Slashdot Mirror
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."
Yep. I'm not going to believe it until Dvorak writes an article about it.
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
Last Post!
(from inside my IBM cubefarm)
Save the Music; Save the World at http://www.TuneTriever.com (Our latest Android game)
...SCO will hire y'all with the cash they win from your former employer.
Anybody want a peanut?
I'll wait until I hear it from a journalist.
How about from an IBM employee? As far as I can tell, it's true. 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.
And I think Cringely has it right - this is largely being driven by Palmasano panicing over the stock price. It's barely moved since he's been CEO.
So what (in a nutshell) is IBM Global Services? What do they do?
It's IBM's consulting division.
In a nutshell, it's all of IBM except the parts with which you're probably familiar from the Good Old Days; it's all the business consulting, management consulting, logistics, etc.
What it's not is the remaining parts of IBM hardware; the AS/400 division, the mainframe division, software division (Lotus) etc.
I think Cringlely is dead wrong on all this -- in the past few years it's been Global Services and software that are really hauling everything else along. I think Hardware would probably survive on its own, as long as they could keep the IBM marque, but the money is in the service crap.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's true. I'm soon to be out of my job at the end of the month, as well as the rest of my team (IBMers and (Perma-Temp) Contractors. My account was slated for transfer to Brazil in January and the talks started before that. We were expected to train our replacements who have basically been warm bodies. They're not even particularly talented. The rest of IBM Global Services is going the same way. So this is a VERY real thing. I was hoping to get hired on this year to IBM from being a contractor and that's shot. I'm just concerned given the massive offshoring that's occurring and how much this WILL impact IT. The displacement of this many workers is still going to have quite an impact on IT.
IBM has also implemented LEAN in effort to cut their IBM'er workforce in response to offshore outsourcing, which ironically is the very thing they're doing themselves. The survivors, although being survivors might mean they sorta wished they weren't. It's seriously bad. I'd suggest not touching IBM with a 10 foot pole. They're calling this the wave of the future... if they want to turn IT into something equated as fast food. That's the dream they're going for.
Check out http://www.ibmemployee.com/ . They have more news on the matter.
The sad part about the whole thing is that I enabled this to happen. I've spent my time there since day one migrating dying backup environments from Veritas Backup Exec and ArcServe IT to TSM and the resulting clean-up work. I am massively disappointed.
Anyone need a Arcserve / Veritas / Tivoli Storage Administrator ?
They do IT consulting, and make up one of the "Big Four", along with Accenture, BearingPoint (formerly KPMG Consulting) and Deloitte Consulting.
IBM Global Services is essentially the artist formerly known as PwC Consulting (which IBM purchased). PwC Consulting was formerly the consulting arm of PriceWaterhouse Coopers, and was spun off in 2002 in response to the Enron/WorldCom/Arthur Andersen messes & the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (requiring auditor independence, separation of audit & consulting, yadda yadda).
Before IBM bought PwC Consulting, you may recall that it was on the verge of being renamed Monday.
Just once I'd like someone to call me 'Sir' without adding 'You're making a scene.'
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 has been massively quiet on lay-offs for many years. It's just their style. It's bad for PR when it is that visible, let alone that it demoralizes the staff. IBM, through unofficial sources, has created ~70,000 jobs off seas while axeing a comparable amount (50,000) here in America. And that's before this latest round that we see today. The tracker is at http://www.techsunite.org/offshore/
>They treat the employees like cattle (presumably like they do in India) and have little to no benefits.
At least it is a country that worship cows...
It would be bad if they treat employees like cattles in Texas.
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.
What, like my Indian ex-co-worker who bit into a piece of prime rib and said "mmmm.... god"?
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?
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."
Anyone need a Arcserve / Veritas / Tivoli Storage Administrator ?
On the bright side, there are a lot of people out there who are of the opinion that IBM hardware and software is pretty great (although a bit pricey) but that their consulting stuff is what sucks. So the fact that you have experience with IBM systems isn't a bad resume line at all.
Personally I've always thought that buying PwC was a bad move for IBM, and they should have just consolidated down to their core strengths -- big iron hardware, the AS/400 series, pure research, microchips and processors, and intellectual property.
But still, I'm not sure I believe all this, because Sam Palmisano was a consulting/GS guy, not a hardware-and-systems guy. If anything, I'd expect them to be axing hardware (which is what they're really good at, but I never said I thought they were bright).
At any rate, IBM GS still has a lot of USG contracts, and those can't be outsourced.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
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?
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?
I just wish people would do an absolute minimum amount of fact checking before they spread this kind of, quite frankly, garbage.
Firstly - I have no doubt IBM is laying off a lot of people, there is probably a need to in some areas. Layoffs are part of running any business. Some times a lot of layoffs will happen too. Trying just a little bit of basic maths first would be appropriate however. The numbers in this article are absurd.
As far as I know IBM has around 320 000 employees world wide and some 120 or so in the US. The layoffs this article are talking about are in the US, and they are only within the IGS part of IBM. IGS doesn't account for more than half of IBMs employees in the US, at an absolute maximum. That means that if you lay off the entire IGS division, you'd lay off some 50-60 thousand people. Where Bob gets the other 100 000 from is anyones guess. Perhaps they are laying off people in India and outsourcing those to China, and they are laying off people in China to outsource them to Poland.
Sadly sensationalism is more important than basic fact checking. The state of our current journalists is really, really sad. Cringely is at the very bottom of the heaping pile of dung that they call journalists today. Cringely is useful for little else than pirana food. Sadly I think that feeding Cringely to pirana would be cruel and unusual punishment, for the pirana.