A Software Architect says he was pushed out days after flagging age bias to HR
A 66-year-old Software Architect says UKG, the HR software company, forced him out after 23 years with a pretextual PIP and post-merger bias.
That is the core of a lawsuit filed April 22, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Thakkar v. UKG, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-11852. Paresh Thakkar, who is of Indian national origin, brings claims under Title VII, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and Massachusetts' anti-discrimination statute, alleging age and national-origin discrimination, retaliation, failure to promote, disparate treatment and constructive discharge. The case is one HR leaders may want to watch, if only because the defendant is itself a maker of HR and workforce-management software.
According to the filing, Thakkar joined Kronos in April 2003 and stayed through the 2020 merger with Ultimate Software that created UKG. He was promoted in 2015 to manage the Corporate Technology Services team, and, he says, consistently met or exceeded expectations through at least 2022. He claims he was repeatedly told he was in line for Senior Manager, only to watch the role go to younger, less-tenured Caucasian colleagues — a pattern the filing says continued for years.
The tone shifted, Thakkar alleges, after a series of reporting-line changes brought him under significantly younger, less-experienced managers. He says he was quietly cut out of planning meetings, stripped of high-visibility work and funneled into documentation-oriented tasks. The same technical depth that had once been praised, he alleges, was suddenly reframed as being "too technical" and "not aligned with modern management."
Then came the rating. In December 2023, Thakkar says, he was asked to step down as manager or be placed on an undefined performance improvement plan. He stepped down, and got a "2" — what the filing describes as the first such rating of his twenty-year career. That number, he alleges, automatically wiped out his bonus and pay raise under a rule that he says other divisions did not apply the same way.
A formal PIP followed on or about June 25, 2025. According to the filing, it required fifteen to twenty hours a week of added documentation, leaned on anonymous satisfaction metrics, and barred him from discussing it with colleagues. When he pushed back, Thakkar alleges, an HR representative told him the plan "was not subject to negotiation."
On June 30, 2025, he lodged an internal complaint alleging age discrimination and retaliation. Two days later, on July 2, 2025, he resigned. In the meantime, he says, HR did not investigate, reaffirmed the PIP, and presented a severance of roughly eight to twelve weeks — well short, he alleges, of UKG's earlier Voluntary Retirement Program, which offered ten weeks of pay plus a week per year of service up to twenty-six weeks, a cap his tenure would have hit.
For HR executives, the filing reads like a study in contested practices: shifting subjective standards, a PIP issued weeks before exit, severance pitched as the off-ramp, and a discrimination complaint followed within days by resignation.
The allegations have not been tested in court. UKG has not yet filed a response, and no court has ruled.
