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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."
I'll wait until I hear it from a journalist. No, you're not.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
heavily indebted McMansion owners?
The guys who came up with outsourcing? I hope their jobs were outsourced.
I worked for IBM as a contractor and I'm sure for anyone else who has worked there whether as a full time employee or as a contractor, I am not kidding when I say they are highly mismanaged. I worked as a security engineer responsible for managed firewall services they were doing and I was extremely frustrated at the methods upper management handled things. We'd often spend an hour to two hours over the phone talking about nonsense and waiting for others to join in on the calls. Mind you I worked from home so IBM wasn't spending on me what they did for their normal employees. Whenever I had to head to Southington CT, I would see nothing but waste. I won't be crying for any one of those workers, that's the name of the game, making money. I only wonder why it took so long since this was inevitable anyway.
Infiltrated dot Net
So what (in a nutshell) is IBM Global Services? What do they do?
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Actually outsourcing is economics at work. If an Indian can do the same job for cheaper, then they should be the one to be hired. Meanwhile, the Developed Country's worker(s) should be not resting on their laurels but working to improve their value so that they cannot be replaced easily by outsourcing. Protections can be put in place, but those are usually short sighted reactive methods and long term are detrimental to everyone overall.
Let's just hope IBM layoffs are a blip on the map and not a sign of things to come.
Then again, any IT person not in a critical role should always be planning (financially, professionally, and personally) for layoffs or reduced compensation. IT is not, and never will be, a constant line of supply/demand. If you want job predictability, be a farmer.
It's also interesting they are dropping unprofitable contracts. Imagine if someone like Dell did that. More than 5 calls over the same user issue? "Sorry, sir, please repackage your computer and return it to Dell for a prorated refund. We are no longer interested in maintaining this support relationship or maintaining you as a customer."
"Cost Reduced" and that's what happened to me earlier this week. Surprisingly, the Silicon Valley job market looks better than it was two years ago when I was last looking for work. I don't think I'll be out of work for too long.
IBM is basically off-shoring their staff, and keeping their managers and execs. The problem is that is where all the waste is at.
OTH, the Indian companies are hiring American, but at lower pay. They treat the employees like cattle (presumably like they do in India) and have little to no benefits. But at least the management does not suck. The companies are able to make profits. IOW, it may be time to outsource the American managers who are terrible at doing their jobs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Being an IBMer I was quite alarmed by this headline. But if you read the linked story, you'll see that Cringely is quoting his "many friends" at IBM.
That's not what news people would term a reliable source.
It's not to say that this might not be true but I'd like to hear it from something a little more reliable than Cringely's watercooler.
9.8/10 is also a fraction. And please stop the alarmist protectionist crap.
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, available from Packt Publishing.
Last Post!
(from inside my IBM cubefarm)
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Wait until it's confirmed. This is the equivalent of an op-ed, not real news.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
if these people get laid off, won't that mean they can fill some of those supposed jobs that Microsoft et al keep saying they can't fill because there aren't enough qualified workers in the U.S.?
Won't that in turn mean that Microsoft et al won't need as many H-1B visas since some of the positions will be filled?
If Microsoft et al don't attempt to fill their supposed empty positions with some of these people, does that mean they are lying when they say they have all these open positions and no one to fill them and must look overseas for qualified people?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
...SCO will hire y'all with the cash they win from your former employer.
Anybody want a peanut?
These are mainly services people, performing services for somebody. These somebodies are still going to need services even if it is not with IBM anymore. It is not like they are closing down a manufacturing plant; they are dumping customers, but these customers will just find someone else to do the work. Whoever picks up these contracts will probably need more employees. There will probably be net increase in unemployed people, but a portion much smaller than 100,000.
If I were an employee at IBM, an internal restructuring process named "LEAN" would scare the hell out of me.
I agree with Cringely on this:
Is it just me...? I feel that there have been a lot more stories in the last few years about corporations caring less and less about their employees and more about their share price. But I could just be remembering the past with rose-colored glasses.
And this sounds bad:
We're just going through another round of union / management contract negotiation talks where I work, and really the long-term benefits can't be discounted. It's why your top-rate people will stick around for decades, instead of learning a new skill set and then looking for work elsewhere. This doesn't sound like it would be a smart move for a company interested in its workforce as more than just "human resources"... but if it's all just about share price, then I get it. Still too bad.
Actually outsourcing is economics at work. If an Indian can do the same job for cheaper, then they should be the one to be hired.
What if the reason that they can do the same job for cheaper is because their government doesn't have protections in place that the US does, and the company is exploiting the workers? Is it the case that Google SHOULD be in China because it makes just economic sense?
...and profit by assisting oppresive governments...the world keeps a-turnin...
Blar.
Really, this is not surprising at all -- what is surprising is how many US companies are not doing the same thing. If the US were slated to remain the largest market for tech services, then it would make sense to make sure the workforce was largely American.
Now, I'm sure to be modded into oblivion, but I think it's important for tech workers especially to understand that they are likely replacable at a fraction of their cost -- and the more experience under their belt, the more this holds true.
Another thing not mentioned by Cringely is that IBM is also diversifying its employment base. Given the ticking time-bomb that is the US over-leveraged economy, this makes good sense for the long-term security of a company. I'd be shocked if other big international companies aren't thinking along the same lines.
Now, as for Cringely's opinion that this move is just to boost stock price, thereby enriching the current executive group, I think that's only part of the equation. It's easy to blame management greed for decisions that are unpopular amongst the rank-and-file. It's not so easy to understand that the stock market rewards moves like this precisely because they ARE good for the company. Sometimes it's a case of management simply making the best of a very sticky situation, when pain is unavoidable.
All that said, neither I nor Cringely know the full details, and so I'd take what either one of us has to say with a rather large grain of salt (and since I'm an unkown, two rather large grains of salt for me).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
>If an Indian can do the same job for cheaper, then they should be the one to be hired.
>... resting on their laurels...
This is such a pile of crap that gets re-spouted over and over. First, you choose the boundaries of your economy. If you go global with absolute free trade, then you are going to have people living in slums like in India, and healthcare like that of the third world, because that is your peer group. But until recently, the US did just fine by selectively trading with the rest of the world. Selective trading can create pockets of prosperity; we need to be smart and not just open our doors wide.
Second, the notion that US workers are all just sitting around on their laurels compared to the rest of the world is also a pile of crap. US workers work longer hours than most of the planet, and a good portion as just as productive.
So save your crap, because that is what it is.
Ok , maybe a few low level ones are , but if these execs were *really* worried about their companies balance sheet, the first thing they'd do it outsource their own oversized salaried roles (unless they think the indians et al are too stupid to do it - unlikely). Funny thing is though , this never happens. As usual hypocracy floats to the top along with the bullshit and they'll fire the people who do the real work while taking home their own 6 figure salaries and heading off down the golf course. These people should be ashamed of themselves and what they're doing. Even for the self centred spineless leeches running a large company such as IBM there should be *some* sort of moral responsibility to your country, no matter what the bleating shareholders and accountants might say.
Notices like this always scare me. I work for a global software company. I am expendable. I guess the good news is I don't have kids, or a house, or any debt for that matter, and I could REALLY use a vacation!
This is just a sign that the days of the white shirtsleeves are fast coming to an end. Several years ago, I interviewed for a programming position at a major wall street firm in New York. This IT department was filled with guys and gals in formal wear (coats, ties, long sleeve shirts etc). They were mostly banging out Perl and the pre-cursors to .net.
