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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's good to see companies doing better
:)
Being an employed-almost-techie(analyst), I would say that it seems a serious trend since maybe 12-18 months that companies are making more and more investment in IT.
Hope this will last!
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Interesting, it appears most of the jobs are consulting related. Polish up your Linux skills boys and get those resumes up to date.
Hopefully some of these jobs are entry level positions for recent graduates, or internships and cooperative education positions.
Go IBM, we're counting on you all the way!
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Didn't they lay of 50,000 over the past 5 years? So 50,000 american jobs leave. 18,000 jobs come back, but only 6,000 american? "Lift your chin up so I can punch you in the face."
Was it 50,000 american jobs that were lost?
I started a contract job @ IBM just last week, Linux cluster work. In RTP btw.
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Major in marketing, business, or communication. Minor in CS if you insist.
;-)
..... as quickly as you can, grasshopper....
Geek skills can be learned, business speak and marketing wonkedness (yep, just made that up) cannot be learned because they are unrelated to the actual "Business" and "Marketing" techniques that work. They must, therefore, be taught in believed in along the lines of other religious zealotry.
I leave it to you to figure out which parts of this message are pure sarcasm and which are serious.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
As a quote goes on bash.org: " There was a 23% drop in temperature. That's almost 25%! ... That was one of the most worthless comments I've ever heard."
my dad works for ibm and is currently training his brazillian replacement in boulder colorado. and he has worked for ibm for 25 years. too bad those 19,000 jobs are going to be created outside the U.S.
Get a degree in Computer Engineering instead. You'll be able to get almost any job a CS guy can get, plus you'll have a shot at engineering jobs. I recently graduated with a CS major, and it sucks. Of the people who graduated from my school in CS this year, 7 out of 19 looking for jobs actually found them. Of the people who graduated from my school in CE this year, 9 out of 12 looking for jobs found them.
Nah, they just didn't want to learn the IBM Song.
He who questions training, only trains himself at asking questions. -- The Sphinx, Mystery Men
from experience, dell mentioned that they would close their corporate support.
/ popups/lou.dobbs.tonight/exporting.america/framese t.exclude.html
fact check : they did not. they sent a press release, but the call center offshore continued to grow. brilliant PR. make the folks think they keep jobs in america
microsoft : reported that they wuold add 5000 jobs in R & D last year
fact check : they added 3500 offshore
ibm: most of these jobs are marketing , support and admin jobs. all most all our development, qa, project management jobs have gone.
list of companies exporting jobs, after getting subsidies from tax payers: http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight
IBM plans to end the year with more than 330,000 employees, the largest number since 1991.
So it's impossible that they laid off 50,000 in the past 5 years... if it were true, then 1991 wouldn't be the highest with 330,000!
If adding these 18,800 jobs brings them to 330,000, then they must've been at ~311,000 before this announcement. Adding to that your 50,000 in layoffs would imply that IBM had ~360,000 employees at some point in the past 5 years, which isn't possible!
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Yeh, and have you checked out the job websites lately? There are more job websites today, than there are actual open jobs. As far as listings, let's see, we have:
.NET. Always a favorite of the job search critic, somewhat more uncommon than traditionally believed. I have a few good ones saved, maybe we should have a contest (would need a way to weed out forgeries)?
1) The Beta Tech/ITT covert spam. You have to read it twice, to understand that after paying them $4500 for a 3 month course, they'll help with job placement.
2) Work at Home! Christ, this scam has to be 40 years old now, haven't they already used up all the idiots?
3) The staffing agency mining for leads. Even I get fooled by these. Recruiter calls me, asks me if I know the names and numbers of all the managers involved in the last 6 big projects I've been in for Fortune 100s. He needs them as references, and no, my coworkers won't do. And yes, as soon as I can get those references, he has a job for me. Haha.
4) The "we have to post this publically, before we can use our H1-B". Usually identifiable by the cryptic description, even by the standards of the buzzword elite.
5) The "must have security clearance". Ok, maybe these are legitimate, but if they all insist on pre-existing clearance, aren't they all chasing after the same 20 people who actually have it and are in this line of work? And if they're so damn rare, how about offering more than $15-17 an hour?
6) The "let's look like a big company" PR blitz. 30 listings at once, all of them paid up extra so that the posting date rolls forward (can't even tell if they're stale or not, as if that matters). Sure, they might hire 2 of those people, but they post the rest knowing full well they'll never hire them.
7) The "let's see if we can get a $90,000 a year expert for $35,000" job listing. My personal favorite. Not that I'm the $90,000 a year expert, just that they probably aren't successful often. Some comfort there.
8) Outright spam. The "apply now" link will take you to viagra, porn, or every once in awhile a MLM scheme. They show up even on Monster, though to its credit, they get nailed within a few hours, near as I can tell. Seeing a disturbing number of these types of listings though.
9) The "let's make you jump through 30 hoops to email your resume" listing. Usually climaxes with them insisting I take my resume that I've carefully crafted and formatted over the years, and strip it down to plaintext and then upload it in a webform textarea. Thanks. Not like you'll read it anyway?
