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IBM Says 'Couldn't Fire 150K US Workers If We Wanted To'
theodp writes "In an e-mail worthy of the Dilbert Hall of Fame, IBM execs responded to Robert X. Cringely's Project LEAN layoff rumors, reassuring employees by pointing out that they've already wiped out too many U.S. jobs to be able to lay off another 150,000. Big Blue's employment peaked around 1985, when it had about 405,000 workers who were acclimated to a long tradition of lifetime employment. IBM puts its current global workforce at 355,766, with a 'regular U.S. population' of less than 130,000."
Silly Cringley! We're Hiring negative 20 thousand employees!
Is this evidence enough that Cringley's stuff can never appear on Slashdot ever again? He's a complete hack of a "journalist". I'd rather see blogs written by 12-year-olds than "articles" by Cringley.
I'm ashamed that he is funded in part by non-profit funds from US taxpayers and makes a bad name for PBS in general.
Yep sure did. Including my job to cheap out sourced labor at $16hr to people who know absolutely nothing about computers. Thanks IBM... morons.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Recently IBM Global Services has been fighing for its life on many fronts especially when they are competing with IBM Partners.
It used to be the case that the Sales Execs didn't care where the revenue comes from. Partner or GS it didn;t matter. Now GS is walking all over Partners in attemts to wrest business away from partners and as a consequence several partners I work with are getting right pissed off.
Once the quote/order info get put onto the Internal Siebel System, it becomes visible to GS who then walk mob handed into the Parner and take the biz away from the partner.
I see this as a last ditch attempt to save their jobs. Therefore IMHO a reduction in GS headcount is long overdue.
There are a lot of really good people in GS but the metrics in which they are having to work are awful. Many are good ones voting with their feet leaving the dross.
This ends up with the customers suffering as the people left in GS to actually deliver the solution can't.
This is nothing new. I saw this 10+ years go in DEC with their services division. It got even worse when Compaq came in a bought the show. Try fitting a services business model into a volume PC business model. They just don't fit.
Just my 2$ worth.
So, Cringely's scenario is entirely plausible. IBM could fire 150,000 Western employees and hire 130,000 Chinese and Indian employees. Certainly, most outsourcing work is in India. So, putting the core of Global Services in India makes economic sense.
I am a former IBM employee. When I was axed in a layoff in 2003, I had worked at IBM for about 2 years after just graduating from college. Upon receiving my pink slip, I visited the job fair at my old college and saw a big IBM table recruiting new employees. IBM was hiring and firing on the same day.
... because it shows that Cringely's claim is not based on real IBM figures.
I think you'll find that "security of tenure" has valid arguments for it in some situations. Perhaps you were not referring to these, but I take issue with mindless blanket statements.
I hate printers.
Americans are getting poorer and cheaper. They're 25% cheaper than just a couple of years ago. The urgency to outsource to cost effective workforces is reducing.
Deleted
I used to work at a company, where the standing joke at headquarters was if a plant (factory) did anything wrong, they would close it. The big boss would say: "Either they make target, or I'm going to close the plant!" Of course, the targets were completely unrealistic, so the next meeting would be: "Well close the plant dammit!!! Close the plant!"
The people at HQ would keep a running tally of how many divisions (plants) were closed that week. 15 plant closures was a bad week, as the company only had 13 plants. At one point, things got so bad they had to purchase a few more plants to make up for the plants they really did close. I'm glad I'm not working for that company anymore.
Yes, it is possible for management to discuss closing more plants than they have, and to fire more employees than they have hired ...
I've always wondered why they don't just move all of the IBM employees and their families into one big town.
It's called "Bangalore".
Table-ized A.I.
IBM stock has reached a 52-week high and is set to go higher. After a quick look, it seems the job cuts are a balance vs their investments in future growth. Gotta have good quarters and making the Street happy.
I'm sure the King of France said the same thing to the angry crowd outside his palace gates.
Of course no one owes anyone anything... But if you don't bother to take care of the people, they tend to "take care" of you. We could have quite easily became another Nazi or Communist country had FDR not instituted his New Deal reforms during the great depression. Free market capitalism works... up until a point.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I find it interesting that people have clung to the "US" bit so much that they feel the need to point out that IBM doesn't have 150k US employees, instead of pointing out that IBM does have well over 300,000 workers internationally, which is more relevant.
I worked at Nortel Networks, a company that had 105k - 110k employees in 2001. In the first 4 months of 2001 the company fired 27k people. In the rest of the 8 months of the year, they fired another 26k people. They fired even more in 2002. Overall, the company fired 57,000 people, over half the company.
IBM has 150k people to fire, and it can do so with ease. The "US" reference is irrelevant, since even 50,000 US workers would be a huge amount of people, but possible.