:-)
Yeah, the waste was incredible, and in I was glad I didn't get the job (regex skills weren't worth a damn those days -- who was I fooling?). I started working in a smaller shop dot-bomb shop and my regex skills improved overnight... this is all besides the point though
Many of you here have worked on one project or another and you know that they frequently overrun both in terms of time and costs, and customer requirements that change even if no change was mandated in the contract. Can you imagine a few thousand projects like that in the IBM Global group? I can, and its a nightmare. Even though they charge the customers a mint, they must still be dramatically decreasing the size of their profits hand over foot.
But that pales in comparison, because we're into the era where you can now advertise on one of the popular tech blogs or Craigs List for your own people to come in, ramp up, do your project (you make the mistakes), ramp down and go into maintenance mode. Your contractors can also SSH in and make changes and tweaks from anywhere in the world, or in Pittsburg Pennsylvania (if you prefer to hire nationwide).
IBM Global is a holdover from pre-internet days when you contracted with a company to make a monolithic application that ran only on the Windows desktop or on your mainframe. Many corporate apps now run on an intranet in the browser and mostly consist of small apps that connect to the old monolithic applications. Heck, a friend of mine spent time hacking drivers that would connect through green screen terminal connections and get the data he wanted to spit out in html. Dare to make an app that only works in IE? Look to be embarassed in slashdot the next day.
Much time is spent talking about the latest version of thunderbird, or outlook, but the writing is on the wall. We're inexorably heading to the point where those kind of apps are moving to the way of the dodo bird. The future is gmail-like/google-like-apps for the majority of us. They just could not keep up.
Newsfollow.com
all from tfa ... ... ...
*This is according to my many friends at Big Blue, who believe they are about to undergo the biggest restructuring
*I have been told is the ultimate goal of laying off at least one American worker for every overseas hire
*All this is supposed to happen by the end of 2007, by the way, at which point IBM will also freeze its U.S. pension plan
*Palmisano and his lieutenants will retire rich. And not long after that IBM's business will crash for reasons I explain below.(!!!)
well, sir, last line here was actually the last line I could read from this peice of shit...
now i can go to sleep...
sweet dreams everybody
everyone downmodding this post will be prosecuted for reading my post without first buying a license!!!
The only other story I can find like this is at CNN.. http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/newst ex/AFX-0013-16392735.htm
But nothing else and certainly not with the whole of IBM's plan for the next year.
They last layed off way more workers than this in 2002, so is this really that big of a deal in fact?
Presumably, these people were doing something at IBM, working for IBM's clients, etc. That something still needs to be done, even if IBM is no longer interested in doing it.
There may be some shake-up, but it is not like 100000 IT-professionals suddenly appeared from nowhere.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That's the publicly announced ~1500 or so, it does not confirm a 40% US workforce layoff. 40% would be a ludicrously desperate move for a company that at worst is described as stagnant, not exactly in trouble. When you aren't announcing any losses, just less-than-awesome gains, it doesn't make sense to just cut out that much in as short a period as a year. IBM is topheavy and I definitely agree that the management is the bulk of the problem (not only *way* too many of them, but they are also more highly paid than the technical people who do real work), and so I wouldn't be surprised if a couple thousand more get screwed over the year, but 40% would be the dumbest thing and I think even shareholders would see it as a detrimental, stupid move.
One problem they do seem to have is startup envy. They see a company come out of nowhere and achieve great fame and a sizable market cap, and wonder why they can't achieve the same percentage growth. The obvious answer (that IBM's market cap is overwhelmingly huge already, nowhere to really go) doesn't seem to occur to them.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
IBM = I've Been Mumbai-ed (i.e., my job was sent to Mumbai)
IBM-GS = I've Been Mumbai-ed, Gujarati Software
No offense intended to our fine quality Indian software developer brothers, it's just that in Western countries the term "going out for some South Indian" used to mean where you were going for lunch, not where your job is headed...
Actually, having done this first hand... I've had to train my replacement. It doesn't take 5 years. Just a few month transition period.
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.
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Let me first say I work in IBM outsourcing; SO actually. I work with this stuff. Let me also say that whenever wherever we can send a unit of work outside of the US we do that. But, one presumes there are those people 'over there' to do that. One can eliminate 150,000 jobs from IBM but at least some fraction of that, probably a large fraction of it, would have to be employed over in those other places to do that work, one estimates at a fraction of the US cost. And we are not seeing that level of growth over there. Maybe I'm too far removed from it or maybe I'm whistling past the graveyard but I'm not seeing that level of growth overseas.
150,000 would more-or-less be IBM's entire U.S. workforce, not 40% of it. If Cringely can't even get that right, I'd treat the rest of the article as extremely suspect.
SirWired
How is an American worker supposed to compete with the fact that it simply costs more to live here than it does in many other places in the world? Maybe *I* would be fine with the same salary that someone in the 3rd world takes home, but my landlady is going to be pissed when I can't pay the rent. I realize that in the long term, competition is better for everyone, we raise the standard of living in the rest of the world, they have to be paid more, we become are better able to compete again, blah blah blah. The problem is that that all takes time, decades in fact. Which blows if someone is going to have to spend 1/2 of their entire career starting out half as competitive as someone in a 3rd world country simply because of the cost of living there.
In 1996 the single largest IBM site in the world was RTP. Now that is one of the sites in India. In fact India has more IBM employees than any other country including the US.
Whenever I feel over-confident, I do the water glass test. Put your finger in a glass of water. Remove the finger. If there's a hole in the water where your finger was, you're not expendable.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
RTFA. The layoff's will be matched with hiring in India / China.
What does that have to do with anything? Do you honestly think that IBM cares whether a Republican or Democrat is in the White House? Did outsourcing become dramatically smaller during the Clinton administration than it was when Bush senior was in office?
It also leads me to wonder what valuable service do most middle-americans offer each other and the world that can't be had anywhere else?
Um, plumbing and electrical work, bricklaying, finish carpentry, automobile work (Would you ship a Volkswagen to Wolfsburg to get the steering fixed or a dent pulled?) or any one of a number of tasks that have to be done locally or require interpersonal skills.
The 30 April New Yorker has (paper copy, p32) a one page aritcle on layoffs and profits and notes that on average neither stock prices nor profits rise after significant layoffs. Worth a read, and for those in decision making positions, rather a bit of thought.
That's from CNN. Also ALL H1B quotas through 2008 have in the US have ALREADY been filled. It would take an act of Congress to change that so clearly any company wishing to drag in more foreign labor can't. They have to send the jobs to them over there.
IBM has succeeded in pimping and prostituting the IT services fields, to the point now that they are soon to be going the way of the TV and Stereo repair shops. They could no longer get people to come in and work for damned near free and give all the money to the conglomerate IBM, so they will take it on the road overseas and use and abuse the various Europeans.
I saw the light early on with them and got out. I hope most of my friends still employed there are also seeing the light and finding the door before its too late.
Of course from what I know and what I am hearing, IBM didn't do that nifty of a job with their clients either. They bring in contractors and temps to do the services contracts and with such a high turnover of temps and contractors, how on earth can you seriously to expect that you'd ever meet SLA, much less keep your customer??!!!!
How can you expect IBM who only *hires* managers and team leads, and then brings on "temps" and contractors to do the actual work and *dirtywork* on the client site, to actually succeed?? The one customer I was at was sorely pissed at IBM many times over for many things. Some justified, some not. Almost all the justified reasons were because the only people to provide the legitimate valued service to the client were done by people who were good, skilled, and knowledgeable;... and quickly left the temp gig with IBM and their clients for a real full-time permanent day job elsewhere with benefits and all that comes with it. That usually left the the client rather lacking and pissed. I watched it many times and finally a door opened for me and I left. This is only going to get worse people.
