I don't think its right, but I understand their view of why they perhaps wanted to do it.
I had contact with quite few folks from IBM when I was at Red Hat and met Distinguished Engineers and Fellows and all they seemed to do was make slides and go on meetings. Literally powerpoint would be used for everything, Architecture? do it in powerpoint? Documentation, do it in powerpoint. Do it in powerpoint, and then invite lots of people to a meeting to share your slides, get as many people on the meeting as you can. These would be endless meetings scheduled into eternity, where the goal of the meeting was 'alignment', the same people going around and around not really getting much done, apart from agreeing on some things, and disagreeing on others. I stopped turning up, as it was a waste of time, so it was 'escalated' to my boss 'why is jossclimb' not coming to our alignment meetings?!?'
They were also clueless about how to deal with us. Had folks 'escalate' as we would not agree to something that first required it be accepted upstream in a community. Would have to say to them 'my word is not worth much, we need to get consensus in the community', this was read as us being difficult and not following some VPs wants to the letter. "This is very important to Arvind"
I will get shit for saying this, but half of them could disappear into the ether and you would not notice anything (apart from SWEs having more time outside of perpetual meetings around powerpoint to put their heads down and build some software).
All they seemed to do was make slides and go on meetings ... They were also clueless about how to deal with us ... Endless meetings scheduled into eternity ... the same people going around and around not really getting much done
So you're saying that on the basis of the above, you "understand" IBM's point of view that the way to fix this was to start firing the older workers?
Because that's, like, obviously the root cause of this malaise, right?
You’ve described a company culture problem, not specifically an age one. I saw similar (sans powerpoint) in the past at Disney. It was mostly fixed through a reverse merger/brain-transplant from Pixar.
Basically, management that needs to be replaced not all older workers. This is where Blue Hat could shine.
That might be an IBM-specific quirk, but to get C-suite roles in large tech companies, one definitely needs to re-specialise from SWE/SDE roles to sales. All deep technical knowledge is not necessary for those roles (it's a nice-to-have).
I had contact with quite few folks from IBM when I was at Red Hat and met Distinguished Engineers and Fellows and all they seemed to do was make slides and go on meetings. Literally powerpoint would be used for everything, Architecture? do it in powerpoint? Documentation, do it in powerpoint. Do it in powerpoint, and then invite lots of people to a meeting to share your slides, get as many people on the meeting as you can. These would be endless meetings scheduled into eternity, where the goal of the meeting was 'alignment', the same people going around and around not really getting much done, apart from agreeing on some things, and disagreeing on others. I stopped turning up, as it was a waste of time, so it was 'escalated' to my boss 'why is jossclimb' not coming to our alignment meetings?!?'
They were also clueless about how to deal with us. Had folks 'escalate' as we would not agree to something that first required it be accepted upstream in a community. Would have to say to them 'my word is not worth much, we need to get consensus in the community', this was read as us being difficult and not following some VPs wants to the letter. "This is very important to Arvind"
I will get shit for saying this, but half of them could disappear into the ether and you would not notice anything (apart from SWEs having more time outside of perpetual meetings around powerpoint to put their heads down and build some software).