As for Cringely, he isn't a journalist. He's never claimed to be one, and his 9 years of weekly articles speaks to this. Cringely is a tech insider and writer who writes about interesting topics, and wrote this article not to report it, but in the hopes that IBM employees, and the publicity his articles garner, could help to prevent IBM from making a mistake. And he is right to do so - at Nortel the CEO wiped out half the company and walked away with a 9-figure compensation for inducing mass unemployment and wiping out billions of value and spinoff value when the tech sector of the TSE crashed.
The effects of 150k layoffs in the US would be very bad, and that's what he hopes to stop, because the way they do it is slow and steady, and if people don't figure it out ahead of time, they find out when it's too late. So in that respect, his article is very worthwhile and commendable.
All too often the people who say as you have either 1) have a job from which they haven't been fired, or 2) fire their "inferiors" and need a maxim to assuage the guilt over the damage theyt've done, or 3) are sociapaths who really don't deserve jobs.
As they say in reality television: "You're fired". Two years from now when the market turns up, you'll wait in line to hear the potential employers in your field say "If you had been good; you wouldn't have been let go. Someone would have hired you." and ask, "Are you an alcoholic?"
I haven't had the above said to me, but I've heard accounts from many others. They weren't alcoholics. They chose the wrong initial employer. That is their only "sin".
You should expect a job and expect to be retained; if you do the work assigned. You shouldn't be promoted, but you should be retained. What's happening now is that even those who do good work are not retained and treated like dirt if retained.
...I do know that some American jobs are currently being moved to India. I also know that some Indian jobs are currently being moved to the states. In an industry like this, nothing stays the same for long, and things are always being moved around. A prediction like 'IBM is going to move around some jobs around' is too vague to be meaningful. And one that says they are going to move overseas more jobs than they currently have is too dumb to be worth repeating.
Well, at least it's not Auschwitz. You gotta be glad it hasn't come to that yet.
Seems pretty silly that in this 21st century the billionaires can move their funds and trade across the globe in milliseconds... But the ordinary people still need some silly visa permit from the king to move their skills likewise. Trade at the post-industrial level, immigration at the Napoleonic law level?
Kind of a sweet deal for the industry: move your production to whichever country has cheaper citizen slaves knowing the people cannot follow in kind.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
That 130,000 number is total US employees. Cringely's previous estimate supposedly just included Global Services employees, which only represents a fraction of the total workforce. So if we assume half of all US IBM employees work for global services, that still means IBM needs to hire 85,000 new employees before his estimate is even mathematically possible.
This whole thing reminds me of a scene from the South Park episode, "Two Days Before The Day After Tomorrow".
Reporter: Tom, I'm currently ten miles outside of Beaverton, unable to get inside the town proper. We do not have any reports of fatalities yet, but we believe that the death toll may be in the hundreds of millions. Beaverton has only a population of about eight thousand, Tom, so this would be quite devastating.Anchor: Any word on how the survivors in the town are doing, Mitch?
Reporter: We're not sure what exactly is going on inside the town of Beaverton, uh Tom, but we're reporting that there's looting, raping, and yes, even acts of cannibalism.
Anchor: My God, you've, you've actually seen people looting, raping and eating each other?
Reporter: No, no, we haven't actually seen it Tom, we're just reporting it.
Isn't journalism so much more fun when you don't have to worry about those damn things called 'facts'?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Mod Crazyjim1 up. He is absolutely correct.
My daughter is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma with bachelors and masters degrees in human resources, criminology and psychology. Her overall GPA for both degrees was 3.8. By the way, she did all of this while raising three children as a single mom.
Prior to graduating from the masters program she sent out over 50 resumes and responded to many letters of interest from major corporations and government agencies. Every one ended up requiring more experience than you could reasonably expect a recent college graduate to have. It makes one wonder what the point of contacting recent graduates is; better annual reports perhaps. I can just hear these companies and agencies complain that they can't find qualified candidates to fill their positions and have no choice but to out-source.
Don't give up Crazyjim1. My daughter finally found a job, although the pay wasn't quite what she had hoped, across the street from the university no less.
Excuse me but the Napoleonic Law was innovative and revolutionary - so much in fact it remained the legal code of choice for the countries formerly-occupied under Napoleon. If anything the French Code Civil was and is a very good system of law. And today most of the world's legal systems are based up on the Civil Law legal system with deep French roots. The US legal system however is mostly based up on Common Law..
But has no idea what it's about.
He wrote: It has to be since the very essence of LEAN is foreign hiring.