Wake up and smell the economic sh** they are shoveling your way.
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Monday
Yup. They spent some huge sum of money to an advertising/PR firm, in order to come up with a name for this new, hot (well, they wanted it to be hot), consulting company. That's what they came up with. "Monday." Like, everybody's least-favorite day. The day you wish was always some other day.
And that's how they got called "IBM Global Services," which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but then again, nobody ever says, "sounds like a case of the IBM Global Services."
(Well, actually they might, but that's a different topic.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I believe this is the sentiment that is incorrect, as it assumes that under free trade there is nothing added but existing resources are just redistributed. That the world is static and everyone would achieve some median level. With real free trade you would see a lot more market "surface" become exposed creating more demand, as well as more entities stepping up to provide them over the medium term. Protectionism is never a positive for any economy.
Unfortunately that productivity is chained by some pretty steep taxation. Both visible on your pay stub, as well as charged directly to your employer just for hiring you. That is even before any employer supplied benefits come into the equation. The bottom line is that employing a US worker is more expensive per unit of output. The longer hours we work just helps us justify our cost a bit, but not enough. Add that to the recent descent into pantophobia and fiscal stupidity, and you have a recipe for some real unpleasant economic times.
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
There are only 150k total IBM employees in the US. Cringely is talking out of his ass with that number.
I see you're a contractor systems administrator. I'm sorry you won't be able to come on as a full-timer, but your post seems to be a serious case of sour grapes. I mean...part of being a contractor is that your job is not guaranteed.
Blar.
Wow. That's staggering. What's also interesting is the timing, as the 195,000 H1-B visas that were issued in 2001 are set to expire this year, unless Congress does something. That, by the way, is why all 65,000 H1-B visas were snapped up in one single day, but I digress.
One would think this would put an end to the current attempt to increase the number to 115,000 H1-B's this year, and back up to 195,000 next year. But I suppose that one should never underestimate the power of the right bribe in the right place.
Pardon my paranoid thinking here, but I have to wonder if this is, in part, why IBM is keeping this quiet.
Spoken like a true conservative know-nothing. Building an economy based on shifting your work outside the country is a house of cards. Wait till wages rise in those countries or some foreign disaster affects the work. We are exploiting people who's governments do not provide the kind of protections enjoyed in the US. It started in textiles and manufacturing, and it is going up the chain. What do you do with a nation of 300 million people who have nowhere to work? What happens to those outsourcing businesses when their market (which remains mainly in the US, don't kid yourself that we are exporting much of anything) cannot afford their services?
It's utopian capitalism, and utopian systems are fictitious.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Well, I understood that was a potential possibility. I was hoping to jump from full-time contractor to full-time IBmer. It didn't work out alas. It's just scary even see the 3 IBMers on the team to go right with us. The other teams UNIX and INTEL just had the same thing happen. That was 100 people right there, contractors and IBMers.
YOU get fired for getting bought BY IBM!
-1 not first post
>RTFA
That's just crazy talk...
>The layoff's will be matched with hiring in India / China.
It did say they will be dumping various contracts and services to begin with before determining thier outsourcing needs.
The outsourcing will ultimately lead to more lost contracts as well.
That depends. If IBM is going to keep doing the work (which would seem likely), they're just going to offshore it. Assuming this layoff happens like Cringely predicts, it will (for American IT workers) be like 100,000 workers just appeared with nothing to do. For the offshore workers, on the other hand, it will be like 100,000 jobs worth of work just appeared.
Shame there's all these pesky immigration laws that keep people from moving as freely as the work does.
Sorry. It's just not that bad. This will go as many other layoffs have gone...contractors and underperformers will be canned...a few thousand at most.
Blar.
Let's be honest here. I work in Global Services in South America. A lot of the accounts were way overstaffed and the people there were not exactly the best and brightest yet still getting 80K+ a year. I'm not a senior sysadmin by any stretch of imagination, but it can be seen from all 5000 miles away that my American counterparts are in no way superior to many of the seniors that I work with who have 10+ years of experience managing servers in environments where there's less money and you have to be more inventive to solve problems, and who've had to face even more difficult economic situations
Many accounts are overspecialized and action is held back by massive bureaucracy. Despite everything, my pet theory is that IBM simply can't support its massive managerial structure divided by a million differente criteria -accounts, competencies, etc.- , eventually it had to give way.
My guess is they talked with some consultants from Accenture.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
When margins were good at IBM, you'd likely get help from (IBM) customer engineers as part of the package.
Now that margins are thinner, and all but the biggest accounts are being handled by business partners, (business partner) implementation help comes in the form of a line item you have to decide to buy or not.
Life isn't all that sweet for business partners these days either. Customers expect a lot when they switch to paying for help they used to get for free.
I'm comtemplating a move back inside a shop. Hopefully before the music stops and there aren't any chairs left.
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.
But the CxO's of the big American corporations aren't stupid. They know *exactly* just what a house of cards they're building... It's that they just don't care anymore. All they have to do is prop up their company's stock price long enough to fool the shareholders for a short while long enough for their golden parachutes to fill up because they know their days are numbered quite short, and first and foremost on their minds is how to pillage the most from the company for themselves before they're done with it. They are not afraid of Sarbanes-Oxley any more either. Scandals like Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Arthur Anderson, Global Crossing, and a dozen others in the past half decade have taught the sharks mostly only how not to get caught or how to not get punished if they do get caught.
China has a lower population growth rate and birth rate than the US.
Care to substantiate this claim? Do you have credible documents that show IBM immediately stopping export of technology when Hitler started oppressing jews and did everything in their power to sabotage and destroy technology already in place?
IBM's costs will be reduced and the prices of their IT services will go down making them more affordable. This means our money spent in the IT industry will go farther. This is only bad for the people being laid off, everyone else benefits.
Creative Demolition
But that's how American Business is done! "at-will" employment anyone? Businesses need to be agile more than ever to please the jerk-off shareholders. They can't afford to lose money keeping non-optimal people employed if priorities shift, etc... You will likely get another job...but it seems the days of long-term employment are going away.
:D
I'm not saying it's right, but that's what we have going on in the USA today. I think we need a little more government in our business than we've been having...shift the balance back to the regular people...but I've been called a godless commie so who knows
Blar.
>US workers work longer hours than most of the planet
Come on, say it. The French.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Meanwhile, the Developed Country's worker(s) should be not resting on their laurels but working to improve their value so that they cannot be replaced easily by outsourcing
Talking about Economics, where did the idea of infinitely improvable value come from? In a global (job/skills) market where a man from the USA and a man from India are equally skilled, anything the USian does to "improve his value" the Indian can and will do too - maybe becoming more valuable than the USian.
Jobs aren't being offshored to India and China because Indians and Chinese are more valuable, but simply because they cost less to employ. That situation will continue until the (inevitable) cycle of upward inflationary pressure in their economies (and maybe deflationary pressures in the US and Europe) increases the Indian/Chinese cost of living until those workers cost the same to employ as USians and Europeans.
Then the work will move on. We've seen it all before. One day, they'll be offshoring work to Africa, you wait.
the tax burden is carried not carried by the big corporations, find out who is actually paying the bill for the safe soil of which these U.S. based megacorps take advantage. then you can say who owes whom what.
