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posted by janrinok on Friday August 02 2019, @02:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the are-we-hip? dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Mykl on Friday August 02 2019, @03:55AM (1 child)

    by Mykl (1112) on Friday August 02 2019, @03:55AM (#874473)

    I wonder if IBM are already feeling the pain of the self-inflicted knowledge drain they have created by this dick move.

    I look forward to hearing the court outcome and, hopefully, the crippling fines and sanctions placed against a company so blatantly breaking the law on this massive scale.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @05:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @05:34AM (#874488)

    I wonder if IBM are already feeling the pain of the self-inflicted knowledge drain they have created by this dick move.

    Most likely not. Cash is what matters to the execs, whether there is enough cash to buy the knowledge when needed (like Redhat?). Then there's still the management faith that no one ever got fired for picking IBM. That alone gets them access to opportunities lesser companies would have to prove they can walk on water to get a reluctant chance at.

    Which does make it a bit surprising they would dismiss an old successful sales guy. You really need a "face" man for the customers to represent the peace of mind you get by choosing IBM.