Hi -
I’m a software engineer who has been at a big Silicon Valley software company for 19 years. I’m 59. I’ve had great reviews for 17 of those years, been awarded stock, gotten bonuses per normal for all that time.
Until last year. I got a middlin’ review; a lot of the criticism was fair and I resolved to do better. But was also unexpectly told I wasn’t “working at my level” and didn’t deserve stock. I’d been at this ‘level’ (there’s a job code) since 2002 and had never had that criticism, and in fact had led a three platform team on a complex project I’d designed. Um, okay. I’ll do better.
Now a year later I’m told I’m still not ‘working at my level’ and my boss’s boss threw out demoting me as a solution and was quite unhappy for not concrete reasons. I feel I’m being pushed out because of my age and feel that I’m still contributing at a high level.
I was urged by friends to discuss this with my HR that perhaps this is age related harassment. Is there any downside to doing so? How careful should I be approaching them?
I do know there’s a lot of age discrimination in tech but had never expected to be on this end of it if I wasn’t a job seeker but was holding a job. I fear if I’m pushed out I won’t be employable, regardless of my talents or record.
PS I’ve been also considering just keeping my head down and taking it. They can’t push me out without cause. and I can probably retire in 3-4 years. Do your worst, assholes. So maybe going to HR would f that up.
What I’d prefer is getting past this and doing my goddamn job, but it’s become obvious that’s not in the cards.
This doesn’t sound like good management on my part. If you weren’t working to expected standards last year, then why haven’t they put you on a performance improvement plan in all that time? The PIP is designed to give employees who are having difficulty meeting standards to be successful. It should include a list of what’s expected of you according to the business goals of your department. You can’t improve without your manager providing you with some concrete reasons for why he or she is displeased.
A lot of people like to remind others, “HR is there to protect the company. They’re not your friend.” And there is some truth to that in that HR, like every other department in the company, exists to support the needs of the company not the needs of the employee. But sometimes protecting the interests of the company means protecting employees from even the appearance of discrimination. It’s also in the interest of the company that managers understand how to give good feedback to their employees so they actually have a chance to correct and improve their behavior.
If you do go to HR, I’d concentrate on the lack of meaningful feedback from your manager on the specifics of you not “working to your level” as well as the lack of guidance on how you might improve your performance. Believe me, they’re going to know you’re over 40 and it’s something they’ll have a keen interest in looking at. But if you truly believe this amounts to age discrimination, feel free to mention it.
Some companies have toxic cultures and HR can’t really fix that as we don’t drive company culture. But as a general rule, most companies wish to avoid retaliatory behavior. I think going to HR might be a good idea because you don’t want your last 3-4 years at the company to be miserable.
Yeah, just don’t. My mother was a VP of HR for a fortune 500 company. And this would be her advice. Don’t do what you’re thinking about doing. Just don’t!
HR looks out for the company’s interest, not yours. They don’t give two shits about what’s fair.
Another vote to be very weary of HR. I know that the HR department at a company I used to work for worked hand in hand with the company. People that were promised confidentiality were betrayed as soon as they left the HR office.
Are you sure about that? Unless you have a contract that says otherwise, you’re an at-will employee, which means you can be fired for any reason other than being a member of a protected class (e.g. you can’t be fired because of your race, sex, religion, etc.).
The “HR are assholes” view is IMHO a bit extreme; but having worked with them a bit, the problem they often have is that their role includes both looking after employees so they are happy and productive, and looking after the employer’s interests. This can give rise to dilemmas and ultimately - if the situation is such that one role must prevail over the other - it is the second role that prevails.
There is a dilemma here regarding which you will have to form your own judgement, which is this:
in an ideal world you would go to HR and say you’re concerned about age discrimination and HR would ensure you do not suffer the effects of age discrimination, which is a good outcome.
in this less than ideal world, if your manager wants you gone due to age discrimination, by raising the subject the only effect will be that HR will tell your manager he/she mustn’t conduct age discrimination, but then your manager will discriminate against you anyway, but cover it up better.
It’s hard to know which way to go - but I would consider whether action taken against you would be blatant and provable age discrimination. If so, I’d lean towards the first option because there is more chance of HR saying “you can’t do this” to the manager. If the discrimination would be subtle, the opposite.
I know this isn’t that constructive, but as someone in the same field (and likely with similar bureaucratic frustrations) I’d say this: look at yourself in the mirror real hard before you do anything. 59 isn’t that old for a tech worker these days. Age discrimination strikes me as really. really unlikely. It’s really hard to find good engineers these days and even harder to retain them. I would be shocked to see an old guard tech company pushing out a 59 year old worker who is an average or better contributor unless they are in dire financial straits and desperate to downsize. Big tech ain’t Facebook circa 2005, and with rare exceptions, the offices aren’t exactly frat houses or nerd carnivals anymore. If you’re being downgraded you better be absolutely certain that there isn’t any cause other than bias before you raise a stink.