Being that it has been stated that IBM is a "poorly" managed company does the blunder of a decision to lay off 100,000+ experienced workers by year's end surprise you. First to show that I am an objective person, outsourcing is not a bad thing; it is a viable system of economics. If done strategically, it could possibly work. But if it is not conducted in a well thought out manner, there starts the demise of your company, which is the case 98% of the time. The simple thought of saving the company 20 million on labor is so wildly over-sighted. But the CEO does not think his 20 million dollar salary, unwise decisions, and highly-backstabbing tech atmosphere is the issue.
or train them wrong.
I spent rwo weeks training my replacment how to write USB firmware...it's a shame we didn't do that.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But there is a 60% probability that in his article Dvorak will recommend that Apple be bought or do the buying.
Unless he has already written that article this month. In which case, the probability drops to 40%.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Yeah the alternative to that principle worked out SO well. I do wonder why those countries that tried this change names and governments so much.
What does that have to do with anything?
./'ers think if they are better or worse off, depending on whether or not the story in discussion is true or not.
The current administration enacted tax, spending and host of other policies that directly affects general economic well being. As history shows, executive policies have direct effects on citizens. Look at the economic policies during/after the Great Depression as an example.
I'm asking if
or any one of a number of tasks that have to be done locally or require interpersonal skills.
That's well and good, but the last time I checked the wealthiest 2% never includes bricklayers.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The economics of IBM's alleged layoffs won't be long lasting, unless the industry as a whole follows suit. Put another way, as long as the demand for the services IBM was providing doesn't decrease, the demand for U.S. IT workers won't decrease. Someone will pickup those contracts and need to hire people to work on those projects. This assumes that those jobs aren't outsourced in a meaningful way, but as I understand it IT employment has grown in U.S. since the collapse of the dot-coms.
damkoziol
If Microsoft et al don't attempt to fill their supposed empty positions with some of these people, does that mean they are lying when they say they have all these open positions and no one to fill them and must look overseas for qualified people?
I assure you, Microsoft lies about their H1B need. They reject many resumes from qualified people and they don't like hiring old people. They just want it their way at their prices, and invent "shortage" to get it.
Table-ized A.I.
If you think most managers don't deserve the salaries and bonuses they get, fine, I agree with you wholeheartedly. But the article says "The point of this has nothing to do with the work itself and everything to do with the price of IBM shares".
One usually thinks of shareholders as a mixture of Bill Gates, Darl McBride, and Steve Ballmer. Well, think again. I'm a shareholder of many companies and you are one too, if you have a pension fund, life insurance, or almost any form of investment. The point is that when you go to the bank and talk to your manager, your main preoccupation is how much you will get from your investment.
If you worry first about the social impact of the companies that make your pension fund and second about the financial results, well, kudos to you, but most people aren't like that. Maximizing a company's profits doesn't mean just making someone "super-ultra-deluxe-rich", it also means providing a decent retirement to people who have worked their whole lives to get it.
That CEO should be hunted down after he sucks the blood from 40% of his fired co-workers. I don't hire slaves to work on my projects. And IBM will no longer be considered in my business. IBM services were spread thin before. 5 techs covering one state. This bullshit can't continue unless IBM wants to spend it's last days following Sun into the shitter.
If IBM, a publicly traded-company, is planning on laying off 1/2 of it's Global Services division, you can bet your bottom dollar that that's considered a material event and they have to publicly disclose it.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Same here. Not only did they lay half my department off, they also executed the team leader by beheading him and then Sam Palmisano himself came to my house and kicked my dog! I thought it was illegal to kill people, but apparently IBM also owns the US government so they are allowed to do this.
Isn't anonymous posting awesome!
The sun is already setting on IBM, ever since Microsoft came into the scene by licensing DOS with every IBM PC. Adding to IBM's woes are PC-Clone (thank god for that) that allowed competitors like HP and Dell to flourish, OS/2 that flopped and then later IBM relinquished all of their PC/Notebook products to concentrate on their consultancy services. IBM is just too big and slow to adapt to new trends or needs by clients/consumers, which Apple, Microsoft and others have capitalized on. If IBM ever want to survive, they must change.
Agreed. But Instead, they have $100k lunches: fiddling while Armonk burns
(scroll down, or search for IBM)
I guess they could be buying it with their own money, but still, that's just bad PR in the middle of layoffs. a$$holes.
Yet, they don't seem to have a problem with the bad PR that something like THIS might generate.
(near the bottom of the story)
...and send the rest to work at SCO thus guaranteeing their hastened demise.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I thought they had some of the worst policies possible. Bloated is an understatment. Their internal "professional certification" program would make an excellent Monty Python skit.
This is one bright side of becoming disabled. I don't have to work there anymore.
Americans get squeamish about massive layoffs, but investors certainly do not.
Yet it's Americans that vote.
It's the start of presidential primary season. The hottest issue among the bloggers in the Republican primary is illegal immigration - mainly its effects on blue-collar unemployment levels and pay scales.
Now we have this - and the issues of outsourcing, H1B legal "guest workers", and their effect on white-collar unemployment levels and pay scales.
How nice that this came up NOW, when it can affect the earliest stages of the election. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You can, however, drown him.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
If you do not understand why this is necessary then you do not have responsibility for supporting a critical production system with 365x24x7 availability. You can call IBM employees stupid all you want, but I guarantee when you see what the business requirements for a high availability application server are, you will shit your pants.
When production system downtime is measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute, you can bet your ass that moving code through test, staging and production is going to be very slow and very organized. If you know of a better way to ensure 99.999% uptime, then you should patent it and sell it because it will make you a fuckload of money. If not, then perhaps you should just let the adults do the real work and get back to your javascript code monkey job.
1. Most of the country didn't really think that Hitler was doing anything to the Jews until we actually entered the war. You're acting as if they knew what this technology was being used for, when they probably didn't have any clue.
Let's put it this way. You're the head of a high-tech company. You get a large contract from Iraq, still recovering from it's war-torn state, but appears to be a nice, democratic country trying its hardest to improve itself. There's nothing suspicious about the contract, just a large number of personal computers with something similar to Excel on them. It's the kind of order you'd expect from a government trying to get everything organized. Meanwhile, the entire Western World is in the largest depression in centuries, and your company is getting hit hard. What would you do?
You'd probably take the contract. And when it turns out all those computers with Excel are being used to track Kurds held in concentration camps? "Oh shit(ler)!"
And then 60 years later, people are still blaming your company (which you miraculously held together) for "helping commit genocide"? How would you feel?
2. Are you seriously suggesting that IBM should have tried to sneak into Germany and destroy the technology Hitler already had? Wouldn't that be the CIA's job?
Offshoring is a new fact of life for tech workers. Layoffs of older workers and sending the work overseas, and/or rehiring the former workers as "managed service" workers. I think that eventually the laws will be enforced and changed to stop this. But in the brave new world of the neocons, the American middle class has no standing. We're expendable.
Lou Dobbs has been trying to raise visibility around this new fact of life, but I don't think he's getting much traction. But it sounds like there's going to be 150,000 new believers.
Best regards.
One, I see the names of the outfits acquired... KPMG, Deloitte, et al. Remember those gangs? Back when the Fortune 500 were hiring the Big Eight firms to audit the books, then hiring their investment arm to manage the IPO, and finally hiring their consulting arm to help them manage IT? And then it went from leveraged IPOs to cooked books to make the IPO irresistable, to bloated IT that would somehow glue it all together. Then came 1998, and then 2001. Crash. And the idea that having your auditors and your bankers from the same firm wasn't sound oversight. harrr.... So IBM/GS snarfed all these loser consulting firms and basically went down the same path? Gotta love it.
