A Strange Brush with Tech-Industry Ageism

I have been strafed by a cold, or a flu, or by some other unwelcome invader. I suppose it’s the season for such maladies. On the bright side, I’d rather play host to the nasties now, if I’m going to have them at all, than during the depths of winter. 

Despite being under the weather, I can still clatter the keyboard in the hope of making sense, which is what I’ll try to do now.  

In a personal post published earlier this month, I dealt primarily with mortality and how it colors our view of retirement, and even of life in a broader sense.  I touched briefly, in the course of writing that post, on ageism, which seemed to strike a chord with a few of you. Today, I’ll dig a little deeper into that social and professional scourge, primarily in the context of surreal sequence of thematic events that I experienced about a decade ago while attending an IBM conference and trade show.

That event took place, as so many do, in Las Vegas. It was a multiday conference, packed with keynotes, sessions, panels, hands-on labs, working lunches, industry dinners, and nightly entertainment. I remember that Elvis Costello and his band played a concert one evening. During that performance, I thought how odd it was for a formerly angry young man of the post-punk period to be performing an IBM conference. Then again, I reflected, everybody needs to earn a living, and IBM likely offered attractive remuneration.

Several years ago, IBM was accused of practicing an aggressive, systematic form of age discrimination.  The industry event that I’m recalling today occurred just as some of those allegations surfaced, evolving later into lawsuits that would long occupy the attention of lawyers and judges. 

A friend of mine worked at IBM at the time of the event, and he asked me to attend a meet-and-greet with IBM executives. When I arrived for the schmoozing, he took me aside and advised me that I would probably be asked questions about millennials. Bemused, I asked why he thought that might be the case. He replied that IBM was concerned about and fascinated by millennials, whom the company wished to court as customers, influencers, and employees. Frankly, I thought he was pulling my leg. I understood that companies are always in search of new customers and employees, but, as a networking analyst, I didn’t anticipate an interrogation on generational demographics.

Almost immediately, I was approached by an IBM executive who engaged me in conversation about what I did for a living and about what was being announced and launched during the conference. Then, suddenly, the discussion took a sharp turn. In sotto voce, practically a conspiratorial whisper, the IBM executive asked whether I could offer insight into millennials.

Whither Millennials?

As I processed the foretold line of questioning, the corners of my mouth shot upward into a wry smile. I responded that I knew millennials were people, much like other people, though younger than some and older than others. This answer proved unsatisfactory, for my interlocutor soon excused himself to go in search of other sources of millennial arcana. 

For my part, I continued to amble from exhibit to exhibit, observing demos and talking to representatives of IBM and a few other vendors manning the makeshift booths and battle stations.

Before long, however, as I sauntered between stations, another IBM executive approached and introduced herself. She was involved with a set of cloud initiatives and partnerships, as I recall, and I asked a few questions about prospective partnerships relating to cloud networking within datacenters and across availability zones and regions. When that discussion reached its terminus, she, too asked about millennials. What did I know about them? What made them tick? 

At this point, I must admit, I was amused by the absurdity of it all. I suspected I was being punked. My friend, after all, was and remains a bit of a practical joker. But, no, the queries were earnest and entirely sincere. At least a portion of IBM’s executive braintrust was on a determined quest to gather knowledge about the mysterious demographic cohort colloquially known as millennials. 

It was if IBM executives were assiduously preparing for an anthropological expedition into a foreign and forbidding realm, not unlike a mission targeted at the shores of North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal. If you’ll recall, the inhabitants of that isolated island are decidedly inhospitable to outsiders; for good reason, too, as the indigenous population of the island has no immunity to flus and other illnesses carried by foreigners. Sometimes, though, the islanders’ hostility to outsiders reaches extremes, including violent attacks on unwary visitors, occasionally resulting in death. Consequently, not much is known about the North Sentinelese.

It seemed to me that IBM also believed much remained to be learned about obscure millennials.

Fool’s Arcana 

 As IBM continued its fervent pursuit of millennials, the company found itself accused of ageism against the cohort known as boomers, who were allegedly given the corporate bum’s rush to make way for younger blood. Technology companies are always in search of young blood, like Dracula at a sorority house.

I have a view of generational classification and labeling that is perhaps provocative. I had a brother, may he rest in peace, who was 11 years older than me. That’s a big gap for siblings, and, as it turned out, we had completely different cultural touchstones and tastes – in music, in film, in nearly everything – and yet the arbitrary parameters of generational categorization dictated that we were both deemed boomers. My brother and I had hardly anything in common, other than genetics, the same family, and an arbitrary demographic pigeonhole. He grew up in the tumultuous 1960s, while my formative years were the relatively less adventurous, at least from my perspective at the time, late 1970s and early 1980s. But, like it or not, we were both dumped into the same demographic bucket. 

Here's a question to consider: what is the difference between somebody born at the tail end of the boomer cohort and somebody born in the first year of the Generation X cohort? Answer: One year.

That subjective boundary arbitrarily separates people who have lived for roughly the same number of years on this planet. The same logic pertains to people who were born at the end of the Generation X cohort and the beginning of the millennial years. Even a few years on either side of those subjective dividing lines doesn’t suggest a huge difference in age or your own personal generational identification. At any rate, I think we would all agree that lived experience is ultimately defined more substantively by many other formative factors and circumstances than generational cohort.

When I hear and see people reflexively defining others by a generic and arbitrary marker such as demographic cohort, I wonder seriously about the madness of their methods. In taking such a skewed approach to interpreting others, they’re indicating that they've capitulated to facile superficiality in a world that is full of complexity and nuance. Each of us is a lot more than whatever generational tag psychologists and sociologists have attempted to slap on our foreheads, wrinkled or otherwise.

Regardless of the arbitrary demographic cohort to which you notionally belong, you will find that each demographic category contains a wildly diverse set of personalities. They have some things in common, of course, but not as many as the cohort enthusiasts might think. I know many people in my generational cohort who have interests and political leanings, for example, that are anathema to mine. I also know younger and older people whose proclivities and temperaments are closer to mine. A generational cohort might appear at first to be a tool that can be wielded to cultivate understanding, but it turns out to be blunt instrument of limited utility.

In the unsparing light of reason, demographic cohorts are arbitrary constructs that are unsuited to help us achieve a meaningful appreciation or understanding of fellow human beings. That’s why the IBM executives at that conference a decade ago were wrong to place so much weight on demographic generalizations.

If we tried, I am sure all of us could find collegial, competent, efficient, empathetic, knowledgeable, productive, and eminently skilled prospective employees in every demographic cohort of legal working age. Unfortunately, we (I will invoke the "royal we' for effect) often reach for handy shortcuts and gross simplifications, even as they lead us astray and into a morass of complication.