10) The impossible experience listing. 20 years of linux, 7 years of
But never worry, with so many job listings, the economy is surely picking up.
ok so by keeping the jobs in US will stop the oil demand. Somehow I doubt it. China and India are actively seeking to improve their economic status and they're willing to spend money to earn money. Hence, consumption.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Now if these jobs were in development, there would be more security. Any company hiring 19,000 developers must have solid plans. After a couple of years a lot of people will be gone but there are odds in favor of people still being employed.
Even if the jobs are not largely in development, IBM must still have some good ideas in order to take such a plunge. Perhaps it smells the blood of competitors or does it feel good times are coming? Or does it want to solidify a position?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Knowing about software engineering early will help you get a job, but you'd learn that anyway, and I seriously doubt any undergraduate level course is ever going to teach you as much about CM or any other S/W process as actually doing it day in and day out will.
And once you get out of college, you will never get another real chance to learn how and why things work.
In college you can learn how and why algorithms work, and not just how to cookbook them into code, which is what you learn in a S/W engineering course.
Lay that foundation right, and you can eventually be a high-priced consultant that comes in to clean up all the dorked up and slow and utterly unmaintainable but oh-so-academically-correct C++ super-object-oriented code that all those college grads with S/W engineering degrees write...
Keep in mind that when scholtzky house of bacon outsources its IT dept to IBM it transfers 500 American jobs to IBM and IBM often has the former employees of scholtzky house of bacon train their offshore replacements in India. I wonder what the typical situation is for most of those former employees in terms of job security, pay and benefits, better or worse than before they were outsourced? What percentage of these outsourced employees will loose their positions when their jobs are offshored?
It makes me wonder how many of these so called 6000 new American jobs could actually be a temporary phenomenon caused by the now lucrative business process outsourcing and offshoring market that IBM is actively involved in....
This all sounds to me more like a self serving corporate propaganda blurb disguised as a serious business analysis of the US labor market. I think it is shameful that corporate press releases like this are often made into headline stories without much analysis or commentary of the message.
IBM continues to layoff people, just a few months back they dumped around 4600. They mainly use contractors so they pay bad, no benefits, sick days, and on and on. They just bought a large outsourcing company in India. They keep cutting the retirement programs, stock purchase program and so on. Many they bring on are ITS a employee who is only allowed to work two years for company them have to leave. They are told they can go full time during the two years, but there are huge barriors they make it near impossible. IBM has turned into a services company and most of the services employees are contractors they treat like dirt. The managers make it very clear we are full-time you are contractor dirty. IBM isn't the company they once were.
I wonder how much of that third that will be in North America will be foreign nationals brought in on L-1 visas. American companies with offices abroad are allowed under the L-1 visa program to transfer workers without any of the restrictions of the H1-B, most notably the prevailing wage restriction. So, all a company has to do is hire workers in India, transfer them to the US on L-1 Visas, and pay them the Indian wage. The L-1 visa was originally intended to allow MANAGEMENT personnel to transfer - and the law was passed specifically so that Toyota and Honda could come to the US and build car plants under the supervision of their own managers. Since the law was written so loosely, it has morphed into allowing companies to send over any workers they want. I think this should be a hot election issue this fall because for one it is very unfair to companies who do not have foreign offices and also because the intent of the L-1 visa is not to subvert American jobs. Its unintended effect has been for huge multinationals to circumvent immigration law and also for the US to lose jobs to cheap overseas labor.
IBM is a huge company and there will be massive variances in what conditions are like in different parts of the business.
I worked at IBM for about 8 years or so - officially, I was in the Open Systems Developent Group from the git-go, but:
1. I started at IBM Havant (then Portsmouth) directly in the OSDG, mainly doing mini-projects - small up to about 1KLOC one man jobs on AIX systems.
I then finished my university degree.
Then I went to Raleigh, NC (Six Forks Road, not RTP) and worked on POS applications there, doing a demo system for a couple of customers.
I then moved to Houston, and worked on a particular customer's retail system, but whilst doing that, did many side projects - some self-initiated - including looking at porting a visitor's center Space Shuttle simulator from the crufty old IBM PS/2 DOS system (complete with 12in. laserdiscs) to something newer with current hardware.
I worked on many many things at IBM all whilst notionally being in the same department (which changed names several times, that's marketing for you) - quite a few of them self-initiated because I thought they'd be useful for our group or business. I disagreed with management a lot, and often got my own way.
I was treated EXTREMELY well by IBM as an employee. They worked hard to ensure schedules were done right so we didn't have to work unpaid overtime. They gave me 4 weeks of paid compassionate leave when my mother died in another country. It was a superb company to work for. It wasn't mindless, and I learned an enormous amount while I was there.
The only reason I left is that they didn't have any offices or plans to open one in the country I now live, and I wanted to live a bit closer to my Dad.
Generalising about IBM isn't very useful (nor is generalising about Microsoft - whilst one side of MS hates the GPL, another side of Microsoft is actually *funding* GPLed projects...)
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Of course, that's just a sampling from the few pages of them I've looked at. I'm not going to go look through the almost 1000 jobs they have posted right now. Maybe on the last half, the ratios are reversed. But I doubt it.
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