27/05/2025

TUESDAY | MAY 27, 2025

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When experience gets downsized I T usually starts innocently: a 52 year-old staff member, who has been loyally clocking in since Elon Musk was still using a dial-up “Your position is no longer required.” Translation: We needed your salary to hire two interns with TikTok skills and no overhead. I am not saying companies should never let go of older employees. Businesses need to adapt and not everyone is a unicorn.

or consultancy gigs. Let the seniors exit with dignity, not a surprise exit memo, a weak kopitiam lunch and a generic farewell email: “We wish you all the best in your future endeavours.” That is not closure. That is a cop-out. And finally, educate your HR managers. If your definition of “diversity” stops at race and gender, it is time for an age-inclusion crash course, ideally taught by the same 50-year-old you were eyeing for “strategic downsizing”. At the end of the day, a company that discards its veterans the moment they develop crow’s feet is one that may soon realise: wisdom isn’t Googleable, loyalty isn’t scalable and no 25-year-old knows why the office printer only works after you slap it twice and press “start” in BM. So, the next time someone says: “We’re realigning our strategic priorities,” look around. If everyone left is under 35, sipping oat milk and calling the surau a “quiet pod”, your company may have just aged itself out of wisdom. After all, a successful company is not built on vibes and fast Wi-Fi alone but also on memory. And someone has got to remember where the HR kept the punch card machine or at least the emergency Milo stash from 2007. AzuraAbas is the associate editor of theSun. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com

“These same 50-somethings were once the original disruptors. They survived dot-matrix printers, dial up modems and telex machines. They ruled the office back when ‘cloud’ meant the weather and ‘streaming’ referred to Sungai Klang.

“Based on recent performance reviews, we have decided not to continue your employment.” Translation: We gave you KPIs requiring Canva, AI and hashtags. You asked, “What’s a hashtag?” You’re out. These phrases sound strategic, objective and even fair. However, beneath the shiny HR language is a growing corporate trend that smells suspiciously like ageism, served on a recycled PowerPoint slide titled “operational agility”. And the irony? These same 50-somethings were once the original disruptors. They survived dot-matrix printers, dial-up modems and telex machines. They ruled the office back when “cloud” meant the weather and “streaming” referred to Sungai Klang . Now, because they don’t refer to Excel as “coding”, they are being treated like expired yogurt. Let’s be clear, this is not always about tech skills. Often, it is about cost. Older employees are expensive. They have earned their stripes (and their bonuses) and that makes them a prime target during corporate “realignments”. Why pay one experienced manager RM15,000 when you can hire three juniors who call you “boss” and work on beanbags?

Though I live far from the epicentre, the images, news reports and emotional testimonies of affected residents have followed me each day. The tragedy has stayed with me not just because of its scale but because of what it revealed. My heart goes out to the families whose homes were damaged or destroyed and daily lives were turned upside down in an instant. No one should have to experience that kind of fear or displacement. The footage circulating on social media was haunting and the ripple effects are still being felt. No words are ever enough. Yet, as a young person watching the story unfold, what concerns me just as much as the damage done is how quickly blame began to circulate. In our digital age, every incident is followed by a storm of speculation. Self-proclaimed “experts” emerge overnight. Rumours drown facts. And worst of all, entire narratives are crafted before investigations can even begin. I made a conscious decision not to join the noise. Instead, I tried to follow the developments through official updates, government statements and well-sourced journalism. It was through that process that one particular fact stood out to me: the pipeline that ruptured was laid over 30 years ago – long before any residential or commercial modem, walks into HR, summoned by an email ominously titled “Performance Improvement Discussion”. He is expecting maybe a workflow upgrade or, if he dares to dream, a long-overdue promotion. Instead, he is gently told that his role no longer fits into the company’s “new structure”. Fast forward three weeks and a fresh-faced 26-year-old with the same job description, now rebranded as “Digital Workflow Ninja”, is sitting in his old cubicle, sipping teh tarik in a can and talking about “workflow synergies” on a podcast. Selamat datang to the corporate jungle, where if your knees creak louder than your keyboard, you are no longer considered “future-ready”. Let us not kid ourselves. No company is going to outright say: “We’re letting you go because you are closer to EPF withdrawal than TikTok virality.” Instead, they cloak the blow with corporate lingo so thick you will need a decoder and possibly a translator from PwC. You will hear familiar phrases like: “We’re shifting towards a more tech-driven operation.” Translation: We saw you panic-click during a Zoom call. Goodbye.

