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IBM Adding Almost 19,000 Jobs
cyngus writes "IBM has announced they will add 18,800 jobs worldwide in 2004. They say about a third will be in North America. I don't know how many they have added this year so far. After the new hires IBM will employ about 330,000 people worldwide." More good news for the unemployed techie. Although things are far from the halcyon days of dot-com yesteryear, it's good to see companies doing better.
It was not that long ago IBM was laying people off...
u 072701s1.shtml / 31/ibm-layoffs.htm
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/projects/ibm/b
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/2002/05
But best to have a job for a year or two than not one at all.
Based on the article summary: 18800 * 2/3 = 12533 non-US jobs
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I know from personal experience that IBM employ a LOT of people that are only there because of IBM's previous "Redeploy, not redundancy" policy. I worked in teams where hundreds of people spent their day printing out online forms, then typing them into another online form.
It seemed that they were creating jobs just to keep people there, when I was pushing for working smarter, and laying off 70% of the staff.
I wasn't popular.
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No, the original poster is playing hype games. It was under 10,000 US jobs that have been lost.
No matter how good you are, you still have to get your foot in the door. If nobody's hiring in your field, or they're looking for qualifications you don't have, you're still screwed. Alas, the idea of hiring somebody that will learn new things and grow into the job never occurs to too many companies today. They want you to be skilled in everything they need before you get there. Of course, if you are that skilled, you're probably looking for a job that needs more than just those skills. What they seem to end up with is somebody that can just squeek by on the qualifications enough to BS their way through the interview. Once they've done that, they think they don't need to learn anything more, so the company ends up with staff that's on the edge of incompetence.
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I just quit there. I was treated better in blue collar assembly lines than I was at IBM.
IBM gets business and charges less because they pigeonhole everyone. If you do websphere, thats all you do.
If you do email, thats all you do. It's like working a government job.
It was exactly like the military. If the process says to do the wrong thing, do it anyway.
It's mindless.
Better than unemployment, but not by a whole lot.
I know from experience, that at least 1,000 of these jobs belong to "rebadged" employees. I was layed off from a large Fortune 500 company that "rebadged" 1,000 of it's software development staff to IBM. Basically, these 1,000 employees were given the choice of excepting a job with IBM to work on what they were currently working on as an IBM employee or take a severence package. The company I worked for basically sold more that 98% of it's development staff to IBM. Therefore at least 1,000 jobs were NOT created. They were just shifted from one company to another. Although this is supposed to be a 2 year contract, there is no guarantee that these jobs will not move off shore after the contract expires.
I am currently an IBM employee. I started as a co-op in 1997 and came on full time in 2000. They still hire CS majors - but they can afford to more selective nowadays due to the current economic climate.
As far as majoring in a non-technical field and then being able to "learn" tech on the job - that's a joke. Most people that try to do that never truly understanding the technical details and struggle in a real technical environment like IBM. IBM won't hire you for a technical job if you don't have a technical degree.
As for the company, I would definitely recommend working for IBM if you are a major in any technical degree. They have some of the best and brightest and the scope of the company's work is very broad = lot's of opportunity to explore various technical challenges. They also have great benefits and pay very competitively...
More likely it's Govt outsourcing. The Bush administration has been on a tear for last four years outsourcing any union job they can and moving union jobs to non union positions anytime they can. You might remember the big fight about how the homeland security dept is not allowed to unionize.
Bush figures that if he weakens or destroys unions then they can't fight him in the next election.
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I'm glad we agree, though I may have explained it poorly.
I did focus on the theory rather than the application of the theory and I would not recommend that to anyone. The mathematics courses you list certainly do not meet my criteria for "much math", in fact I'd consider Calc 2 the bare minimum for anyone in any science and discrete math the minimum for anyone in a remotely mathematical field.
I was talking more about abstract algebra, number theory, probability (which is not statistics), linear algebra (which is interesting and easy but not terribly useful to most in CS), and algorithms or numerical analysis. These are all fascinating fields (in some geek's opinion) but in my experience, they are not going to help you secure a stable career. They might open some doors in some specialized fields, but those doors are opened for a lot of fresh-out-of-college people and they're probably going to hire someone with actual software engineering experience before hiring someone with course credits in mathematics. That's just my experience, though.
In retrospect, I wish I had spent less time learning about formal languages, NP-completeness, algorithm analysis, and mathematics topics I mentioned before and more time learning about software project management, using someone else's APIs, and the software development industry. The fact is that there are a few hard to get jobs that are truly specific to abstract computer science and mathematics but there are tons of jobs available for developing software.
It all worked out for me in the end, but I'm working only indirectly in the CS industry and I spent 2.5 very nervous years worrying about how I was going to eat and repay my loans while earning $9 an hour.
Very few.
IBM has clear internal processes on international assignments. I've been an international assignee with IBM, and they don't do it unless they REALLY REALLY need to. They pay international assignees very well - I was much more expensive for IBM than any of my Houston-based co-workers (my basic salary was similar, and on top of that I got about US$20,000 in international allowances). Additionally, they will upgrade your salary to meet the local conditions if they fall short.
IBM generally avoid sending people on international assignment if they can because of the expense of doing so. The don't put people on L-1 visas to save money because it doesn't. They spent a lot of effort trying to work out how to send me home, but unfortunately they found me too valuable, so I ended up spending 7 years on IA.
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