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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.
Interesting, it appears most of the jobs are consulting related. Polish up your Linux skills boys and get those resumes up to date.
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?
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
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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.
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."
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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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
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.
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.
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.
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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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.