For IT workers, the opportunities have never been better. According to a recent study by the Information Technology Association of America, 1.6 million additional IT workers will be needed in the United States during the next 12 months, and more than 800,000 of those positions are expected to remain unfilled because of a lack of available workers. The IT labor shortage is so acute that workers are demanding and receiving salaries at unprecedented levels. President Clinton is expected to sign the bill. Norm Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California, Irvine, submitted written testimony to Congress in 1998 that the problem of age discrimination in IT is getting worse.
Age discrimination is a tricky issue.
A U.S. Supreme Court decision in June makes it easier to prove age discrimination if the employer is found to have been untruthful about related issues. But cases of age discrimination in the workplace are difficult to prove because the claim usually comes down to one person's word against another's. The IT industry is among those exhibiting a particularly high number of incidents of age discrimination, says Laurie McCann, a staff attorney at the AARP, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, who specializes in such cases. But the issue also affects large companies. Intel has been a defendant in several age-discrimination cases during the last five years, and the U.S. subsidiary of Siemens Corp. settled such a case out of court last summer.