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I know some folks who currently work at and worked at IBM. It is not "B". It is taking people who put a lot of time in and are very good at their job and not even giving them the opportunity to lose some salary to keep their jobs. I heard a story from one friend who was at IBM where they were excited to be working with a new team to support them in India but then suddenly being laid off with the Indian team taking over their jobs. So its a train-and-dump scheme a lot of the time.

What IBM isn't realizing is that a lot of these folks will be relearning the know how without the benefit of those who were knifed in the back and also that in other cultures being an engineer for 10-20+ years is not the goal, they _all_ want to be in management and gain "rank" rather than experience and technical know how.

Invariably you get a bunch of freshers with no real experience being lead by the bureaucrats. Its really unfortunate to see very smart very talented people be summarily fired after training what are supposed to be supporting teams and engineers. I also bothers me they are not given the opportunity to meet new terms to save their jobs.

What is not realized is in other cultures the competitors often build up a presence near to or sometimes next door to a place like IBM and poach engineers and intellectual property. And given IBM is all about decent (not trollish) intellectual property this is not a long term good strategy to be using scabs to replace true blue engineers.

You can also read some stuff here about the former IBM union http://www.endicottalliance.or... - they were not a strong or unreasonable union but you can get a feel for how many good long term employees are facing the firing squad.

In 1985 IBM had 230,000 employees mostly in the USA. Now its 71,000 in the US or so - and who knows where everyone else is employed, not here.

I know some folks who currently work at and worked at IBM. It is not "B". It is taking people who put a lot of time in and are very good at their job and not even giving them the opportunity to lose some salary to keep their jobs. I heard a story from one friend who was at IBM where they were excited to be working with a new team to support them in India but then suddenly being laid off with the Indian team taking over their jobs. So its a train-and-dump scheme a lot of the time.

What IBM isn't realizing is that a lot of these folks will be relearning the know how without the benefit of those who were knifed in the back and also that in other cultures being an engineer for 10-20+ years is not the goal, they _all_ want to be in management and gain "rank" rather than experience and technical know how.

Invariably you get a bunch of freshers with no real experience being lead by the bureaucrats. Its really unfortunate to see very smart very talented people be summarily fired after training what are supposed to be supporting teams and engineers. I also bothers me they are not given the opportunity to meet new terms to save their jobs.

What is not realized is in other cultures the competitors often build up a presence near to or sometimes next door to a place like IBM and poach engineers and intellectual property. And given IBM is all about decent (not trollish) intellectual property this is not a long term good strategy to be using scabs to replace true blue engineers.

You can also read some stuff here about the former IBM union http://www.endicottalliance.or... - they were not a strong or unreasonable union but you can get a feel for how many good long term employees are facing the firing squad.

In 1985 IBM had 230,000 employees mostly in the USA. Now its 71,000 - and who knows where.

Alliance@IBM = Communications Workers of America: http://www.endicottalliance.org/

The Communications Workers of America: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Workers_of_America is a labor union for communications and media workers; if you read the previous link, you'll see that it's the largest, with about 700,000 employees under their purview.

I'm rather certain that software engineers don't count as communications workers, although I'll agree that communications workers are being displaced, as more and more telephone companies turn into providers of dumb internet pipes.

The interesting thing to note is that their dues are typically set to about 1.3% of your gross pay: http://www.cwa-union.org/pages/what_does_cwa_mean_for_att_mobility_employees , are not tax deductible, and get deducted from your post-tax pay.

Now the fun part! For a typical salaried software engineer in California, between state and federal income tax, you re paying nearly 50% of your income in taxes. The average salary for an engineer at IBM in the US (average, meaning band 6) is ~$100,000/year. So that works out to $1,300/year in union dues, if they are successful, which is ~$2,500 of your pre-tax dollars, or double the 1.3%, were it taken off your net, instead.

But the really fun part is what 120,000 workers at IBM being unionized would mean to them: 120,000 * $1,300 = $156M/year in additional income to the union.

I'm guessing that these people are either used to dealing with people who are bad at math, unlike engineers, or they believe engineers are fairly gullible, and can be used as a replacement source of income, as their traditional milk cows run dry over time.

NB: For full disclosure, I was a band 9 engineer at IBM before leaving them, and the CWA picketed our offices, which were the offices of a small company which IBM had acquired, to try and unionize us, as well. They had not a chance in hell.

At the end of 2009 IBM employed 399,409 employees worldwide.

IBM U.S. labor force numbers.

2009: 105,000
2008: 115,000
2007: 121,000
2006: 127,000
2005: 133,789

Where IBM hired in 2009:

Asia/Pacific: 13,376
CEEMEA: 3,988
Europe: 2,923
India: 18,873
Japan: 868
Latin America: 7,112
USA: 3,514
Canada: 820

Here are the detailed numbers from the IBM March 1st, 2010 layoffs (2,901 cut so far)

STG Technology Development: 24
STG Sales Support: 80
CIO Application and infrastructure: 160
Software Group WPLC: 50
Software Group Information management: 99
GBS Global Account: 98
GTS Security Systems: 41
ITD Transition, Quality & Service Mgmt: 276
ITD Application Hosting and Database: 158
ITD Service Management Delivery: 66
ITD Storage Management: 178
ITD Distributed Server Management: 318
ITD SSO (IDMM): 120
GTS North America East IMT Region Maintenance & Technical Support: 66
Sales and Distribution Headquarters: 73
ITD Complex Engagement Services: 34
Tivoli: 51
SWG Application & Integration Middleware: 119
ITD Shared Services, Security & Risk Management: 216
Sales and Distribution Global Sales: 57
Human Resources Global Administration: 124
STG Global markets: 12
CIO Client Value Tranformation: 76
Corporate Marketing & Communications: 48
CIO Operations & Enterprise Portfolio Management: 8
STG Software Development & Lab services: 39
GBS Financial Services: 24
GBS AIS: 84
GBS ASAA: 202
Total cut so far: 2901

Source: http://www.endicottalliance.org/

As another IBMer, I agree. Maybe it would be a good time for Sun employees to join IBM's union.