IBM Fired Me Because I’m Not a Millennial, Says Axed Cloud Sales Star

Zarathustra[H] said:
This was by design. When the union was being formed, the small states didn't want to get steamrolled by the larger ones, so the Federal/State model was adopted.

There are laws and regulations at the federal level, but we intentionally leave a lot of this up to the states. It's a philosophy that people should be able to govern themselves.

It has its benefits and drawbacks, and I can see how it would seem silly to outsiders, but it is what it is.
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It's the main reason a state like Seattle can pass it's progressive agenda without the federal approval. I think it's a very good system and promotes competition amongst states. It creates a balance. I mean, if Seattle fucks up too much, their citizens leave and another state gets to adopt that success. So, it's in their best interest to correct their errors. Or, you can end up like San Fran with priced out of entry living and shit everywhere.
 
auntjemima said:
I find it funny that every state in your country is its own little country with its own little asinine rules.
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Nothing more sane than buying a legal product in one state only to use the interstate system to travel through another state where the legal item you bought is now a felony just to get to another state where that same item is once again legal but another item you own is now illegal to use in that state but still legal to possess. It worse than that though. Something can be decriminalized in one county where you just get a ticket and then another county a mandatory arrest. Not only do you have to know the state law but also the county laws.
 
auntjemima said:
I find it funny that every state in your country is its own little country with its own little asinine rules.
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I find it funny that all of Europe banded together in an attempt to form an economic unit roughly the size of the US. That unit being formed of actual countries, most smaller than several of our states and some smaller than some of our cities.

How many currencies were made obsolete? I'm sure your model would work much better. Eliminate all the individual cultures in Europe and adopt a single identity. Yeah, man. You could even call each other Citizen, and wear the same color.

But why stop at a mere cultural and aesthetic level? Let's equalize people, literally. Harrison Bergeron style. Now people can be the same not just in theory, in cultural exposure, or merely under the law - but in every which way.

To the collective, Comrade!
 
auntjemima said:
I find it funny that every state in your country is its own little country with its own little asinine rules.
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Yup, especially these days. Only need to swap two letters around to accurately describe the current situation: The Untied States of America.
 
Wait, there are people who aren't millennial by some definition or another?
 
I got out of IT about 12 years ago to become a recruiter. I don't think it matters what field you're in, when you start approaching 50 and see the young hot shots moving in, it can be disconcerting.

I work at one of the tech behemoths and my job feels relatively secure, but things can change on a dime. Fortunately, we're hitting a period of low unemployment so jobs tend to be more secure and for recruiters, business is good.

But everything is cyclical.
 
I went to the wake of an IBMer in Cali and some corporate hotshot turned up in an Aston Martin Vanquish.
 
Joust said:
I find it funny that all of Europe banded together in an attempt to form an economic unit roughly the size of the US. That unit being formed of actual countries, most smaller than several of our states and some smaller than some of our cities.

How many currencies were made obsolete? I'm sure your model would work much better. Eliminate all the individual cultures in Europe and adopt a single identity. Yeah, man. You could even call each other Citizen, and wear the same color.

But why stop at a mere cultural and aesthetic level? Let's equalize people, literally. Harrison Bergeron style. Now people can be the same not just in theory, in cultural exposure, or merely under the law - but in every which way.

To the collective, Comrade!
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They tried; they fell just short of the 2/3 majority of votes to make it happen. In theory, thanks to Brexit, the EU might have the necessary votes to go full Union this time.

As currently configured, the EU is basically the US under the Articles of Confederation. With all the headaches that includes.
 
singe_101 said:
The 19th patch or amendment was pretty important for users. Kind of rough to lock out more than half of the people who should have access.
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The player base was really happy with the patch, but some argued that emotional arguments became OP.
 
Heh.. interesting story... I used to work for Frys Electronics... was Supervisor for their Parts 82 Dept @ Corporate. .. I was 24 @ the time. MY boss had a friend over @ IBM.. guy lost his job. I didn't get the details.. my boss just tells me he wants me to train this guy on how to handle orders and replacements. I'm fine with that. He's not a BAD worker.. not dumb.. but liked to sit and listen to the radio (NPR) rather then focus on work.. and felt the need to bring in veritable picnic baskets of food, which he ate constantly. Guy was in his late 40s early 50s..

