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No, they don't know what they're doing. Quit preaching employer infallibility, I'm not interested in joining that religion.
That is well stated bobsell.
Fact is most of the companies that layoff people in last 10 to 15 years, especially in the 50+ age area and won't hire those, was to put all their job functions overseas. Just about everything you bought basically there were options that went through R&D, design, debugging manufacturing all done here. Lots of good jobs with that, and I am not talking people on a line earning minimum wage but design engineers, test engineers, and much more. What happens and is proof most companies don't know what they are doing is these companies didn't get what they want. Which is getting almost free products from overseas (All those R&D, design, debugging, manufacturing done nearly free) and sell them at high prices with a US name on them, then do that forever. Well of course companies overseas are not stupid, they can copy the product, make a version, and sell it for less than the one with a US label on it.
Companies opened patents, designs and everything else to Chinese companies and everywhere else they went to get so called "free" labor. Then within a short period they can't compete to overseas and they look to exit a business or start losing money. Well they obviously didn't know what they were doing. It boosted shares for a year or two as they laid off millions of engineers, but there was a price to pay in the more than one year timeframe. It is happening in software too, not just hardware engineering. All the big companies did it, from semiconductors, to phones, to appliances, you name it. Not just the jobs that are lost, these companies in their naivety often undid themselves. And other companies did and continue to do the same thing incredibly, even though they see it doesn't work.
Yes it is true companies are very fallible and way too short term in thinking.
It may be bad business, it may be myopic, it may lack long range thinking but those decisions have nothing to do with age discrimination. Companies don't just roll up their sleeves and spit on their hands and say "What can we do to get rid of older people?" It may be expensive people who are old, it may be obsolete people who are old but it isn't just because they are old. It doesn't make economic sense and it is risky. It's easy for people blame their failure on discrimination but discrimination is mostly a myth. A person is either a added value or he isn't.
I think what we have here is a failure to understand how things work. People don't come out of college at age 21 or 22 and be among the top of a companies R&D or top of design or other function. Mostly people take more than a few decades working small areas till they really know the product lines, have ideas that can be worked on as products lines of their own, and much more. It is just a fact that one tends to get to around 40 to retirement just to be in the place in a company where you contribute a ton. Yes, of course companies decided to cut people because they all thought they had a free lunch overseas as the main line they were thinking, but the people who were at their top in these companies were generally 40 to retirement because that is just fundamentally how it works. Was it age or greed? Well actually it was both just because the way it works. These companies were making lots of money in 80's, 90's and into 2000's but that idea of letting go of people then came into place because that free lunch was believed to be out there overseas and that idea is still being used today to cut people and move operations. Which I already explained this thinking of everything overseas being free is not actually free. Instead it causes companies to go out of business.
It may be bad business, it may be myopic, it may lack long range thinking but those decisions have nothing to do with age discrimination. Companies don't just roll up their sleeves and spit on their hands and say "What can we do to get rid of older people?" It may be expensive people who are old, it may be obsolete people who are old but it isn't just because they are old. It doesn't make economic sense and it is risky. It's easy for people blame their failure on discrimination but discrimination is mostly a myth. A person is either a added value or he isn't.
While individual executives might think in terms of age as a negative, I'd agree that it may well be other factors that result in layoffs. The net result might be the same though. Make up a list of 'negatives' for a force reduction, and the older employees seem to tick all the right boxes. Generally, large companies have dropped the idea of long term career development sliding into retirement as a concept in any case. The changes in a place like IBM are remarkable over time.
Of course, in technology companies at least, if you base hiring and retention 100% on ROI to the company, you might well end up with an employee base that is close to 100% white and Asian males. Is that desirable? I really can't answer that. It's probably above my pay grade to theorize about the social responsibilities of corporations. Once you start putting your thumb on the scales, age appears to be left out of the equity equations.
Mostly people take more than a few decades working small areas till they really know the product lines, have ideas that can be worked on as products lines of their own, and much more. It is just a fact that one tends to get to around 40 to retirement just to be in the place in a company where you contribute a ton. .
I completely agree but I'm not seeing that so much in hiring anymore. It might just be the corner of the world I'm acquainted with, but you rarely see people stay in jobs even five years, and new hires rarely come from highly similar industries.
For some reason, domain knowledge seems to take a distant second to tool kits. Go figure.
