IBM to Lay Off Half of Global Services Division

Rolgar writes "Cringely says that IBM has begun massive layoffs in a quiet manner, starting with 1300 employees, but by the end of the year, the total will rise to at least 100,000 and probably closer to 150,000 employees, nearly 40% of their U.S. workforce. Some people will be temporarily retained as contractors at a fraction of their salary, and eventually, IBM will also dump many of the unprofitable customer contracts worked on by Global Services or outsource the work to Asia. If these people are looking for work, that could seriously drop wages for technical workers in the US since they will have to compete with these people for available jobs."

Comments

Re:Fuck you IBM

[Teckla]

I don't understand why people get pissed when this crap happens. The company doesn't owe you a fucking favor. They hire, they fire, they do well, they do poorly. That's life. If you think it's "unfair", tough shit.

America has given many companies the fertile soil needed to create hugely successful businesses. Now these same companies have decided to take a big, stinky shit on that very same America, by offshoring everyone so that a tiny minority of people can go from super-ultra-rich to super-ultra-deluxe-rich.

If you don't see the problem with that, you're a moron.

Let Me Tell You How it Actually Works

[Greyfox]

Lets say you've got small project A. Small project A has 5 or 6 guys working on it. They've been working on it for years, wrote a good bit of the underlying system, know everything about it and can generally tell you exactly where the problem is if you call them with a problem.

Now you fire all those guys and hire a bunch of guys from Brazil at 1/4 the original team's salary. Even if the original team hangs around to train the new guys the new guys have to ramp up from scratch. Even if they're excellent programmers it's going to take them 6 months to a year to even get comfortable with the code, even with documentation in place. During that time the overall application design will get slightly worse as they try to implement new features in ways that don't fit in with the original application design.

In the mean time you've got 150 other tech companies realizing that people in Brazil will work for peanuts and they'll all move in to the country. Now your programmers are realizing that they can get more peanuts if they do the same sort of job hopping that we did in the 90s to get more peanuts. So over the course of the next year your team is replaced by new people who you have to pay a lot more money to and who are completely unfamiliar with your code base again. So now you're paying your Brazilians as much as you were paying your original programming team and they have no experience with your code base. Good job!

You can only save money that way if you buy into the fallacy that people are pluggable resources and experience counts for nothing. If you believe that then you can get as much done with a summer intern as you can with someone with 20 years of programming experience. Give it a shot sometime. And you can find a company that doesn't have that philosophy. I wouldn't want to work for a company that thinks I'm just a body taking up space anyway.

Re:Mismanaged...

[GameMaster]

You may, or may not, feel the need to cry for the IBM employees who are losing their jobs but better people to cry for might be the competent employees in the rest of the IT sector who now have to deal with a flooded job market. As long as they weren't fired for cause, their resumes look just as good as a competent employee's would. Even employed IT workers should be, at least, a little worried as the average pay rate stands to plummet and their higher pay rates become a liability to job security.

-GameMaster

Re:Thanks Cringely

[shofutex]

Even if they do get fired for fucking up, they get millions of dollars anyways. You walk away rich whether you're good or bad--where can I sign up?