Re: Coming soon: Turbo COBOL from Micro Focus :-)

In article <770f5fF1f2tghU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Bill Gunshannon <billg999@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <guevml$qm9$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
docdwarf@xxxxxxxxx () writes:
In article <770ajeF1fa10jU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Bill Gunshannon <billg999@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <guergf$ahu$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
docdwarf@xxxxxxxxx () writes:

[snip]

Lower salaries,

Not specific to age. A 60 year old guy with no experince is going to get
a lower salary, too. You are paying less for lower ability, not age.

A sixty-year-old person has, in many cases, a few decades to garner a bit
of work experience. It may not be specific to the task at hand, true...
but unless the older worker has been out of the workforce, period, they
have a greater amount of work experience. When a worker stays in a
particular field the disparity becomes obvious. From
<http://www.businessfairfield.com/webpdf/NextSteps.pdf> :

But even within the same field changing jobs can out you back at the
beginning. A few years ago I turned down a job because while the
salary was nice they wanted me to go back to 1 week of vacation and
wait almost 10 years until I got another. Just like a guy hired off
the street. My age not withstanding!!

'The salary was nice'... you mean better than a kid without the
experience? As for the vacation bit... I've had that discussion with
managers before, the mantra is always 'HR won't let us'.

[conjecture snipped]

--begin quoted text:

The report also noted that jobs held by older workers in the utilities and
management industries paid the highest median quarterly earnings, each
exceeding $17,000 in the fourth quarter of 2006. Other high paying
industries for older workers include finance and insurance, manufacturing,
mining, construction, and 6 professional and technical services. The
report found that older workers (65+) saw their median earnings increase
by as much as 7.4% across the industry spectrum, supporting the view that
older workers with appropriate skills are rewarded financially.

[snip]

Older workers tend to emphasize experience over job skills. However,
experience is often a code word for age, a negative in a job interview.

--end quoted text

Ain't that a fact!!

Ain't that what I've been saying... and you've been disagreeing with?

I have always gotten a kick out of the idea that
it is illegal to ask an applicants age but you can ask for his entire
work history.

Even easier... you cannot ask age but you can ask for birth-date.

When your work history goes back 40 years, how old do
you think the applicant is? And then there is education information.
If I graduated from High School in 1968 I'll bet they can come real
close to computing my age without having to ask me.



lower insurance premiums,


[snip]

From http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/87xx/doc8712/10-31-HealthInsurModel.pdf :

[snip]

Note that age-sex factor is multiplicative and increases with age. Other
factors may mitigate this... but age-sex is still a multiplicative factor
in the expected health-spending equation.

Yes, but is that what the insurance company is paying or what they are
billing the companies who use them? I always assumed they averaged the
risk out over all of a client company's employees.

If that is the case... then the higher the number of older employees the
greater the average rate and the higher the overall multiplicative factor,
an impetus to Keep The Geezers Out.

fewer benefits that come from
seniority (vacation time, tuition reimbursement),

Same as pay. Not becasue of age, per se, but level of experience.

Not according to any HR schedules I have ever seen... but my experience,
granted, is limited. (n) years with the firm = (y) weeks of vacation, no
matter what courses one passes.

Right, time with company, not age determines vacation time.

Hence... an older worker, one with the company longer, generates more
expense.

[snip]

Pretty
much the same with tuition reimbursement except that the older person is
much less likely to be interested in it.

Not in my experience. Younger workers come in already trained in the
newer technologies; when an older worker requests a course the run into
Educational Catch-22:

If you are doing your job you already know it and you don't have to learn
it so you aren't entitled to reimbursement.

If you have to learn it then it isn't part of your job and is not
work-related and you aren't entitled to reimbursement.

[snip]

Assuming a college-graduation age of 22 if you have a new hire with the
latest technology fresh out of school that's a half-decade without a
spouse.

[snip]

And when he reaches 50, you have an experienced professional who has no
kids cause they are all married and moved away.

.... and will be accustomed to earning a Decent Wage. Can't have *that*,
now can we?

[snip]

How old one is should have no bearing whatsoever on how suitable a person
is for being hired.

I agree, but reality is seldom the same as utopian ideas.

This is what I have been asserting from the start, that what the Hiring
Office approves is not always what is most productive for the company.

That it is seen otherwise has resulted in a variety
of anti-age-discrimination laws and successful age-discrimination
lawsuits. 'Should be' does not equal 'is'.

Most cases of age discrimination in hiring cn not be proved and almost
never result in a lawsuit.

Cite? I'll accept 'most' as a mere 50.1% over a ten-year span across 30%
of the country.

(did you know that 86.725% of all UseNet statistics are made up on the
spot?)

The hiring company would have to be total
idiots to handle it in a way that resulted in a lawsuit.

Best not to hire them in the first place because 'we've found a better
fit' (who just happens to be younger, of course)... but what to do with
the ones you already have?

<http://www.minnpost.com/businessagenda/2009/05/05/8567/3m_faces_another_age-discrimination_lawsuit>

<http://esciencenews.com/sources/physorg/2009/02/04/lawrence.livermore.lab.faces.age.discrimination.lawsuits>

<http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9025759>

These are just three... from 3M, Livermore Labs and Best Buy.
Manufacturing, research and retail, and some of the biggest in their
fields.

The best and the brightest, in my experience, do not wind up in HR... and
that is where such decisions are made.

DD

.

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