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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.
Note its North America for that 1/3, not all will necessarily be in the US.
-kaplanfx
Visualize Whirled Peas
The significance isn't so much the amount; it's that they are hiring. Companies do not hire massive amounts of new employees if future outlook is grim. IBM obviously thinks things are going good and that the economy is done throwing up, and that's good news.
Okay, this is getting tiring. Why is it that every story that has the word job anywhere has to contain "dot.com hay day" of the late 90's. I know that Tech's been in a slump but it seems kind of useless to keep hanging on to that short 5 year period.
Get over it people.
**watches troll mods fly**
Or jobs they pick up from outsourcing deals? If schlotsky house of bacon outsources its IT dept to IBM, and transfers 500 employees to IBM, that aint job creation, but it is increasing IBM's headcount.
If you want to do 4 years of school and start a career, I strongly advise you to focus on software engineering. Take as little mathematics as possible and focus on business and more software engineering.
I was a mathematics & computer science double major in my undergrad years and I was all but unemployable with my BS degrees. To work in software development, you need to show experience working in... software development, go figure. I had academic experience working in computation, graph theory, programming language concepts, algorithm analysis, and all sorts of mathematics that were pretty exotic at the undergrad level in CS. That's all fantastic, but what the hell type of job did that qualify me for? Basically nothing.
It did virtually assure me a seat in graduate school, where I was working toward a graduate degree in computation. I dropped out of graduate school for a career that met all my "reasonably ideal" criteria for post-undergrad school, though, so my Master's remains unfinished to date.
Anyway, I advise that you do NOT focus in "computer science", but rather in software development. It is INCREDIBLY more employable with a 4 year degree.
AC because I'm not at home, and I have a new job too!
Laid off in RTP December 2003 (Software Group (SWG) resource action). Replaced by 5-member team in IBM India. Got work again on a scientific computing project in C + Perl running on Linux.
My friend still working for IBM in RTP reports that job postings are starting to appear in the cafeteria: "Two years programming experience, $75,000". Quite a bit of money for so little experience, right?
Curious, he investigated and saw identical listings on the Employment Security Commission website, using IBM's position titles like "Staff Software Developer", "Advisory Software Developer", etc.
Turns out there is a law on the books to explain it. Before a position can be staffed by a foreign national, it MUST be listed locally so that an American can fill the position if they qualify -- just like we expect with the H1-B visa positions. Since virtually NO American with two years' experience can qualify for a $75,000 job, the listing can't be filled locally.
Our conclusion: IBM's new SWG hires are actually just replacing existing high-paying positions into outsourced/visa'd lower-paying positions.