Two, it makes you wish for another Fat Lou, doesn't it? He knew crap when he saw it. Saved IBM. Suppose there's someone out there that can do it again?
Nope, it's not the 'Little General' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
You so obviously get that open resistance, while providing a satisfying emotional catharsis, is SO MUCH less effective in the long run than this kind of high-level monkeywrenching of the system.
I tip my hat to you!
... without clubbing a few baby seals.
IBM is just keeping up; if you don't like outsourcing, you shouldn't have let congress, the senate, and the president (the last one) make it legal.
Damn it took you clear into your second paragraph to blame the ills of the world on Bush.
<sarcasm>
The good ship USA is sinking. Just go ahead and abandon ship and get it over with.
Fire everyone, close up shop, lock the doors, and move offshore. Oh, and sell your grandmother into prostitution on the way out too..
Then they can outsource to the US and put Americans back to work.
It's where things are headed anyway. It won't be too many years from now before America becomes a third world nation at the rate things are going.
What ever happened to "America First" ?? Oh, I know, it's been declared obsolete. The new catch phrase is "Profits First".. No matter who it hurts.
These giant corporations will crush the skulls of a billion babies if it would mean higher profits and a big fat bonus check for the CEO..
</sarcasm>
Well,
1. Most of the country may not have known, or have chosen to turn a blind eye to atrocities. But IBM executives surely visited Germany from time to time and should have known what their advanced technology was used for. Similarly I wouldn't make any excuses for anyone who does business with sectarian Iraq government today.
2. There would have been lots of ways to hamper Nazi efforts without risking employees' lives. IBM USA could have sent a bogus replacement part as a high-priority update that would, say, cause an electric short after a one month delay.
When companies themselves are under threat from cheaper foreign rivals, they routinely go crying to government and suddenly economic protectionism leaps into action. Yet this protectionist attitude miraculously vanishes when it comes to protecting the jobs of the average citizen. For us, having a foreign competitor (i.e. a guy who will work for 1/10 of what you will) is just tough and we have to deal with it.
Does anyone at these corporations ever consider that by putting Americans out of work they're shrinking the size of their market? A little temporary boost in profits will be followed by a long term loss...
It's not outsourcing, it's incompetence. My opinion: If you read the links carefully, you will get the impression that IBM is an incompetent company run by someone with no technical knowledge. Death is normal for an incompetent corporation.
Links: General information: IBM Employee.com.
Cringley: "... the executive ranks from CEO Sam Palmisano on down were losing touch with reality, bidding contracts too low to make a profit then mismanaging them in an attempt to make a profit anyway..."
IBM employee: "They just cut nearly half our team Tuesday, wtihout even notifying the customer (Who is going apeshit). And 40% is indeed the workforce reduction I've heard bandied about." That comment is anonymous, of course. However, that fits with my experience, which is that IBM is an amazingly incompetent company. The incompetence has been there for a LONG time. Remember, IBM lost more than $2 Billion on OS/2, which in the beginning was fundamentally better than the competition from Microsoft.
IBM is run by a technically ignorant CEO: Samuel J. Palmisano is a technically ignorant CEO: "He holds a Bachelor's degree in history..." Note that his official IBM biography carefully avoids mentioning anything that would give a true picture of his incompetence.
I don't think the IBM layoffs are about outsourcing. They seem to be only about incompetence. Only technically ignorant managers contract with IBM, a company run by someone as ignorant as they are.
Also, I don't think outsourcing is working. U.S. companies get an EXTREMELY bad reputation when calls are answered by an under-trained person who can't speak English. Outsourcing is more an abuse of people outside the U.S. by U.S. managers than it is a way to get things done, apparently. Outsourcing call centers is a very effective way to sell customers on the competition, if the competition has competent employees.
Look at the web sites of any online bank. They are stupid, stupid, and purposely stupid. After people in India learn how to write good banking software, magically some company owned by an Indian will have the best banking software.
There is only one reason for outsourcing. Non-technical managers want the technical responsibility as far away from themselves as possible. It is dishonesty only.
Walk down any street in India and ask yourself: Why are people in India so poor? They are poor because their culture is extremely self-defeating. No matter how well an Indian who is first- or second-generation educated is trained technically, he is still guided mostly by his culture.
The claimed cost savings are not there. They simply are not there. The "cost savings" come from situations like this:
1) It is cheaper to hire Indians for a sloppy, poorly defined project than it is to hire people in the U.S. for a sloppy, poorly defined project, and the result is the same.
2) Many top managers today are like kings. They have complete control, can be as destructive as they want to their company and to other people, and are very ignorant. So when it comes time for a technical improvement that will be a lot of work, and require a lot of responsibility and decision-making, moving the entire project 10,000 miles away seems attractive. The distance offers lots of excuses, and it just doesn't matter to the king how much money is wasted. The "cost savings" are what the king says they are.
We are going through a time in which most managers of technically-oriented companies know nothing about technical issues, and don't want to know anything.
Laid off a large bunch of their Professional Services staff here without informing their customers. The customers pulled out the signed contracts asking who was going to fulfill them. By the time the dust settled, Sun had either lost a lot of people to other companies or had to hire the sacked staff back on at higher contract rates to fulfill the obligations.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Microsoft is constantly snooping around my CS graduate program trying to lure people there, either leaving early with a masters to take the cash, or for a job immediately upon graduation at MS Research. They seem paranoid that Google is going to get all the good talent, and are willing to pay a very nice premium to hire people away from both Google and academia.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm not blaming, just reporting. President Bush, in a White House press release, defined what he calls the "ownership society", one in which individuals are responsible for providing for their own health care, retirement, and other needs. That's simply the Bush Administration's stated philosophy of the role of government in America. Whether we agree or disagree with that philosophy is a separate matter, but wasn't my central point here.
Actually, treason is traitors at work. If a fellow countryman offshores your job - that individual is a stinking traitor. If a fellow countryman lays you off and replaces you with a legal, quasi-legal or illegal foreign replacement worker, that individual is a stinking traitor.
Traitors should be dealt with in the most severest manner possible.....
1. It wasn't actually IBM, but a state-owned company. This would likely have reduced the high-level "checking out" given by IBM, as there was another company in-between. I'm sure they were much more concerned about the machines that were leased to openly-Communist Russia than the ones leased to professedly-Democratic Germany.
2. The Nazis weren't idiots, despite what you'd like to believe. They'd be suspicious of any "high-priority update" when they had seen no problems with the machines. They'd get someone knowledgeable to look at it, and when they found something fishy with it, they wouldn't install it.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/138 8.wss
IBM claims that Hollerith (the IBM germany subsidiary that supplied and serviced the equipment) was taken over by the German government when the war started. If you have proof showing otherwise, please provide it.
And of course, if you have proof showing that employees of IBM today were involved, please provide that too. If not, then please STFU already about it, because if you live in the USA then you too have profited from a genocide in the past.
$100k lunch is salary for one of those 150,000 employees. A drop in the bucket really. Of course, it's still a slap in the face... but it's not as if it's that much money for IBM.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Does anyone at these corporations ever consider that by putting Americans out of work they're shrinking the size of their market? A little temporary boost in profits will be followed by a long term loss...
No, they aren't considering it. This behavior is straight outta a Marxist critique of market economics, where company A works to minimize their own labor costs, and counts on every other company to pay out enough to finance a market for A's goods... except that just about every firm is company A.
A classical Adam Smith economist will respond that the capital freed by (for arguments sake) IBM ditching thousands of employees can be more profitably deployed elsewhere by the Company and stockholders. Ex-employees, too.
