He cleared the performance plan and kept the reviews clean - then came the pink slip
A 61-year-old Boeing engineer says the company used its own performance system to force him out over his age.
In a complaint filed in federal court in Virginia on September 1, 2026, the engineer accuses The Boeing Company of age discrimination, disability discrimination, and retaliation. He joined Boeing around 2005 and worked his way up to a senior software engineering role. His claims fall under three laws: the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act and Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Virginia Human Rights Act.
The complaint traces the trouble to a management shake-up in mid-2021. Around that time, the filing says, four engineers over the age of 50 were moved off his program at once, leaving him as the oldest engineer on it.
His age soon became a talking point, according to the complaint. During a 2022 meeting, the filing says, a program manager looked at him and said, “you’re old, so you don’t have any kids going on spring break.” The same manager, the complaint alleges, described performance improvement plans as a tool for getting back at people, quoting him as saying that to “get back at” people, “you put them in the PIP.”
What came next is where HR teams will lean in. The engineer says a different manager, barely a month into the job, hit him with a performance improvement plan for “failure to complete work” less than a month after he returned from a hospitalization -...
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