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Intel accused of age discrimination

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Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#31

Post by danieltillett »

humanrebar wrote: post #21
danieltillett wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the bosses at Intel just hate older people (unlikely as they are almost all older people) they are doing this for economic reasons alone. I say this as someone already over-the-hill age wise that we really need to find a way to allow people as they age to be able to accept a lower wage that matches their productivity. Far fewer old people would be made redundant if they got a wage cut every year instead of a r…

First, productivity (as in widgets per hour) is a bad measure for knowledge worker value. It's famously hard to measure the output of teams of engineers over long periods of time, let alone the recent output of a single engineer. Second, it is just taken as a given here that knowledge workers become less productive over time. Why are engineers downhill starting in middle age but not doctors, lawyers, professors, and…

If employees don’t lose value as they age then why do employers want to get rid of them? It is not because they don’t like them. There is only one reason and that is they are not productive enough for their wage compared to someone younger.

Just because it is hard to measure productivity doesn’t mean it can’t be measured. Most employers have a reasonable idea of the price/productivity of their employees.

What we have done by not allowing the cutting of wages with age and declining productivity is introduce a lottery event. Some employees as they age “win” by getting pay rises every year until the retire, while other are thrown on the scrap heap early. Collectively the decline in productivity is reflected in average wages, but the human cost is very unevenly distributed.

People in every profession decline as they age. You certainly don’t want an old surgeon operating on you. Job productivity is a story of rapid rise until a certain point, a plateau, and then decline; slow at first and then faster. I wish it was otherwise as I am now past the plateau :(

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#32

Post by yayana »

xstartup wrote: post #25
humanrebar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, productivity (as in widgets per hour) is a bad measure for knowledge worker value. It's famously hard to measure the output of teams of engineers over long periods of time, let alone the recent output of a single engineer. Second, it is just taken as a given here that knowledge workers become less productive over time. Why are engineers downhill starting in middle age but not doctors, lawyers, professors, and…

1. Difficulty in assigning a single number to performance does not mean that you can't compare against others. 2. There is license requirement, taxi medallion like setup with lawyers, doctors which keeps overall supply low. 3. It's just not just your salary which company pays. There is a cost to company per employee if the ratio of your salary: cost to company declines, you are a problem for the company and company w…

Just imagine if someone experienced was retained at Intel told them that they are doing CPU level security wrong by doing downright idiotic things like sharing caches. What is the value of that worker in terms of productivity?

Similarly with stripe, I am aware of dozens of similar companies doing CC processing that failed, and stripe probably built a better answer after sleeping on the advice of grumpy old advisors while companies that lost everything in recreating with nothing new had no advice or chose to ignore it.

The general problem is that absurd hope may get you an IPO and a worse is better solution that experts can fix for you later. Building and maintaining a good company is hard and requires expensive experienced workers that lower your quarterly productivity by telling you the truth.

Software being in the crisis it is in is no surprise, but the speed that hardware is joining the negligence for productivity club is more alarming.

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#33

Post by danieltillett »

ofrzeta wrote: post #22
danieltillett wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the bosses at Intel just hate older people (unlikely as they are almost all older people) they are doing this for economic reasons alone. I say this as someone already over-the-hill age wise that we really need to find a way to allow people as they age to be able to accept a lower wage that matches their productivity. Far fewer old people would be made redundant if they got a wage cut every year instead of a r…

Wage cut? You've got to be kidding. I certainly have a lot more experience now than I had in my twenties, that translates to finding bugs faster and better for instance. I don't necessarily expect a raise but there has to be some compensation for inflation at the least.

If you are more productive than last year you do deserve a raise.

What we want to avoid is leaving employers with only one way of solving the declining productive issue as their employees age. I think it is better to have a job that pays less than no job at all.

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#34

Post by ofrzeta »

danieltillett wrote: post #33
ofrzeta wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wage cut? You've got to be kidding. I certainly have a lot more experience now than I had in my twenties, that translates to finding bugs faster and better for instance. I don't necessarily expect a raise but there has to be some compensation for inflation at the least.

If you are more productive than last year you do deserve a raise. What we want to avoid is leaving employers with only one way of solving the declining productive issue as their employees age. I think it is better to have a job that pays less than no job at all.

