Hacker News Reader

Comment by omarchowdhury | Hacker News Reader

Aerospace is ageist towards the older people? That's interesting, I'd think that experience would be the most important factor in that space.

View on HN

Once you top out the salary range, and are close to 55 (the earliest age for reduced retirement benefits) they look for ways to shed you. It happened to me, and many other colleagues. I have worked on a lot of great projects such as B2 Bomber, Space Shuttle, UAV Global Hawk and many satellite programs. That does not matter; once you hit the age/wage criteria, you better have great connections or you could easily see yourself filing for unemployment.

That's nuts. You're more proficient and efficient with that experience, which should compensate for the wage difference between you and a less experienced colleague.

Its short term, bottom line thinking. If you force them out at reduced retirement wages, that saves pension money you can then bonus yourself with. You don't care that you are firing your most competent people, because they are just resource slots you put new, cheap college hires into. They arent as good, but whatever. You have 2000 of them. They are good enough, right? You can then bonus yourself with that salary savings as well.

The company will eat itself to death, but that will take years, and you'll have left to do the same to other companies, using your "success" at this one to prove you need an insane salary at the new one. Repeat, over and over.

Yes. But imagine this on a scale of the big defense contractors. They won't 'eat themselves to death' as you put it but they are big enough (especially after major consolidations in the 90's) to sustain this behavior indefinitely.

Unfortunately a large part of their business model relies on fulfilling their commitment to seat engineers on programs as promised in the contract they signed with their customer, i.e., the USG. Filling seats is more important than achieving quality engineering outcomes. There are three big-time losers in that equation: [1] the taxpayer, [2] the "lifer" employee, and [3] the warfighter.

It's because that industry uses a lot of old (software) technology and older folks tend to know it best.

The grandparent (no pun intended) said he was forced into early retirement though. Shouldn't he be more valuable as he grows older?

It seems that the salary schedule is out of line with the actual value of the employee's labor (assuming that there is no widespread irrational behaviour in the industry). This could be related to a skills development plateau, decreased attitude/attention/enthusiasm, or possibly even risk-aversion in older employees.

A lot of aerospace involves government contracting which has all sorts of accounting games. Companies generally don't want highly skilled workers they want cheap workers they can bill as highly skilled. Remember cost overruns are only a bad thing if you don't get paid.

Also, the industry has a lot's of ups and down and far more recent grads than available positions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com