Rather than enable damaging email correspondence to become part of the public record, IBM settles age discrimination case that sought top execs’ emails
This is not the first time IBM has settled age discrimination lawsuits while claiming they never discriminated against workers based on age.
Age discrimination is a long-standing issue in many sectors of the tech industry and has been an issue going back to the 1970s. I grew up in Silicon Valley and my neighbors, and others, were a steady stream of laid off electrical engineers. In recent decades, I have personally known several computer software engineers that were laid off due to their age – typically late 30s to early 40s. Because the tech changes rapidly, there is often little value in employing tech workers with more than 3-7 years of experience. Whether you are 28, 38 or 48 – the only experience that counts is the last 3-7 years – hence, overall experience adds little value, unlike in other fields (law, architecture, medicine, airline pilot).