Boss wants to know how the guy is doing... is he progressing.... etc.. I tell him the truth, he's not bad, but can't seem to get the Apple orders right, and I've had to re-order a few times because hes not requesting the right items. His shipping out to the various stores was a trainwreck though :(

I was told the next week I was being given a lateral transfer back to the outlets, they needed help in their AVT dept in the Mountain View store which was LITERALLY right next to us. They gave him my job...

w...

t...

f...

I ended up quitting over all the backstabbing and maneuvering that was going on.. let alone the pack mentality of the Pakistani invasion. MAN they had it in for anyone who wasn't part of their clique. I got fed up with constantly having to rework the schedules and department assignments because the dept heads kept giving all the best jobs to their buddies and not the folks who were actually doing the best work. Last straw was when one of my Cos accused me of spending all my time in the parking garage smoking cigarettes and making out with all the cute cashiers.... I've never smoked a day in my life... when John Gamet tried to give me a poor performance review based on the nonsense he was being told, I quit. I did kind of enjoy the morning video conferencing though.. got a few good programs started and improved a lot of buy policies we were drowning under.
 
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Kor said:
Do not miss working there one bit. Also they have zero chance of that rebrand goal. I was buying a new pair of shoes a couple of years ago when I was still there and the kid asked who I worked for. I told him and his immediate reaction was "who's that?".
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Worked with IBM on a enterprise PC replacement over a 6 month period back in 1995. They could (and excelled at) fucking up a wet dream. Schedules that were pure fantasy. Hired "grunts" with no IT experience from a temp agency. Failed to order or otherwise get the hardware delivered when scheduled for implementation...etc.
 
auntjemima said:
I would be interested in knowing what their reasoning. I would think that firing someone without just cause would be pretty difficult these days, no?

Would they not need a valid reason?
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Depends on the state. Where I work, they need no reason and you have no recourse, unless you can prove a civil rights violation or A violation of the Americans with disabilities act.
 
Makaveli@BETA said:
This is why I sometime refer to it as UUSA.

UN-United States of America
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"Tall fences make good neighbors", "you do you, and I'll do me." or "Live and let live". It's how you get along without constant civil war and/or a police state and since initially ideologically we were very well separated by geography it worked. But now you have people who think socialism/communism or corporatism is the place to be and those are both trans-nationalist movement. Neither respect diversity of thought or policy. And if you do a dumb policy in a few states, you can point out the failures of it. But if you do it everywhere, there is no relative comparison and people deny and obfuscate the failure.
 
I remember getting a "club cyberblue" t-shirt in the late 1990's as an intern/printer monkey. If they would have hired me, i guess i would be fired by now...
 
auntjemima said:
I find it funny that every state in your country is its own little country with its own little asinine rules.
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Way off topic, but that's kinda the idea of the United STATES of America. Keeps the central government from being to powerful. Keeps some power local.

Kinda the opposite of the direction the EU was going. Seems UK saw the light? ;)
 
This has been going on for a long time at IBM. IBM believe that older people have no new ideas or drive to develop them. Outright replacing senior members with skulls full of mush isn't a good idea. You need the senior employees to mentor the younger ones for a healthy business.
Makaveli@BETA said:
If that is the case it seems to be in Beta 1.0

And its time to update the code and move up to something more stable :)
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What, like being run by a bunch of unelected technocrats like the EU? No, thanks. I'll keep my beta testing government if that is the case.

I would also point to the 10th Amendment that this is by design. Limited federal government is the entire point of our Constitutional Republic.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
 
mord said:
Way off topic, but that's kinda the idea of the United STATES of America. Keeps the central government from being to powerful. Keeps some power local.

Kinda the opposite of the direction the EU was going. Seems UK saw the light? ;)
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Italy is almost there at this point, the new government is very anti-EU, mostly based on Italy having to eat the cost of a lot of immigrants.
 
Bigbacon said:
Man i would not fight for the job back. I would just sue for mega millions and then find a new job.
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yeah, i dont get it. WHY would you want to go back to some place.. that really doesnt want you around??


and.. lets say he got the job back.. LOL that would be a living hell
 
Megalith said:
Despite excelling in his position as worldwide program director and sales lead of Bluemix, Jonathan Langley was fired by IBM and is now suing because he thinks his termination was due to old age: court filings suggest the company has “devoted countless millions of dollars to its effort to rebrand as a hip, millennial-centric tech company.”

"IBM treated substantially younger persons more favorably by signaling through its internal and external branding and marketing that IBM wished to hire and/or retain younger persons," stated Langley in its lawsuit filing. The ex-IBMer has asked the court to force IBM to give him his job back along with lost pay and benefits, damages, his legal fees covered, and so on.
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The hip millennial company that sold computing machines to nazis! Though that does seem to be coming back into fashion... hmm...

