from the this-dept.-intentionally-left-blank dept.
The judge overseeing Jonathan Langley's age discrimination lawsuit against IBM has dismissed the case, which was scheduled to go to trial later this year.
The court order [PDF] closing the case, signed on Wednesday by Judge David Ezra in the Texan Western District Court, cites a stipulation of dismissal by Langley and IBM. That suggests the two parties have agreed to settle confidentially out of court.
The Register asked IBM to confirm that the case has been settled. We've not heard back. Langley's attorneys could not be reached for comment.
In 2018, Langley sued IBM, claiming age discrimination. He was laid off at the age of 60 after 24 years at the biz. The lawsuit was filed several months after a report from ProPublica and Mother Jones claimed that IBM had embarked on a company-wide campaign to dismiss older workers, a project said to be called Operation Baccarat.
In January, Andrew Austin, the federal magistrate judge overseeing the pre-trial phase of the litigation recommended that case be allowed to go to trial. Then in February, IBM's motion to dismiss the case was rejected. Last week, Judge Ezra set the trial date for Monday, October 19, 2020.
But with the dismissal of the case, there will be no trial.
Numerous other lawsuits are pending; by some estimates 13,000 people were let go under similar circumstances.
[Disclaimer: I was an employee of IBM back in the last century. --martyb]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @05:56AM
I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:11AM (6 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:35AM (5 children)
How challenging is it to learn COBOL, and how useful would it be when compared with today's popular languages?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @09:17AM (4 children)
COBOL is simultaneously easy, hard, very hard, and insanely hard.
It is easy because, when done right, it is very verbose and reads in an almost sentence-like structure and the structure of everything is explicit.
It is hard because being explicit in that way requires you to think in a way that many programmers aren't used to thinking anymore because the data structure comes first, then the relationships, then the algorithm, then the code. It is also hard because the sentence-like structure results in a huge list of global keywords and statement-specific keywords.
It is very hard because those keywords, among other things, are implementation-specific, so you have to know what environment and compiler, and sometimes specific compiler flags, you are using. It is also very hard because, for job security purposes, it is not uncommon for programmers to obfuscate code by combining statements, using bad variable names, removing the optional words, and explicitly relying on implementation-specific behavior. Oh, and there is usually no tests, comments, or documentation, so the above is all you get.
It is also insanely hard because COBOL is only 1/3 of the battle. You also need to have understanding of your scripting language, usually JCL, used to run your batches. And you need to understand your processing flow between the batch jobs, your infrastructure, and your entry/exit points.
All that said, when you see a job listing for COBOL, they are actually asking for much more than a simple programmer. It is part of the reason why they are paid a ton of money when they are good and experienced. It is also why IBM and others are trying so hard to get them to be cheaper. It is also a hard industry to get into as many current programmers are coasting, the groups hiring have usually been bitten by bad ones in the past due to going too inexperienced or cheap, or they are "trying" to get away from it.
At a minimum, I think it is an important language to be familiar with because it, like Prolog, Haskell, Python, R, and C, requires you to think in new ways, be disciplined, and stretch yourself. Plus, you can use the knowledge you learned elsewhere in other languages. Plus, if you end up liking it, you can put projects on Github/bitbucket/Gitea/etc. and one of the places may find you. Networking and recruitment is how many (most?) jobs get filled nowadays. Well that and the new accelerator/mentorship thing IBM announced to fill the urgent gap.
If I were you, I'd probably look at the language. Fill some time, learn something new, maybe get a programming job with actual job security. Worst case, it just pads the resume and looks impressive to HR.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @10:11AM
Thank you for taking the time to reply with such helpful information!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @12:39PM (2 children)
Had to learn it as part of my CS degree in the late 90s. Never quite understood all the hate it got, it wasn't a horrible language just very rigid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:47PM
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @07:42PM
Its partly because of what the AC said. It can be awfully verbose and equally laconic, depending on the programmer. The real problems is that, as I mentioned above, the data structure comes first and the code last. Many coders, especially the young or otherwise undiciplined ones, like to throw crap on the wall without thinking of everything else first. Not that that way of thinking can't be correct in the right situation or language, but it goes strongly against the COBOL paradigm. On top of that, like I also said, even if you get the COBOL part down, that is only 1/3 of the problems you will have in the "real world." Without equal or better understanding the rest of the environment, you still might not get the output you expect from the system your code runs on. So you commonly end up with someone who invests the time in learning to think of structures first and the COBOL syntax/semantics and then they get frustrated because that still isn't enough for an actual COBOL job because COBOL "programmer jobs" are usually more than just "coders" or "programmers" or dealing with COBOL. So they, naturally, conclude that the problem isn't them, but inherent in the language, the people hiring them, or the system, depending on exactly where they start having problems.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Thursday April 16 2020, @08:47AM (6 children)
They will never indicate it's age related.
