or so years. In their place, adults in their twenties, who typically flock to the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Salesforce, Apple, Adobe, Oracle, Intel, LinkedIn, SAP, Uber, Boeing, HP, and so on, rather than IBM.
The enterprise tech titan fears it is therefore missing out on top emerging talent, and is battling to make its workplace more enticing for uni grads. Older employees are bearing the brunt, it is alleged.
Langley, who was let go from IBM at the age of 59 in 2017, last year sued the venerable computing giant in Texas, USA, accusing it of unfairly ditching older capable staff to replace them with so-called early professional hires, which is IBM code for people who obtained their degree within the past three years.
IBM denies any wrongdoing, and says it does not discriminate on age – however, when testifying under oath for the court case, Wild, who left Big Blue in late 2018, appeared to contradict the IT giant's position.
Wild said in his deposition that IBM wanted potential hires to see Big Blue not as “an old fuddy duddy organization,” but as “cool and trendy” instead. “To do that, IBM set out to slough off large portions of its older workforce using rolling layoffs over the course of several years,” he said, again under oath.
As a result, IBM has laid off between 50,000 and 100,000 employees – a little under a third of its global workforce – while aggressively hiring as well. As a result, around 50 per cent of its new hires have been hired in the past five years, and now half of its total workforce are millennials, according to Big Blue’s CEO Ginni Rometty.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @03:30AM
I was hired straight out of university at IBM 20+ years ago during LVG's ("Computer chips, potato chips, what's the difference?") time. They were doing strong hiring for their service division; while they often drew from local schools (Marist, SUNY New Paltz, Vassar) getting the children of current IBMers, they expanded recruiting to even secondary campuses of state schools in the Northeast.
That made the demographics an odd bimodal mix of 22-26 year olds and 50-60 year olds (many as contractors), with hardly anyone in between. We weren't so shallow back then to shun anyone outside our age group; young and old had good social interaction.
A year later when they were doing layoffs, management gave each of us a sheet with the ages of everyone who was laid off, purporting to show that there was no ageism. Of course if they went through the trouble of showing us they weren't discriminating, it meant that they were.
They also made each of us complete an online training module about the FCPA, to show that IBM was completely opposed to paying bribes in foreign countries. Which of course meant they did pay.