A fly in that ointment is that nowadays, most of that capital is being redeployed out of the US, and it takes a while for the domestic economy to take up the slack with increased added value to crank the domestic incomes back up. Most US-based multinationals (if the Economist, Forbes, the WSJ, Biz Week, and my various stockholders reports are any indication) see their future growth in sales and headcount overseas. According to his latest financial disclosure statement, so does Dick Cheney. So, exactly how or when that increased domestic value is going to be created is an open question.
For the moment, the effect of the tide of money leaving the US is hidden by the Chinese and Japanese buying Treasury Notes to hold down the value of the yuan and yen. When that tails off, interesting things will occur. It's unlikely to be a meltdown, but it won't be pretty.
Luke, help me take this mask off
nt
is a fucking wanker, don't listen to anything he says.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Don't miss this comment: Every time a change needs to be made ..., [IBM] takes 6 people...
That clarifies things a great deal, since this whole outsourcing and layoff thing started far before Bush was president, and is not his fault (or Clinton's, or Bush V.1's, or any other president's, really).
WRT the concept that people should provide for themselves, I by and large support that. A single-payer health insurance system would be nice, but that's so hard to get right that I don't want our government to try it. The only nation I'm aware of that has tried it and not significantSocly fucked it up is Japan, and even there it has solvency issues.
Social Security? Hah. If they would release me from any further participation in the program, they could *keep* everything I've already payed in, and that's not a small amount. I'm in my forties and have been continuously employed since I was 16.
Welfare? I don't think it should be scrapped - there ought to be some sort of safety net for people who legitimately fall on hard times like a lot of IBMers are about to do - but I believe there should be caps on it. Something like a 2 or 3 years out of 5 (or 10?) usage cap, and perhaps a lifetime maximum usage cap as well. Of course, there should be exceptions for people with permanent disabilities as a result of things like auto accidents and severe birth defects, but if you are an able-bodied person, you can and should get your arse out and work.
If we're going to have anything resembling a welfare state, the chief investment should be in the area of education. Make it as cheap and easy as possible for people to get a quality education as you can, and you will minimize the people who may wind up on welfare. And by education, I don't just mean college. That should cover vocational programs of all sorts, too. If being a plumber or electrician is what floats your boat, there should be support for that, too, not just for people going to college.
One thing is for certain: government is so bloated and out of control and beyond the intended limits of authority that it makes even Windows Vista look lean and trim in comparison. As it has been succinctly said, "Government is not the answer; government is the problem."
Unfortunately, Bush is not really a small government guy, and he's not all that much of an America-first guy, either. One has to look no farther than his foolish policies on illegal aliens and border security to know that. To make matters worse, when I look at the slate of candidates running for president in 2008, every potentially viable candidate is at least as bad as he is, and most are worse.
We're screwed.
Does anyone know if this will affect employees at Tivoli?
Walk down any street in India and ask yourself: Why are people in India so poor? They are poor because their culture is extremely self-defeating.
Tell that to all of the farmers in India committing suicide because they can't compeat with all of the heavily subsidized produce from the US and EU. The same thing happens in South Korea and Mexico. People wonder why so many Mexicans come to the US as "illegal aliens". The reason why is US subsidized agriculture products and NAFTA. Because of the subsidies US agribusinesses can export to Mexico and sale it for less than Mexican farmers can grow the food for. This drives Mexican farmers off their farms and they go north to try to cross the border or they go into Mexican cities and those already in the cities are driven north.
Remember, Time-Warner bought AOL and immediately lost 88 Billion dollars.
WRONG!!! AOL bought Time Warner!
FalconShould there be a Law?
They just cut nearly half our team Tuesday, wtihout even notifying the customer (Who is going apeshit).
I'm wondering if the customers have a signed contract with IBM, if so then they can sue IBM. If a bunch of customers were to sue then IBM's stock would tank.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Perhaps you have info that these people did not have. By the way that they were talking, the number are up in the air, but it was not sounding like a couple of thousands. They were saying more along the lines of the 10s of thousands. But until you are the CEO, you really do not know.
As I have said elsewhere, I worked on the kaiser apps (the one that they recently replaced) via the medical group of Watson/Object group of Boulder. So where do you work at in IBM? Or are you just guessing as to the severity and talking out your a*&?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Seriously, whenever I hear about massive layoffs, the same question pops into my mind:
Why are the employees being punished when this is so obviously a management issue?
If the managers were doing their job correctly, then one of two things would of happened:
1) Either the projects would generate enough revenue to keep the current workforce, or
2) the workforce wouldn't of got "so large" that they need to cull it.
Call it cost saving if you will, but if I were working for IBM and got to keep my job, I wouldn't be turning up Monday. Or any other day for that. If these stories turn out to be true, I'll never buy something from IBM again. If IBM isn't being managed properly, get new managers, not cheaper staff.
I always thought IBM had built its empire on quality and innovation rather then being the cheapest.
Rising unemployment will lead to the collapse of the mortgaged house of cards that is currently our banking situation
This is already being seen in the subprime mortgage industry.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Just junk food for thought...
Americans get squeamish about massive layoffs, but investors certainly do not.
If an investor is intelligent then s/he will get "squeamish" because of layoffs. When people are lainoff they can't afford to buy and when spending goes down businesses revenue also goes down. Now if the business enjoys good sales internationally then falling spending in the US should be made up by foreign sales. Take Walmart, if it's not already then it's approaching being one of the biggest retailers in China.
FalconShould there be a Law?
With the dollar hanging precariously in the balance, off-shoring of many technical jobs, off-shoring of many labor jobs, low end labor going to illegal labor, China paying for war efforts by propping up a worthless dollar, education system is crap, and a myriad of other bad news. How does it feel to be an American looking over that first drop on the roller coaster for the second great depression? BTW the tracks might be a little loose at the bottom.
Will Bush 2 go down in history as the worst leader ever? I sure hope so. Sure he didn't really do anything, but he didn't do much to slow down his minions.
Damn... I really need to invest in foreign markets but I'm locked into a domestically invested retirement plan...have to see if they're exxon heavy. I hear there's beautiful weather in Dubai.
Why aren't financial analysts mentioning any of this? It's not like america will work in a vacuum...not even close. Hell we're turning shipping containers into low cost housing because there just isn't enough stuff going outbound.
Somebody PLEASE prove me wrong.
I remember porting some old code. There was a date validation routine that performed a calculation like 32.28-19.96 and did some string conversions based on the result. For the life of me I couldn't make sense of it. Why put the calculation in at all? Why not simply use 12.32? Out of desperation, I decided to PRINT 32.28-19.96, and instead of getting 12.32, I got 12.319999. Suddenly the code made some sort of sense.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
After 20 years of "investing" in a 401K I still do not have nearly enough to retire on.
Give it another 20 years and let compound interest work for you. Compound interest works great.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The elites of the world are driving the majority of the population into poverty.
This is wrong. Actually it increases pay in those countries work os outsourced to. Because of outsourcing pay in China and India are rising fast. Outsourcing only hurts workers in the US and other countries where businesses are outsourcing jobs.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Industry-wise, the "Big Four" refer to accounting firms.
Yea, it used to be the "Big Eight" in accounting. My sister used to work for Earnest & Young but now she owns her own accounting firm along with friends.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Farming isn't predictable.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Because NAFTA allows US agribusinesses that are subsidized to sale food for less than what it cost Mexican farmers to grow food NAFTA is directly relevant!
FalconShould there be a Law?
