From The President: Age Discrimination
By Merrill W. Buckley, Jr.
2000 President,
IEEE-United States of America

In this, the second of the monthly "From the President" series, I want to
focus on age discrimination.

Mark Twain said that when he was 15, he thought his father was the most
ignorant man on the face of the earth. So he ran away from home to work on
a Mississippi steamboat. He returned at 25, and was "amazed to find out how
much the old man had learned in 10 years."

Too much of the discussion about age discrimination in our profession misses
Twain's point. I hear it all the time -- older electrical engineers' skills
are out of date, their salary demands are too high, IT workers as young as
35 want a life outside the job so they are not as "reliable" as younger
workers.

As the U.S. career services and public policy arm of the IEEE, with 230,000
U.S. members to represent, we are working to counter these false
impressions. Our ongoing efforts on behalf of older members include:
IEEE-USA's Older Workers Initiative, begunby 1999 President Paul Kostek
http://www.ieeeusa.org/bod/kostek/opi/index.htm; the Age Discrimination page
on our Website http://www.ieeeusa.org/EMPLOYMENT/age.html; the Older Workers
Survey that is now in the field, with results due in June .

But why should younger IEEE members care about age discrimination? Consider
what those who deny the serious evidence of age discrimination, particularly
in IT, are really saying. I don't believe that as a group, older engineers
have failed to keep up their skills. We all know that, as Twain might have
put it, book learning isn't the same as job experience. Our profession
changes so fast that, because we are a profession, being an electrical
engineer means that you have to stay current to survive. What those who
claim that older workers must be out of touch are really saying, is that the
IT industries are a short career. Get in at 25, get out by 40, and do
something else for the rest of your life. If you can.

That is where the IEEE-USA, your advocate, comes in. We don't accept
that our profession is a throw-away career. We believe continual
improvement is vital. And we know that the value an engineer adds to our
economy and our society grows with experience.

Those who have now turned 40, 50or older have the immeasurable benefit of
keeping their skills current through one of the most profound periods of
accelerating technology in history. Those who are 29 today will be 39 and 49
a lot sooner than they might think. Programmers whose newly-minted skills
are in Java and Linux might keep in mind that, 20 years ago, the
newly-minted skills were C and C++. What happened to COBOL and Fortran will
happen to Java, too, and the same arguments might be heard again. "Y2K
graduates with computer degrees are out of date," someone may claim in 2020.
"Nobody does Java anymore, and Linux has moved parsecs since the invention
of Digital Oxygen. We need younger workers who can do voice-response
programming in Chinese..."

Twain was right, if these changes occur, some who deny the obvious evidence
of age discrimination now will be amazed to discover how far ahead of its
time IEEE-USA was. But we're not going to let that happen, because we're
already fighting for older workers -- and younger ones -- right now.