I completely agree but I'm not seeing that so much in hiring anymore. It might just be the corner of the world I'm acquainted with, but you rarely see people stay in jobs even five years, and new hires rarely come from highly similar industries.
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Lots of the job descriptions now are really kind of crazy. I went ahead and retired but some of the recent hires I saw really made no sense for the companies where they worked. They will list 3, or 5, or even 10 past job description with borrowed sentences from each and paste them all together in a jumble mess, then list all kinds of silly certifications thinking that takes care of all the issues, then end up hiring a 21 year old that really didn't know any of the jobs well but did have certifications. I think because so many people left traditional roles for other fields as jobs moved overseas in last ten years, companies that still do hire became kind of way too over-reaching in how they write up job descriptions these days to somehow make up for it. Not exactly sure, since I would say of the ones I saw hired it wasn't working for them with these descriptions. But there are people 50+ that could help them, just the way they write up descriptions those people are not going to get the jobs.
It may be bad business, it may be myopic, it may lack long range thinking but those decisions have nothing to do with age discrimination. Companies don't just roll up their sleeves and spit on their hands and say "What can we do to get rid of older people?" It may be expensive people who are old, it may be obsolete people who are old but it isn't just because they are old. It doesn't make economic sense and it is risky. It's easy for people blame their failure on discrimination but discrimination is mostly a myth. A person is either a added value or he isn't.
In most companies
Older employees = Higher salaries and larger medical risks.
So it may not be pure ageism, but it is ageism by way of blind profit making.
Lots of the job descriptions now are really kind of crazy. I went ahead and retired but some of the recent hires I saw really made no sense for the companies where they worked. They will list 3, or 5, or even 10 past job description with borrowed sentences from each and paste them all together in a jumble mess, then list all kinds of silly certifications thinking that takes care of all the issues, then end up hiring a 21 year old that really didn't know any of the jobs well but did have certifications. I think because so many people left traditional roles for other fields as jobs moved overseas in last ten years, companies that still do hire became kind of way too over-reaching in how they write up job descriptions these days to somehow make up for it. Not exactly sure, since I would say of the ones I saw hired it wasn't working for them with these descriptions. But there are people 50+ that could help them, just the way they write up descriptions those people are not going to get the jobs.
You speak the truth!
Having been a mechanical engineer for over 40 years I have witnessed the decimation of first the drafting and secretarial pools, with engineers picking up those responsibilities, then the outsourcing of manufacturing and assembly overseas, and now the switch from US-based engineers to both overseas engineering and H-1B visa engineers.
If most Americans knew how much is being designed and built overseas but marketed by all-American companies they would be shocked.
Most young engineers are now project or system engineers, not actually designing but only overseeing the work of overseas engineering and manufacturing.
TestEngr is very correct, businesses lust after increasing profits will ultimately be their demise. But not before it destroys American design and manufacturing, and devalues experience.
First, The Affordable Care Act has a provision for a "Cadillac tax" for health insurance policies which cost more than $12K a year. People over 50 have health insurance policies who cost big money, most over $12K a year. Do the math. Our own government made employing people over 50 more expensive on purpose.
The Cadillac tax only applies to group plans. Companies that offer Cadillac plans offer them to all employees, not just employees over 50. It's true that coverage for employees over 50 is more expensive (can only be 3x the cost of a policy for a 21-year-old employee), but before the ACA there was no limit on how much more they could charge for older employees. So the ACA has actually made it more fair for older workers.
I returned to the U.S. after age 50 after being partners in an engineering and manufacturing company in Asia for twenty years. During that time I learned to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese and acquired eleven U.S. patents. I was head of engineering and brought many commercially successful products to market. I also acquired deep manufacturing experience in many of the industries which no longer exist in the U.S.
Before I left the U.S. I had no trouble getting jobs. After I returned - a far better engineer than when I left - I couldn’t even get an interview. Fortunately I didn’t need to work but wanted to because I love designing and manufacturing new products.
When it became clear that no company in the U.S. had any use for me any longer I just went back to my old supplier base in Asia and started designing and manufacturing new products on my own, minus the overhead of having to supervise others. I’m just going into production of my first new solo product and expect, based on testing, to.be going on the market with a cheaper, better product soon due to my low manufacturing costs and firm control of product quality.
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