For a few centuries countries like India had their natural resources and human resources sapped for the West (think East India Trading Company). Now some of the > billion people in India, and the > billion people in China, etc., are developing marketable skills and well paying (for them) services and we start to finally see a transfer of wealth back from the West to these countries.
And we're already seeing massive wage inflation, and a similarly massive housing price inflation in regions filled with high tech workers. This 'correction' for several centuries of wealth transfer to the West will be fast by comparison - decades rather than centuries. And somewhere in there the economies of the by then 2.5th world will have grown enough to generate enough demand to need to import products and services from the West again (with the real limiting factor to all this being the impact on the environment of having all of that added consumption in the world).
Yes, no great consolation to Americans' (and Europeans') jobs lost. But unlike India and China, we have all greatly benefited from increased life expectancy and relatively clean water and air. Compare a Western life expectancy to someone in India or China today.
I mean, if what you want is someone with advanced training in statistics, then a guy who knows some Perl isn't going to cut it. So how are people who don't have the relevant profile useful in filling the jobs?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yes but its not rising as fast as income in the west is losing pace with the increased cost of living.
Hence unless the cost of living in the west stops its meteoric pace or somehow china, india and the like start developing their infrastructure outside of major cities and their workers wages start growing even faster there will be a higher number of people in poverty. So yes, driving the middle class in this country into the poor house (just you wait until the housing bubble bursts) while not getting everyone from india/china out of the poor house will indeed result in more people being poor.
Robbing peter to pay paul only works for so long.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
china, india and the like start developing their infrastructure outside of major cities and their workers wages start growing even faster there will be a higher number of people in poverty
Income in the two most populace nations in the world, China and India, are rising quite well. And partially because of this their birth rates are dropping. With the trends now going on now they believe within a couple of generations there will be more retired people in China than there are workers. The Economist has had some good articles on this in the past year as have other periodicals such as Foreign Policy .
FalconShould there be a Law?
People in India commit suicide for the same reasons people commit suicide in the U.S.: social and psychological problems.
Women in India have too many babies that they and the society have no hope of supporting.
Time Warner agreed to be bought. The value of the combined company decreased by $88 billion immediately. Thousands of Time Warner employees lost most of their savings.
The deal was an example of the incredible stupidity and profound ignorance of some top managers.
I call "bullshit"... this is the union guys again.
a yoffs_2007/
I'm a former IBM Global Services employee; I left IBM on my own steam to start my own startup when they were closing down our division in 2001 (IBM Global Small Business - say that with a straight face). When that happened, they gave each of us six months to find a job elsewhere within IBM, including paying for flights for interviews, and sending HR people out on site to help write resumes, etc.. IBM bends over backwards to retain employees. IBM is not just a job, it's a job for life for most of its employees.
Here's the original "The Register" article which set off this current firestorm:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/02/ibm_may_l
Notice who the press release is from: "Alliance@IBM, a group working to form a union at the company, reports that..."; this is The Communication Workers of America Union; here's their site:
http://www.allianceibm.org/
They claim to be "The official national site for the IBM Employees' Union CWA Local 1701, AFL-CIO" - only there *is no* "IBM Employees' Union" (nowhere on this site will you find membership statistics of any kind).
These are the guys that have been trying to unionize IBM since smelling a payday, in order to get their claws into everyone's paycheck at $10/month and control of the IBM pension plans. When the IBM pension plan converted over to a cash-balance plan, about the only people who didn't have a choice were people who hadn't vested in the plan at all. Yet these same guys tried to stir up a firestorm about it, and attacked IBM over it in the press.
These guys are all about trying to FUD IBM employees into joining their union; while I was with IBM, no one was interested in their party line, even though they practically camped out in all the off-campus restaurants and tried to chat us up every chance they got - they were worse than religious missionaries.
It's too bad Cringely bought into this fake press release, I genuinely enjoyed his "Triumph of the Nerds" television programs.
-- Terry
I work for a major competitor of IBM, in Global Consulting Services. Recently our earnings, even at the hyperbolae forecast by our current hire-a-CEO, exceeded expectations, as reported to the Street. Personally, my review at the end of last Quarter was 'Outstanding' in all respects. I really hustled last year and improved myself
But we received 2% raises. That's a slap in the face and a coded message to update one's resume, and start interviewing elswehere. I wonder if our hire-a-CEO knew.
If IBM does the deed then there will be ZERO reason to have any H1B visa people in the US. But of course industry would rather buy an H1B at $40K than pay an American $80K. Attention Bill Gates: This is why Americans no longer major in CS - It won't pay the bills after graduation.
True. But this is just one example of the voluminous waste these people create for the company every day.
I have 7 layers of management between myself and the CEO. Four of those are vice presidents. I have never seen or heard from any of the managers between the 4th line and the CEO. I have never even got an email from any of them, I have no idea what they do. One executive's sole job apparently is to fly around to different sites a couple of times per year and give speeches about diversity. The guy could easily be replaced by a VHS tape.
In the last couple of years, they have even added some parallel managers, so instead of me having to give status in one meeting per week, I now have to give status reports seperately to my team leader, project manager, 1st line manager, and then even a team leader of an associated project. The decision makers for this project are three levels up, so I spend a lot of time making sure my clueless project manager understands the technical issues.
IMO: IBM is not looking to replace older workers with younger, but all workers with offshore labor.
But yes, they will run the articles about the horrible shortage of IT workers. That is part of lobbying congress to allow more H1B. They need H1Bs because they need local people to speak Russian, Hindi, or Portuguese, to their real workforce.
And besides, why not run those articles? Can't hurt.
For example, some Americans think this is all the fault of the Repubs. It isn't. Go ahead and vote the repubs out of office, it won't make any difference - it never has.
Clinton sold out to China, and didn't do anything to stop illegal immigration. And it was the repubs who dragged the dems - kicking and screaming - into a balanced budget.
I wish this was simple as voting the repubs out of office, I'd be the first in line. BTW: I never voted repub in my life.
Honerably discharged from the USAF, put myself though eight years of college, stayed absolutely 100% squeaky clean, got a top-secret clearance. Worked for less than minimum wage just to get experience. Always tried to do a good job, never hurt anybody. Invested in my home, and my country. Never voted republican.
Yet I am *constantly* told that I am such an awful person. My race owned slaves! (what race didn't?). My gender, race, and country, are all evil - they must be evil because they were successful. Lord knows, nobody in China, Russia, or South America was ever evil. Right?
It will be helpful if the people who manage the overseas projects are familiar with the language and culture of the offshore workforce.
Was 18.8 million dollars last year. That's just the cash component. It doesn't include stock, deferred comp, etc. This was last year when stock was in year 7 of languishing. Not to begrudge our overlords their satchel of gold, but let's at least pay for performance, please. I'm reasonably sure that anyone could do as poor a job for one tenth of that payment.
You have that backwards. Buy IBM stock now, sell when you think the bump has almost played out. Play your part in screwing with people's lives anonymously through capitalism.
The site in your sig (http://c0d3h4x0r.spaces.live.com/) gives an "XML parsing error: syntax error" in Firefox 1.5, reported at line 3, Column 49.
Er, your "bounty" link is to an article from 1997 - the runup to the dotcom boom. Things have changed just a tad since then.
Time Warner agreed to be bought. The value of the combined company decreased by $88 billion immediately. Thousands of Time Warner employees lost most of their savings.
The deal was an example of the incredible stupidity and profound ignorance of some top managers.
I agree it was bad and stupid thing Time Warner agreed to be bought. What supprised me was that Ted Turner supported it.