It’s been my experience in corporate America that a PIP is more often used to build a case to get rid of an employee than to actually help an employee. YMMV but I have never know of a person put on a PIP to still have a job at that employer a year later.
Will talking to HR be a good idea or a bad idea? It depends on the HR. It depends on the corporate culture.
There is something to be said for just hunkering down and waiting out until retirement at the OP’s age. And yes, I do think there may be an element of ageism at work. When you’re young you think it will never affect you, but once you hit 50 you discover that a LOT of people just see your age, not your capabilities.
Maybe I missed something, but have you asked the bosses for specifics? Like what you have to do to work at your level? Are they not saying what the expect of you or are you not hearing it?
Anyway, that was my initial reaction upon reading the OP.
I’ve worked for my company for 25 years, and have found HR to be less than useless. They have been adversarial each time I have interacted with them. I’m not sure what their function is. The only thing I know is that they couldn’t care less about my interests, nor the interests of my customers. I no longer interact with them unless I am forced to.
As someone on the wrong side of 40 in tech, I’m sympathetic to the notion of age discrimination. At the same time, there’s more expected of someone with our experience than a 27-year-old, and that expectation usually comes with more pay and responsibility. I’ve also seen lots of underperformers skate by for years, decades even, because it was easier to let them skate than document their lack of growth. And so now we have people in my company in their late 40s and early 50s who haven’t been cutting it for years but have no idea because nobody’s ever given them a negative review. Until… you get that one manager who has the stomach to start a process that’s long overdue, and it feels like it’s coming out of left field.
OP, I’m not saying this is you, not by any stretch. I don’t think you’d have landed that job at the age of 40 without being able to perform at your expected level. But there’s a good chance this is what’s being sold to HR – “people have wanted him gone for a long time but nobody’s ever documented it, so that’s what I’m doing now – documenting it – so we can being to show a pattern that we can then use to terminate him without the cloud of discrimination.”
Even if HR did make an honest effort to research the situation for you, you will have antagonized people who find some way or other to get rid of you. I’ve seen it happen.
One of the difficult things when talking about employment in the United States is that we have tens of thousands of employers and even if you’re in the same field in the same state you might have a wildly different experience than someone working at a different company or even a different manager within the same company. I have no doubt there are companies where PIPs are used for the expressed purpose of pushing someone out, but I don’t have enough information to know if the OP works for that type of company. Employees are typically put on a PIP because they’re underperforming so it shouldn’t be a big surprise that a lot of them don’t end up meeting those goals.
It appears as though the OP’s boss is already antagonized. The OP’s situation isn’t going to change unless he does something about it. Maybe going to HR will help, maybe it’ll hurt, but right now it appears likely to me that the situation will only get worse if nothing is done.
This example is from a completely different industry (and will probably be shocking to almost everyone here ) - but I know of a person ( a salesman) who was convinced that the reason he was fired at age 70 was age discrimination. He was so sure of this that he refused to sign a release in return for receiving 26 weeks of severance pay. ( a week for every year he worked at the company ) It couldn’t have been that his sales were dropping for three years straight, it couldn’t have been that he never answered emails until the next day ( because he had to go home and have his wife open the email and then send the answers he dictated) couldn’t have been because he insisted on faxing the orders to the office rather than using the scanner he was given to transmit orders. Nope , only could have been his age - even though it was a family owned company , and the people he thought were discriminating against him based on his age when he was 70 were the same people who didn’t fire him at 65 or 60 … He didn’t sign the release, sued them instead and after a couple of years was lucky to get the same 26 weeks he was originally offered minus whatever he had to pay the lawyer. He would have been better off just taking the severance pay at the beginning.
I agree not to go to HR. HR believes employees are a necessary evil and are NOT on your side. Can you keep your head down and nose clean until you can retire? If THEY are intent on getting rid of you, they will. Make sure they offer you a good severance package including health insurance.
You’re in the field, I know. @Broomstick also reiterated my basic premise.
One can only get away with … “what the organization supports” for any length of time. If you have a very employer-friendly C-Suite team and this culture has effectively translated to HR policies, then they may prove very helpful.
But it can’t be overstated that HR generally isn’t there to serve you, and that – in far too many cases – employees are virtually viewed as a necessary evil to be mollified and kept quiet on the regular.
A prime responsibility of Senior Managers is to always bring threats and opportunities to the attention of the Executives. You don’t want to make HR’s ‘threat’ list
If you have any trusted colleagues within that you know have tried to avail themselves of this kind of help, I might tap their knowledge (if you don’t already know this answer yourself). See what the broad outlines of their experiences were.
But knowing the basic marching orders under which your HR department operates, IMHO, is about 90+% of what you need to know to make this decision.
