At 68, I’m still working a bit, taking small writing projects when they come my way. God knows I couldn’t actually live on what I make, but it’s definitely a nice-to-have. It means I can throw a few bucks Beto O’Rourke’s way without blinking. Order the high-end noise canceling earphones from Bose when the incessant drilling from the gut-reno next door starts driving me cra. And, every 7 or 8 weeks or so, fork over the $$$ needed to keep my gray hairs hidden away.
But if I were still working working, I wouldn’t be. Not in high tech, where I’m no longer old enough to be everyone’s mother. I’m now old enough to be everyone’s grandmother.
A few years back, I went to one client’s marketing group offsite. By my estimate, there were two of us over the age of 40: me and the Chief Marketing Officer, who was forced out a couple of months later. (Having discussed it with this CMO, our shared belief was that the force out was because she was the only woman in this boys’ club, rather than that she was “older” – i.e., a good decade younger than I am. This woman is incredibly smart and good at what she does and – bravo! – is still working as a CMO in high tech.)
Recently, I talked ageism with another client – a woman in her early forties who told me that she thinks she has a few more years because she looks a lot younger than she is.
I’ve also had the discussion with high tech marketing friends – M and F - who’ve hit their late forties or early fifties. They talk openly about whether they have another job in them, whether they’ll be employable in a few years, what they’ll do next.
It should go without saying: everyone I’m talking about here is whip smart, super competent, great to work with and for, and keeping completely up with the latest in technology, in marketing, in technology as it relates to marketing, and in marketing as it relates to technology.
Yet they all live in fear of the grim reaper, in the guise of a 20-something HR manager, beckoning them into their office and handing them their walking papers.
We hear all this about how everyone “needs” older workers to hang on, hang in, yet there is no doubt about it that there is a shit-ton of age discrimination in high tech, on both the marketing and on the techie sides.
So I was certainly not surprised to see an article in the Boston Globe on a complaint filed against IBM that:
….alleges the technology giant systematically fired tens of thousands of older workers in recent years as part of an effort to recruit more millennials and “make the face of IBM younger.”(Source: Boston Globe)
IBM maintains that they don’t do this and, in fact, claims that there’s been no change in the average age of their workers. Which is not to say that there may not be certain groups (e.g., marketing and techie) that aren’t finding themselves croaked while others (e.g., finance) make out okay. That’s my guess, anyway.
As part of its move to “embrace the Millennial mindset,” the suit said, IBM has been “pushing out older employees,” paring more than 20,000 jobs of employees 40 and over in the United States during the past five years alone.
The complaint cited a 2006 paper by an IBM consulting arm that described the company’s older employees as “gray hairs” and “old heads” and said younger workers are “generally much more innovative and receptive to technology than baby boomers.”
As a gray hair (under there, somewhere) old head, I would like to point a couple of things out there.
For one thing, we do have to be open to new ideas (these days known as “innovation”), and I have seen some fellow gray hair old heads sitting their with crossed arms and sourpusses resisting change. And yet, a lot of what passes for innovation is just plain dumb. And this has always been the case.
As for receptivity to technology, it is my observation that baby boomers who have spent their career in technology are quite receptive to technology or they wouldn’t be there to begin with. Admittedly, I do on occasion admit to boredom with the new and the shiny, but I can write a mean tweet. I can throw terms in that optimize content so smoothly that the reader can’t begin to figure out that those terms were added in for search engine optimization purposes. And, as it turns out, I’m “up” on AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and the deep-geek technology underlying “stuff” like autonomous vehicles.
And keeping up is something that everyone I know still working in tech, however gray haired and geezerish, still does. The ones that didn’t, they already got out.
I suspect that proving age discrimination by IBM will be an uphill climb. IBM probably has all sorts of metrics to demonstrate that they haven’t discriminated against anyone. But, in truth, I suspect that when they swept out the deadwood, the sourpuss arm-crossers, they also tossed folks who were keeping up, still productive, etc. Just because they could.
Good luck to the plaintiffs.
In my gray haired, old head way I’ll be rooting for you.
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