Ageism in the working world (opinion piece)
I’m not an authority on the economy.
I’m not an authority on HR or Talent Sourcing.
I’m not an absolute authority on management and productivity.
But I can smell when there’s a stink in the air and put 2+2 = 4 as a truth on paper.
(why on paper? Because there are interesting errors in the digital world involving mathematical operations in bits and bytes that say 2 + 2 = 4.0000001 or thereabouts).
I just need to visit my LinkedIn and read the feed to see the demographics of the people who have been laid off over the last 18 months.
I’m just spitballing, but if I exclude all the Recruiting and Talent Sourcing people (who disproportionately make up a huge percentage of the 380k people laid off in the tech industry), too many of the people looking for work are in the 45+ age bracket.
And of the people in this age group, there are so many who have been unemployed for more than 9 months?!?!
Just today I read of one gentleman with a wife and 2 kids — wife is disabled, older boy has level 3 autism, and a 7 year old daughter. He inherited a house from his grandmother and needed to have it permanently transferred to his name, but the legal system is very challenging and between layoffs and the legal fees they are going to lose the home on April 29th.
He is only 41 years old. How is 41 years old considered to be old?? He said he’s been turned down for roles who hired people 15–20 years younger than him. He’s gotten to the point where he put a plea on LinkedIn looking for anyone who would give him a chance.
This isn’t a unique story either. Every day I see at least 6–12 similar posts where people are losing homes, selling their vehicles, working Uber, taking jobs at McDonalds, etc… to try to at least pay a portion of their expenses or even simply to pay for food. People running out of their severance, losing health and dental insurance, running out of Unemployment benefits and more.
The thing that is dumbfounding to me about this whole situation is this isn’t a bunch of factory or farm workers, or postal carriers, or any blue collar phenomenon. This is a group of people who were sold on education earlier in life being the safety net that was supposed to guarantee they would be always employed and employable, and that this situation was never supposed to happen. We were all sold a story that turned out to not be true anymore — and in many cases there are people who still owe student loans for the education that was supposed to make them safe from poverty.
These layoffs weren’t targeting either Republicans or Democrats — that wasn’t a property that the company filtered on.
The layoffs weren’t targeting gender or color of skin. Not a filter for this dataset.
Not targeting sexuality, or identity — not a filter.
Nope, the one thing that I have seen at least from the perspective of those who are being the most open about it — its age. I don’t have access to LinkedIn’s user database to be able to pull the dataset of technology workers based on the “Open to Work” banner. But I would be quite willing to put my hard earned money that there will be a predominance of people who are in the 2nd half of their careers.
Something else I read in the posts — one recruiter working for a hiring manager to fill their open headcount had that hiring manager say directly “Do not bring me anyone who is 45 or older”.
This is someone who themselves were laid off, seemingly both because they were redundant given no additional hiring, but also that they were older than the 45 year old dividing line of functional vs decrepit workers.
If there’s anyone who has access to be able to do an analysis of the demographics of people with “open to work” on LinkedIn, please do me the solid and run the query? I am interested in the results, and wonder what might be some action that could be taken if this is indeed true?