What they will do is force you into new technologies you do not understand, and have no training for. Then wait for you to fail. That failure will be grounds for showing incompetence and justification for termination.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 16 2020, @11:41AM
(Score: 5, Informative) by Cosmic Debris on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:35PM (2 children)
Nope. That's not quite how it worked. Former IBMer here (31 years and change before "retiring"). Inside IBM you have access to a huge trove of new technologies. You can study to your heart's content. It's a great place to build knowledge for your resume.
However it's what you're measured on and what you're paid for that counts. In my case I was busy learning blockchain (attractive and trendy but devilishly hard to explain to mortals). But I was paid on selling technology that was new circa 2002 and hadn't really changed much since then. A career death sentence in 2016. And of course the older you were the more likely you'd be pushing this old tech while the shiny new kit was given to "Summit" hires (shiny young folk groomed in college to work for IBM).
In the IBM world, your *position* would be based on outdated technology. What you know and talk to customers about is irrelevant. And IBM first line managers are told to give out your annual ratings on the old "rank and yank" (roast in Hell, Jack Welch) program. Some portion of your direct reports must be given the lowest rating ("Needs Improvement") no matter the relation to actual performance. I know people that sold tens of millions in software every year; respected literally worldwide for their deep expertise and yet were given "needs improvement" ratings. And the more dire IBM's situation got the more folks that got pushed into that bucket.
The only saving grace in my situation was that I was eligible to retire. So my choice was forced retirement (which looked good on the stats IBM gave to the government and press) or I'd essentially be laid off for cause. Is it age discrimination? Probably. Is it worth years of expensive litigation? Probably not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @04:58PM (1 child)
Let's put some personal color on it - it was female CEO doings - ruthless hated bitch she was.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @08:30PM
Yeah, Ginny sucked, but I was there when LVG was. Situation was the same.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday April 16 2020, @04:53PM (1 child)
Like I mentioned many times earlier, at my company - a bank - Perl is being pushed out for an openly stated reason: "young people that we want to hire do not want nor understand it". The same argument is used in attempts to decommission real databases for that modern big data useless shit.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @08:19PM
A family-friend does database consulting. He told me about how they were brought in to help a place because they were having shitty performance with their system. They had gone from a beautiful and probably expensive fully normalized RDBS to a document-store system based on JSON. The problem was that instead of simple JOINs and SELECTS, they had to do a key query on the redundant non-normalized data and then filter all the records returned in software. And they couldn't understand why the resulting system was so much slower.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:17PM
If (exists(damaging evidence)) then
If(delete(damaging evidence)) then
If( exists(lawsuit)) then
goto(jail)
else
deploy(golden chute)
endif
end if
end if
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:19PM (1 child)
I also worked for IBM last century. Even then during their yearly firings, they provided everybody with a list of victim ages, and the manager tried to shut his ears to how old people were, because there were age discrimination lawsuits going on back then.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:32PM
While "last century" is technically correct, so is "last millennium", which is what I prefer to say.
Example: "I haven't written any Pascal or 68000 assembler since the previous millennium." -- DannyB
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:49PM
Executive: "How's that lawsuit going? You crushed it yet?"
Lawyer: "Er, not exactly..."
Executive: "What the hell? You know your bonus is riding on this, right? Weren't you talking about a third home in Venice?"
Lawyer: "Slow down. Uhm, look, Bob. Can I call you Bob? Bob, we have a problem. The numbers we can debate, the meaning of discrimination we can debate, but you and I both know that we have closets that have been full of skeletons back to the FDR era..."
Executive: "I know all about that and it's your job to keep it on the downlow!"
Lawyer: "... and as I saw trying to say, Bob, when you interrupted me, their discovery for this lawsuit includes a crowbar made for exactly some of those closets. If we let this go to trial, it's going to look like Dia de los Muertos out here."
Executive: "I don't speak fancy lawyer-latin, what's that in real people talk?"
Lawyer: "A bad halloween party with skeleton-loving goth kids everywhere. We need to get out of this, or it's all over, and even Russia might extradite you."
Executive: "... shit. And you can't stop it?"
Lawyer: "I can't stop the judge, but I think I can stop the plaintiffs. But I won't lie, this is gonna cost ya."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:31PM (1 child)
When health insurance is tied to employment, employers have every reason to prefer a younger and healthier employee pool as a way of lowering their HR costs. It's a big enough difference that paying a newly minted 25-year-old $75K is often cheaper than paying a highly experienced 57-year-old $65K.
Of course, there's also the stereotype that the old guys can't code or some nonsense like that. I've worked with and for a lot of older techies over the years, and lots of them were very smart and capable, while a lot of the 20-somethings that thought they knew everything were demonstrating repeatedly that they were clueless.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:35PM
Quick! Hire a teenager while they still know everything!
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.