Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel accused of age discrimination

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 78 posts

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#41

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

danieltillett wrote: post #10
DeusExMachina wrote: post #3

> older workers tend to be better paid So, if the metric is "remove employees that cost the most but don't seem to justify the cost," it's going to look like age discrimination, even if it wasn't. 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.

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…

> Unless the bosses at Intel just hate older people (unlikely as they are almost all older people)

People routinely hold negative stereotypes of groups that they belong to.

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#42

Post by myth_drannon »

fma wrote: post #37
myth_drannon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Well as with developers, some managers are good and some not. Let's not follow Larry Page's attempt to fire all the project managers at Google in 2001 http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/04/25/googl...

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#43

Post by microtherion »

danieltillett wrote: post #31
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…

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…

> You certainly don’t want an old surgeon operating on you.

When I had gallbladder surgery a few years ago, it felt VERY reassuring to have a surgeon in his 50s who could cite a track record of hundreds or thousands such surgeries, with a minuscule complication rate.

You do NOT want a surgeon fresh out of med school who hacked a GAN into a surplus Tesla industrial robot to perform the procedure, no matter how bleeding edge that would be.

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#44

Post by microtherion »

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

Ah yes, so after all those layoffs of older employees, Intel and IBM nowadays should be true powerhouses of innovation!

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#46

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#47

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

rdl wrote: post #15
andreareina wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a societally-accepted reason for older people to earn more -- experience, responsibility, and time-in-grade are correlated both age and pay. The same cannot be said for race or sex.

If the job is something with such a steep learning curve and plateau (maybe due to periodic technical revolutions?) that someone with 20 years experience is only insignificantly better than someone with 5 years experience, economics would support paying them the same. If we want to artificially subsidize some more expensive older workers, they should be subsidized directly by society, not by forcing employers to do s…

Fine but then don't create housing bubbles that lock lower paid younger workers out of the market. I have to relocate in the not too distant future because local rent and home prices eclipse my frozen salary.

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#48

Post by rboyd »

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…

I don't recall any "specific techniques that were important in the 90s are no longer important". A bad algorithm then is still a bad algorithm today.

OTOH the GPU and advances in ML have had a pretty dramatic effect on the landscape. So I don't think any stalled computer architecture is the cause.

The biggest "edge" most engineers have in their 20s is an undue sense of loyalty to the corporation and the naivete to expect that sacrificing time and health will be proportionally rewarded. By your 30s you've typically seen the ugly truth and have a harder time spending 12 hour days driving somebody else's vision.

Usually we see the older engineers claiming that they were either 1) more effective in every way since X years ago; or 2) slower in some ways but experience more than makes up for it.

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#49

Post by humanrebar »

danieltillett wrote: post #31
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…

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…

> People in every profession decline as they age.

Supreme Court appointees aren't in their 20s. Neither are Premier League coaches. Same for granting tenure to university professors.

And citing price/productivity is ignoring the points I made about productivity being both hard to measure with any accuracy and being a bad measure of value besides.

Re: Intel accused of age discrimination

#50

Post by stagger87 »

oblio wrote: post #36
roenxi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, machi…

NNs and ML go back a few decades earlier than the 80s :)
Post reply on HN