But when the exits start looking like a silver tsunami and the average age in a department suddenly drops by 20 years, someone needs to say: “ Eh, macam tak kena je (Eh, this does not feel right)”. The sad part? This purge is happening at a time when these employees are hitting their professional prime. Emotionally intelligent, steady under pressure and immune to office gossip (because they don’t care who is dating whom in HR), these are the people who will tell you how to fix the printer with a paper clip and a prayer. So, what can companies do instead of quietly ghosting their veterans? First, stop making technology the only yardstick of relevance. Train, don’t terrorise. If an uncle can learn to scan a MySejahtera code during MCO, he can learn Microsoft Teams, even if he still calls it “the new Skype thing”. Second, design KPIs that value multiple generations. Instead of awarding points for building the best Slack bot, how about rewarding crisis management, mentorship or knowing where the office router lives? Third, create roles that honour experience. We already have too many “digital transformation officers”. What we need are “wisdom integration managers”. Fourth, consider phased retirement

LETTERS letters@thesundaily.com

The blast, the blame, the blind spot we must confront I AM a final-year university student completing my internship in Kuala Lumpur. Like many others, I was shaken by the tragic pipeline explosion in Putra Heights. development encroached upon its corridor.

Let this not be another tragedy that fades from the public mind once the flames are extinguished and the media turns the page because public safety should never be negotiable. – AMIRUL SYAFIQ/THESUN

That detail alone struck me hard. As a layperson with no engineering background, I cannot speak on the technical cause of the explosion. But as someone with common sense, I found myself staring at maps and videos and asking: How could developments have been approved so close to such critical infrastructure? The proximity was disturbing. Side by-side images showed homes, car parks and access roads crowding the area surrounding the pipeline. In some visuals, it felt like the pipeline was almost part of the neighbourhood. I could not help but wonder: Where were the safeguards? Was there no minimum safety buffer? No enforcement mechanism to ensure that land-use decisions did not compromise a national utility asset – or worse, put lives at risk? It raised a troubling question that few seem willing to ask out loud: Who approved all these developments at such close proximity to gas pipelines which had been there way before? I am not writing this to blame any one party. That is the job of the investigators and regulators. But as a citizen and future professional, I believe we must begin confronting what I would term “the missing link”. The blast has exposed more than just a pipeline – it has uncovered possible gaps in planning, zoning, enforcement and inter-agency accountability. The pipeline was not new. It did not suddenly appear. It had been there for decades. Yet, the structures and

systems and citizens, and this is only possible when accountability is visible and responsibility is shared – not just by operators but by planners, regulators and developers alike. Let this not be another tragedy that fades from the public mind once the flames are extinguished and the media turns the page. Let it be the moment we collectively say: “Never this close again.” Because public safety should never be negotiable and silence must never be the buffer zone. Terengganu-born Selangor-based

like isolated events. They are often the visible consequences of invisible failures. This incident should force us to re-examine how different authorities – whether local, state or federal – coordinate (or fail to) on land use and infrastructure protection. As someone who will inherit the outcomes of today’s policies, I worry about what other “missing links” exist elsewhere – near other pipelines, reservoirs, floodplains or utility corridors. We cannot afford to be reactive anymore. Prevention does not make headlines but it saves lives. This is not just about Putra Heights; it is about how we build trust between

developments mushrooming around it seemed to disregard that fact completely. This is not just an infrastructure issue. It is a governance issue. It is a question of how we approve, monitor and manage development in relation to safety-critical assets. Why were not stronger development control guidelines in place? Why wasn’t the pipeline corridor treated with the same caution as a high-voltage transmission line or a railway? Why was it possible, legally or otherwise, for homes to be built so close to a live gas artery? We need to stop treating tragedies