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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.
Well, about a third would be in North America, which is about 6,000 jobs. I would figure that most of those would be in the U.S., with maybe a few in Canada. This leaves a range of about 12,000 - 14,000 jobs outside of the U.S., and I'm leaning toward 12,000 in that estimate.
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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Based on the article summary: 18800 * 2/3 = 12533 non-US jobs
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I guess open source does create jobs! Well, in terms of linux support services. I think a huge area of growth is going to be people with solid knowledge and experience helping companies switch to linux and other open source software.
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.
CS is a good idea, for the right person.
You have to understand that a university degree is going to become a part of you, and hopefully refine talent you allready have. Once that matter becomes clear it should be a hard time convincing you why not to start a four-year degree, depending of course on how expensive it is to acquire. I pray you use something other than Microsoft Windows?
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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?
There was a time when some people would look down on the idea of working for IBM because they seemed stuffy and out of step with the market. Now they're a hot spot for job seekers again
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
They say about a third will be in North America.
Stop outsourcing our great Indian jobs to North Americans!
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**
I started a contract job @ IBM just last week, Linux cluster work. In RTP btw.
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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.
Don't go study CS thinking about jobs. You should do CS if you like computer theory, math, programming and alikes. A good job will be a consequence of your higher level of knowledge.
Maybe you were thinking about this and just added a zero?
I realize that it's very important to the Kerry campaign to emphasize that (1) the economy is not doing well despite the tax cuts and (2) the war in Iraq is not doing well and should never have happened, but (1) won't fly and (2) is debatable.
Don't blame me -- I'm voting for Nader.
Because I live in MA.
everything in moderation
And of those 6K jobs, I'd wager most will be sales, marketing, or support roles with the actual development happening offshore.
Just a guess.....
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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.
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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."
IBM has announced they will add 18,800 jobs worldwide in 2004. They say about a third will be in North America.
And they are all lawyers to fight SCO.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Ahem,
That first interview is normally conducted by HR. The second, if you progress that far, is often handled by the direct department you would actually work in. In fact, if you consider the telephone interview, most of us actually endure this process three times.
Storming out of interviews is a poor way to put food on the table or flesh out that resume. Please, use more caution in the future. You have a lot of skilled and experienced competitors who are willing to suffer the idiocy of an HR drone for a short period.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
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.
Anything is possible, except skiing through revolving doors.
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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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.
In the summary it says that about 1/3 of the new jobs will be in North America. I suppose they could mean Mexico or Canada, but I think that the meaning is clear enough.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
so not only did he not RTFA, he did not read the summary.
it's an all new low.
next time, i won't even bother reading the topic.
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
Your lack of knowledge makes me skeptical of your post... I mean, IBM hiring Computer Science guys? IBM /IS/ CS guys. Their entire business model is writing software, sold on their own hardware, and cashing in on big support and customization contracts... 3 of those 4 things(OS/software development, Hardware design/development, Software customization) are the core of CS. Supporting software and hardware isn't far off.
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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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.
Isn't IBM in the business of helping other companies outsource work?
Business must be good...
John
I dream in binary.
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.
For the most part, disregard most the replies here. It sounds like a number of people have been suffering for the last few years. It tends to produce a jaded outlook.
CS, CE, and EE will be needed here for years to come. If you stay with CS, no problem. But, you need to consider getting a master no matter what you do. While my generation excells with a Bachelors, yours will require a master or PhD to stay in the industry.
Rather than looking at IBM and other companies to hire you, I suggest starting your own company. You will be going to school with some talented people. Meet them and try to get something going. If you can can try to hook up with a salesman. Likewise, read Business for dummies. It will get you started. Consider doing something in the OSS world, but with a consideration to how to make a buck at it. Think Yahoo or Google. Or see what industries that you know and has MS software develoed for, but not for Linux. Develop something but think through the license and how to make money.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What's even more interesting is how much money did the company lose in firing and re-hiring. How much expertise walked out the door with a nice redundancy payout and years of built up knowledge. Unless they lost only their least talented or least satisfied employees, this is a wasteful practice that can only erode the quality of the company.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Many of the jobs IBM will add in 2004 are simply employees from other companies being "rebadged" to IBM in outsourcing deals. Sprint is an example of this. Approximately 1100 Sprint IT workers will become IBM employees in the next few months in a billion dollar outsourcing deal. IBM adds 1100 employees, but they're not previously unemployed tech workers.
Yes, but a Linux Solutions Sales Engineer with 1 year of experience makes a better Linux Solutions Sales Engineer than an AIX Printing Software Programmer with 10 years of experience.
The firings likely represented mostly positions that were becoming less in demand, and the hirings represent ones that are becoming more in demand. Experience and knowledge aren't just scalar quantities.
IBM hires people with any kind of degree. They seem to look for the quality of your mind rather than knowledge and then stuff u with all needed knowledge through OJT.
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.
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.
994,000 more and we'll be back to the employment levels we had in late '99.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
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.
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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It implies that there were American's to take all the jobs that were sent overseas.
As for jobs that are marketing, support, or admin. These are all valid positions and should not be discounted just because you or someone else doesn't feel they are the right jobs. I know quite a few people who make a great living in marketing, let alone support or similar.
A lot of companies are overseas simply because to compete overseas you have to have a presence. A lot of people in the news industry ignore this requirement because it does not generate the headlines they desire, let alone drive their own agenda.
What it comes down to is that many people just need to grow up and realize that there are jobs worth taking and its up to them to do so. People, including the media, spend to much time dwelling on the actions of big corporations, many of who are truly multinational, because it makes them feel better when they can create a "Bad guy" instead of taking account of themselves. The majority of jobs in the US are not from big businesses but instead from the small business. Lastly too many people are upset they are offered only what they are worth and not what they think they are worth. Time to move past the selfish attitude and realize they are not the center of the universe.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.