Paul_Johnson said:
That's by design. This iteration under the Constitution is a lot more cohesive and uniform than it was under the Articles of Confederation though.
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Pre-civil war, wasn't the common reference to the USA the United States "ARE" rather than the United States "IS" that we use today. To me it seemed like back then the US was only a bit more cohesive than the EU is.
 
harmattan said:
This sort of thing is institutionalzed at many similar large enterprises.

I have a batch of HR/Legal emails and files that were accidentally misrouted to me during a layoff period. The emails and files indisputedly show (and senior folks in the threads outright state) that two of the top criteria for "selection" were a) age (over 40 employees floated to the top) and b) ensuring the cuts "tell a good diversity story" (with white and Indian folks also floating up). The thing that shocked me the most wasn't that this sort of illegality existed, but that it was so overtly discussed and progressed over emails and captured in files.

The other part of the selection process was, once an individual was singled out, a separate process would happen where litigation would redact, massage language, and paraphrase the selected individual's 360 reviews to demonstrate why they were laying the person off. I saw a few examples of stellar reviews of very talented employees evolve to sound like the person wasn't meeting responsibilities, quotas, hard to work with etc. The whole thing was brazen and absolutely extraordinary to read.
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Some of the few people that got in even modest trouble for causing the 2008 financial collapse were the one who were very explicit in describing their illegal conduct and screwing people in their emails. Mind you, this was only a small subset of those people sent up as sacrificial goats.
 
Armenius said:
What, like being run by a bunch of unelected technocrats like the EU? No, thanks. I'll keep my beta testing government if that is the case.
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EU representatives are elected.

And I'd take technocrats over the know nothing political numbsculls we have any day. Doesn't matter which party they are from. In the U.S. politicians are more likely to win by giving people unattainable feel good messages and bashing their opponents than by actually knowing the business of government.

Don't get me wrong, there is some of this everywhere, but we seem to have it down to a science.

The U.S. would be much better served by a parliamentary system than the system we have now which is fundamentally broken.
 
harmattan said:
This sort of thing is institutionalzed at many similar large enterprises.

I have a batch of HR/Legal emails and files that were accidentally misrouted to me during a layoff period. The emails and files indisputedly show (and senior folks in the threads outright state) that two of the top criteria for "selection" were a) age (over 40 employees floated to the top) and b) ensuring the cuts "tell a good diversity story" (with white and Indian folks also floating up). The thing that shocked me the most wasn't that this sort of illegality existed, but that it was so overtly discussed and progressed over emails and captured in files.

The other part of the selection process was, once an individual was singled out, a separate process would happen where litigation would redact, massage language, and paraphrase the selected individual's 360 reviews to demonstrate why they were laying the person off. I saw a few examples of stellar reviews of very talented employees evolve to sound like the person wasn't meeting responsibilities, quotas, hard to work with etc. The whole thing was brazen and absolutely extraordinary to read.
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Shit man. If I came across something like this I'd be a whistleblower in no time.

I'd see it as my duty to report and fuck over anyone even remotely trying something like this.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
Not in an at will state. They just can't fire you for a protected reason (age, race, sex, etc)
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Thing is that 'officially' they don't have to fire you for any of those reasons. Most companies have yearly reviews for their employees. All they have to do is rate you low for any reason they can dream up and you are gone. Doesn't matter if it really was because of any of the 'protected' reasons. There are always ways around them. If they want you gone, you will be gone. And there ain't shit you can do about it. I've seen it going on for decades.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
EU representatives are elected.

And I'd take technocrats over the know nothing political numbsculls we have any day. Doesn't matter which party they are from. In the U.S. politicians are more likely to win by giving people unattainable feel good messages and bashing their opponents than by actually knowing the business of government.

Don't get me wrong, there is some of this everywhere, but we seem to have it down to a science.

The U.S. would be much better served by a parliamentary system than the system we have now which is fundamentally broken.
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The US has always had a problem with that to varying degrees, (look at the campaign BS that went on when Andrew Jackson ran), but the stuff that's been happening since Nixon and especially during and after the 2008 presidential campaign and you can see a whole mutating cancerous growth of awfulness. As for the politicians themselves, separate from campaigning, they overall used to be of higher caliber (with a lot of bad eggs / rotten apples mixed in), but which began degrading around LBJ's time and then took a really sharp dive off the deep end in 1994 and has been on a near straight downward trend since.
 
auntjemima said:
I find it funny that every state in your country is its own little country with its own little asinine rules.
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I hate the 2nd Amendment Murphy....A transplant from Massachusetts I can't say I am surprised.


murphycommie.jpg
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Shit man. If I came across something like this I'd be a whistleblower in no time.