FaclonShould there be a Law?
When I leave a salaried position with a company to contract for them, it is usually for forty to fifty percent more pay to cover lost benefits. My fraction is 7/5 or 3/2 of previous pay levels if they want to get me out of bed the day after they "fire" me.
And plenty of people can't afford to invest anything, and they're likely the ones to be hit hardest by layoffs.
I'd be real supprised if those IBM employees being laidoff make less than $24,000 a year, I wouldn't be supprised if they make two or three tymes that. I live on half that and if my income was $24,000 a year I'd be able to invest at least $10,000 of it. And I'm single and live alone whereas if I were married or lived with someone else, without children, my expenses would be lower thereofore I'd be able to invest more.
Sure someone working in a deadend job may not be able to afford being laidoff but how many of these jobs are eliminated? And if you are working in one of these jobs it's your responsibility to try to improve your lot in life. It may be hard but most people should be able to do it. Tbe groups not able to are more likely to have a disability, handicap. For those civil society should help them as much as they need, as long as they keep trying.
Food is free for the taking for every other animal on earth, except humans (in our culture.)
Garden then. Even someone in a one room apartment should have enough space for a few pots. And a 3" square plot outside, even on a roof, should be enough space to grow enough food for one meal a day for a few weeks. Plant some loose leaf lettuce, carrots, radish, and some peppers and tomatos. Then have salad for lunch. It may be work but it's not much and even those others animals work.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Thanks for the solid observations.
And that's the downfall of the plurality voting system.
I just thought I should note that it DOES say "select few" IBM execs. My guess is that the company is rewarding those that do good, as any company should. Yeah layoffs suck, but does that mean that you cant reward any other employee's good behavior? More then likely those select few execs have made the company millions of dollars in that company (not to say other execs arent losing the compnay money). They have to reward the good and fire the bad, just like any company does.
The fact is, layoffs bring employee moral down so unfortunately while it saves you money in the long run, many times you need to "reward" the employees still left. I know when i used to work at Circuit City... during that time when we were forced to cut labor we STILL ran contests for $100 gift cards here and there and did our best to keep moral up.
While i think 100,000 is a little pricey, it depends on the circumstances. If an exec made me 3 million dollars that quarter by his management skills and hard work, I'd sure as hell make sure he got rewarded, while cutting the labor of the manager that lost me money, and making sure his expense pocket strings were drawn up tight.
Just my opinion. $100,000 is all relative.
~Just keep eating, porky. Fat people are harder to kidnap.
Sorry I was educated when CLinton was President.
Yes, of course moderators. Really, I deserve the -1 mod you've given me - considering that all I said was what you'd expect.
Listen, the average corporation doesn't give two squirts of piss about where you've come from, or where you've been. It just wants you to make it money. To argue with that is to argue what's happening to you now.
However, when buying the business they would also buy the management who may have limited experience in IT. Being a manager there means it's hard to get fired which might be ok if there was churn - but these people rarely leave, and why would you? The company benefits are pretty good.
Problem is most of that management does not add value to the business, especially a service business such as this one. I had at least 6 layers of management above me when I worked there just to get to the regional directors. I don't know how many levels of executive were above that.
The most simple analogy I can draw is in the race boat 1 person is rowing and 5 people are yelling "row", when they lose the race they counsel the management and repremand the rower for not performing.
If this were about rationalising the management of the company - I'd rejoice - but I don't think this is what this is about. Management bloat is out of control there and few of those managers realise how challenging technology work is. Consequently the "economy of scale" that should exist are absorbed by layers of people trying to convince the management above them that they are adding value and justifying thier existance with-in the organisation. It's very parasitic and even technical people have to play politics to survive.
Don't expect management to be outsourced anytime soon, competant staff are overworked and work life balance is a joke for those people, mediocrity is encouraged because innovation is difficult for management to understand, which compounds the problem and drives a cycle of diminishing returns within the business. High levels of shareholder returns appear ro be maintained by trying to drive the cost of labour lower and lower, which cannot be maintained in a business as demanding as technology. Risk is out of the question.
The failure is because that management does not recognise that most mature technologists worth thier pay understand how to develop technology that is related to generating profit in a (duuh) technology business. Instead they choose to outsource these "jobs" without recognising thier long-term value and once that competitive advantage is gone it's costly to re-gain. In a service business, capability == profit, it's the bottom line.
Cringley is right. If the same sort of behaviour is happening within the core of the company it's going to take an executive with some very big balls to return the business to sustainable levels of profitability, the alternative is to continue to drive the business into ground, which would be a shame, because without the parasites, politics and the bloat it's a pretty good place to work.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
See in order for a 91 billion dollar company to show the necessary double digit growth required of Wall St. to move the stock in line with the market, IBM would have to create from scratch a Fortune 200 business every year. Clearly that's impossible even with acquisition. So they have to say something and invent a new market - the SMB market, one that IBM has traditionally failed in because IBM is too expensive (like thos SAP ads that tout how affordable SAP software can be for the SMB sector too!). You can believe it or you can laugh at it like you laugh at all of their insanely bad advertising.
I am a software engineer from Bangalore.I work for HP.I have enjoyed programming since my school days.I have always wanted to be a software developer.But I have just ended up maintaining some code written in your country nearly two decades ago.I will have to agree that I have very little knowledge of my product.I mostly solve the cases on the fly using a debugger.My counterparts in US each have more than 20 years of experience ,but I hardly interact with them. All the interaction is done by my seniors,who also claim that the counterparts in US are not very co-operative with them.The US counterparts assign only that work to us which they would not like to do.There is another level of filteration in Bangalore by the senior members and a fresher like me gets the worst possible work.Most of the time I end up doing nothing and getting bored.So I read blogs like this one where you people think my country is the cause for all your problems.But on the other hand I feel ,had I got a chance to work in US I could have contributed more in something that I love(programming).
Before you blame us, understand that we have also studied the same courses and the same books.I agree that our system which produces thousands of engineers eyery year, most of whom have taken up IT just because the pay is much higher than other fields,must have compromised on quality.But we also require to get a chance.It is not our fault that the cost of living in our country is cheaper.It is very unfair of you people to blame our communication skills.We unlike you not only have to learn english but also the local provincial language(kannada in my case),the so called "national" language hindi, the language spoken at home (tamil in my case).But we try to do the best.There was a comment about Indian's adding new words to english.What is wrong with that?
You all should also know what ill-effects IT has had in our country.A beautiful and peaceful city like Bangalore which was called the garden city has turned into a garbage city.You will get to see the worst traffic in the world here.The city has become over crowded as people from all over the country come and settle here.This has angered the locals here, who(just like you people)feel that outsiders come and take up their jobs(a great irony).There is huge disparity of incomes between those in IT and the rest.This has led to lot of unrest throughout the country.All this for being the back office of your country.
I would also like to warn the multinationals that exiting India and layoffs will not be as easy as in US.Our polititions will not allow that.Also the polititions will surely introduce caste based reservations in private sector(It is called vote bank politics in our country).This will reduce the quality of the work force further.
...but a good performer who has invested years into the company and the community in which the company operates deserves a little more consideration. The company only has to hire a new body and spend a few weeks training them up. The employee might have to sell his freakin' house before he can move to a place with jobs.
I don't want to run a company. I know many people who have their own businesses....they make maybe 35-50% more than my well-compensated salaried job does...but their income fluctuates and they have way more stress.
Small business is sold to the American people as some great get-rich scheme but most small businesses fail and that seed money is gone. It's a sucker's bet these days.
Blar.