I’d rather add a typical social fear of poor skills managers, seriously I’ve heard from people that they always fear to manage people older then themselves
1 Like
Maybe, still there are companies who do hire +50 for their experience, knowledge, open mindedness to new technologies etc. it depends on the person AND the company.
I would add to the list:
- more vacation days per year. Albeit, almost insignificant.
- a higher chance of medical leave, but no public data on this. Pure speculation.
Back to measurable things, the unemployment rate for people in the 50-64 age bracket is lower than those between 25 and 49.
Specifically:
In 2020, the unemployment rate for those aged 50 to 64 was slightly lower when compared to that of workers between the ages of 25 and 49 (4% compared to 4.7%).
A gender difference was also noted, with a lower rate of unemployment for women compared to men (3.5% and 4.3% respectively).
Among unemployed 50 to 64-year-olds, just under half (48.9%) had been looking for a job for more than a year. About one in three (32.7%) had been doing the same in the 25-49 age bracket.
Effectively, older workers take more time to find a new job as seen in a higher fraction with >1 year of unemployment. At the same time, an overall lower unemployment rate. It takes an effort, but results are achieved. But, why men VS women difference?
Whatever the cause, it seems older males need a bit of affirmative action.
2 Likes
Interesting thread because we’re mostly expats in multinationals. Regular 10% cuts from companies making huge profits is… sadly just capitalism. But any job which is mostly at a keyboard will be under scrutiny from now on.
However if you look at the job sites there are very large numbers of vacancies, predictably they’re nearly all jobs that don’t mean sitting in front of a screen all day (and generally requiring local language fluency). The next 20 years is going to see a huge shift in the job market. I’m glad I came out of it ‘at the peak’.
1 Like
For those (of us) who are not in companies… I noticed also that, on those multinationals you’re referring to, budget approval limits for any type of consultant or contractor services have meagered, so small projects that were run before ‘under the radar’ are now ‘elevated’ to VP or president level, procurement is involved, and things …never happen. That’s another nice way of cutting costs!
Yeah. I’ve also witnessed this death by procurement policy and “even a requisition order for a pencil needs to be signed off by the CFO” kind of nonsense.
Going back to more nornal levels in my case. Spend thresholds for mandatory RFP and signing authorities have increased. And we have more consultants than ever before (they are all like cancer, btw).
This might sound like our business is booming and we have no worries. That is not the case. At all. But we had become so frugal that this now is a counter reaction. We shall see for how long.
Just because there are a lot of “open positions” doesn’t mean they are really open.
My experience in big pharma says - let’s keep it open and see if we get someone interesting…eventhough we didn’t have any open position…
It was done for positions in my team…
3 Likes
Nonsense, sure there’s no more place for dumb copy-paste jobs at the keyboard, but human intelligence is still needed, because there’s no intelligence in AI. I bet I’ve already wrote it on this forum, AI is only a statistical filtering, sorry, no intelligence, no logical or mathematical skills. Personally I’m seeing a regress in utility of AI because they try to make it more intelligent, so ~2 years ago it was quite efficient search filter, now it’s like a “Chinese whispers” game as it’s aggressively obscuring the succinct filtered out information. I believe that long term AI will cause an increase of head count in every organization. Hordes of people will have to deal constant verification what’s going wrong with the AI 
Nonsense. I did say ‘nearly all’… because ‘nearly all’ keyboard jobs are dealing with processing data in repetitive ways, not just ‘copy and paste’. But, I agree that those jobs requiring data ‘analysis’ and reasoning will, for a while, require humans, typically ‘advised’ by something artificial.
1 Like
In the last months, there were news about hiring freezes for IT in Switzerland.
I that time arrived for the rest of us. I bet 2 beers hiring freezes will be announced this week around here. Maybe even today.
The Swiss Franc is going up. It makes less interesting for multinationals to have workers here.
1 Like