I'd see it as my duty to report and fuck over anyone even remotely trying something like this.
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It's not that simple for most people. Not everyone can walk out the door and into the next job's door - particularly if they are in their mid 50's. With all the offshoring taking place, some jobs are almost impossible to get. For instance a solid 80% of IBM's software dev jobs are going to China and India. All that is left in north america are architecture and management jobs. And the jobs that are there are NOT 9-5 jobs.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
EU representatives are elected.

And I'd take technocrats over the know nothing political numbsculls we have any day. Doesn't matter which party they are from. In the U.S. politicians are more likely to win by giving people unattainable feel good messages and bashing their opponents than by actually knowing the business of government.

Don't get me wrong, there is some of this everywhere, but we seem to have it down to a science.

The U.S. would be much better served by a parliamentary system than the system we have now which is fundamentally broken.
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They have trwo bodies. One is elected and one is not. The elected one can only 'veto' the real body right now. So they just need to bully, bribe, and repeatedly try to pass something past the elected body and its permanent. The elected body can't undo it. It's like a tug of war where one side can never make progress, eventually that side will lose. Just a matter of time. So no, it's not a democracy.
 
cyberguyz said:
It's not that simple for most people. Not everyone can walk out the door and into the next job's door - particularly if they are in their mid 50's. With all the offshoring taking place, some jobs are almost impossible to get. For instance a solid 80% of IBM's software dev jobs are going to China and India. All that is left in north america are architecture and management jobs.
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If that were a concern, I'd leak the docs and stay anonymous. Maybe find if someone else is in the middle of an age discrimination suit, and send the docs to their lawyer via an anonymous email account, or something like that.

Rememeber, the "snitch" is always the hero! These bastards can only get away with this shit if they scare everyone to silence.
 
tetris42 said:
...this is a sales lead and I tend to think of sales as professional liars...
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Sad but true & mostly because management forces them to lie - because the estimating team blew the estimate or the product team / dev team / delivery team etc. blew their part of the deliverable - so an honest person is forced to become a "deceptive diplomat" - or as you called them - professional liars.

It really sucks to be an honest person who is forced to cover up for other peoples ineptitude while those same people insult you for being a "professional liar".
 
cyberguyz said:
Thing is that 'officially' they don't have to fire you for any of those reasons. Most companies have yearly reviews for their employees. All they have to do is rate you low for any reason they can dream up and you are gone. Doesn't matter if it really was because of any of the 'protected' reasons. There are always ways around them. If they want you gone, you will be gone. And there ain't shit you can do about it. I've seen it going on for decades.
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Yeah, like I said it is called at will. So long as they don't fire you for one of the protected reasons employment is at will.
 
_l_ said:
As a blue collar worker Protections I want; Unions not so much
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I'm not a big fan of most current unions, but at the same time it's not lost on me that organized labor protests and strikes is what got us many of the legal protections and labor laws in the first place, including - among others - the weekend. So I'm torn.
 
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Unions are a double edged curse.

Many employers are willing to put your life at risk so they can make an extra tree-fiddy.

Many unions give protections to useless employees but we all get equal pay...

And then - there's the overhead of dues & BA's & politics, etc.

We won't solve it here, so I'll STFU after saying that I think - unions do more good than harm.
 
talk2troy said:
Unions are a double edged curse.

Many employers are willing to put your life at risk so they can make an extra tree-fiddy.

Many unions give protections to useless employees but we all get equal pay...

And then - there's the overhead of dues & BA's & politics, etc.

We won't solve it here, so I'll STFU after saying that I think - unions do more good than harm.
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You were saying... https://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ss...ed_off_by_their_own_ly.html#incart_river_home

Snip of it "
So, when Ed Richardson, the executive director of the state's largest teachers' union, was asked by the IRS to disclose his compensation in 2015, he came clean.

He listed it as $1.2 million in salary and benefits."

The same page shows that it's basically a free-for-all at the union's headquarters in Trenton -- compensation for the top five NJEA officers averaged $764,000 in 2015.

I happily opt out of NJEA.
 
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