As someone else above asked: how do you measure productivity?

Also I think it's an simplification to think that it's all about productivity. I guess at Intel as everywhere managers tend to become younger on average because senior management thinks it's the only way to face the future challenges of digitalisation or whatever.

Then you have the grumpy senior like myself who doesn't believe in the n-th iteration of some web framework or microservices or containers. So that guy becomes deadweight to dispose of.

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#35

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

rdl wrote: post #5
300bps wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know whether Intel did this or not, but the point is that you can't assume the intent by the result alone Would you feel differently if the case were about race instead of age? For example, if Intel laid off a population of people that was 22% African American while the population of the people remaining in the company was 10% African American, would you feel the same way?

Isn’t the argument that women and racial minorities are “paid less for the same work”? In which case laying off white and asian men would presumably be the economically efficient choice? (I definitely think such a gap has existed at various times and places. There was a UK enterprise software firm founded by a women which hired mainly stay at home mothers and did amazingly well.)

No it seems to me he's making a totally different argument which no one here is actually addressing. Why should we care about intention? The purpose of a system is what it does[0] so if Intel's 'hiring and firing' system systematically removes older people who cares about The Reason that managers give?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#36

Post by oblio »

roenxi wrote: post #24
humanrebar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, productivity (as in widgets per hour) is a bad measure for knowledge worker value. It's famously hard to measure the output of teams of engineers over long periods of time, let alone the recent output of a single engineer. Second, it is just taken as a given here that knowledge workers become less productive over time. Why are engineers downhill starting in middle age but not doctors, lawyers, professors, and…

> Second, it is just taken as a given here that knowledge workers become less productive over time. Why are engineers downhill starting in middle age but not doctors, lawyers, professors, and professional coaches? Software engineers in particular. Computers really started to stabilise in the 2003 when single core clock speeds hit a wall. 'Rapid' change since then looks a bit glacial compared to what rapid meant in th…

A reasonably curious Computer Science graduate that stays up to date a bit with current technologies will be as effective at 50 as your average 50 year old lawyer.

You just need to check your underlying assumptions (aka axioms) once every 5 years or so. But core CS is as the name says, science. It doesn't change every 1-2 years. Knuth wrote about searching and sorting back in the 60s, neural network (pardon me, machine learning) first appeared in the 80s :)

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#37

Post by fma »

myth_drannon wrote: post #13
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #2

It's weird that the article pulls out statistics that underline Intels wrongdoing (ρ(age, awareness of rights/pay/...) but not the statistics that might be the reason: Older people are less innovative, learn slower and so on. Ergo, if you're for example firing the bottom percentile of "adapted the new data entry tool", there is a good chance that the avg will be higher than the avg of all people working there

I would say older employees in corporations tend to be middle managers. If the layoffs affect more management than the engineering side you are going to have a skewed graph.

It would be nice if productivity was measured by line of codes. That way we get rid of all the managers and executives who spend their days to come up with stupid ideas and say 'make it so by arbitrary date'.

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#38

Post by user5454 »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #2

It's weird that the article pulls out statistics that underline Intels wrongdoing (ρ(age, awareness of rights/pay/...) but not the statistics that might be the reason: Older people are less innovative, learn slower and so on. Ergo, if you're for example firing the bottom percentile of "adapted the new data entry tool", there is a good chance that the avg will be higher than the avg of all people working there

There's science to prove you wrong [1].

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/joop.12031

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#40

Post by justherefortart »

chrisbennet wrote: post #19
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is interesting (especially regarding the comment below citing an even higher age)! But I'm not sure how that converts to the skills you need to have to be an employable Intel worker, which are most certainly a lot different

My (admittedly snarky) post was in response was to the "old people are slow" comment. You are probably right though on the different skills. Perhaps being a successful founder doesn't require as much neural plasticity as being an older worker at Intel. ;-)

I'm about to turn 45. I'm on my 8th startup.

Not including all the kid startups I did. My first startup was in 1996, I started this one 3 years ago, it's finally getting some traction.

I've probably only got 1-2 more startups in me if I don't have the capital, which is always my biggest hurdle.

Hopefully this will be the leap that takes grandpa home ;-)

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