LEAN http://www.lean.org/ has nothing to do with foreign hiring. It's a philosophy for process improvement that focuses on eliminating wastes in that process. Such wastes include: excess inventory, re-work, moving things around more than needed. It's about redesigning the process so that there is as little wasted effort and material as possible.
LEAN is well-executed when the culture of a company is changed to empower workers to have more control over the way they do their work - and those employees are encouraged to find better ways to do what they do. For example, Toyota is often held up as a prime example of LEAN. There, an employee who finds a better way to improve a process is rewarded with cash bonuses.
Now it may be that a company has hired a consultant to tell them do do layoffs and they call it LEAN, but that's not what it is.
But, everyone here seems to be of the opinion that Cringley's full of shit. I'll have to agree.
Sadly, he did write that, and no, it doesn't look tongue in cheek at all. Catch: XP Decay.
Genuine quote from the great pundit: "When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing?"
I've read the article again, just in case there might be some subtle sarcasm I've missed before, but it looks as serious as it gets, if anyone asks me.
The whole list is framed between:
- "This week's column is about exploring the commonly observed problems that crop up with each new release. Maybe Microsoft should patch the patches once in a while. Here are a few of my gripes - most of them a result of excessive patching." which doesn't really sound like the start of a joke, and
- "And please, will the characters who "have never had a crash or blip" in 10 years of "heavy use" not contribute. I'm sick of these people. They're full of it." Which, again, would indicate that not only he's not joking, but he thinks that anyone who hasn't had those newbie problems is, in his own words, "full of it."
Speaking of which, the rest of the complaints sound... shall we say, computer illiterate. And that's putting it mildly. He sounds like the average Uncle Osric or Aunt Emma, who are terminally stumped as to why would their computer suddenly be sluggish or takes a while to connect on the network. It must be all those MS patches, really. Not like the kind of expert who fixes such things for fun, and/or knows exactly what worm was hogging the network.
Believe me, I've tried finding some trace of tongue-in-cheek irony there. I've hoped it would be an April 1st article. Nope.
But, hey, judge it for yourself. If you can detect some trace of sarcasm there, please tell me.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Where in the hell do you think IBM is going to find 150k qualified people in India? Maybe if you're ignorant of the realities of employment there. The labor market is very tight and salaries are skyrocketing as a result. There aren't 150k engineers on the market in the entire country right now. They could try sniping people from the big companies already present there (Google, Microsoft, etc.), or from the local companies (Infosys and the like), but it's going to be tough. The average salary for a software engineer in Bangalore has gone from a little under $10k 3 years ago to over $20k now. If IBM started trying to pull in another 150k heads, they'd see the average shoot over $30k as competition for talent gets fierce.
I've never read Cringely's stuff before, but he does seem to have missed a key point in his article. He calls it "IBM's mysterious LEAN program" as if LEAN itself is the project. If you read the reply from IBM, they point out that they're using the LEAN methodology and not that this project is called LEAN. He also says that "the very essence of LEAN is foreign hiring", which is tripe.
He's deliberately scaremongering by using the term out of context to suggest that it is the title of a project that's synonymous with cutbacks, knowing that most people won't be aware that LEAN means something else entirely. Maybe he should read up on the LEAN methodology first before he starts worrying people by writing all this nonsense.
And here's the obligatory Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing
--- Band: Joey Ultra
*Who* said every job is going to India? To avoid this kind of skyrocketing in wages, *if they are really going to layoff that many jobs*, they will distribute them among many countries... Hungary, Romania, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, India, China, ... There are lot of countries with competent IT professionals out there.
ilex paraguariensis for all
Lean isn't mysterious. It's popular, especially in manufacturing.
It ain't about laying off people. Not if you do it right.
However, for many companies, it's a radical re-think of the corporate culture and hard to implement because far too many managers can't wrap their heads around some of the concepts and think it's just simpler to get rid of people. That's not Lean. That's just stupidity.
--
BMO - "I'm not anti-business. I'm anti stupidity" - Dilbert
Is there such a thing anymore in the US? Or did it all disappear with "trickle down"? Is it only in government where you can expect lifetime employment now? I had an Uncle who put in 40 years with the post office. Retired with 95% percent of his pay till he kicks the bucket. Does anybody know anybody who is still working a non government job with the same employer for over 20-25 years? Do they expect any retirement benefits? Will they be able to trust the company to come across with it?
What?
> Free market capitalism works... up until a point.
If the Government hadn't stepped in, every American would now be an employee of The Rockefeller Corporation.
The trouble with Free Markets, is they're usually not. Heard a Pundit on BBC World Service saying we shouldn't worry about Rupert Murdoch taking over the Wall Street Journal because it's a "Free Market" anyone can set up a blog and compete. (Level playing field, my ass.)
If there are 120000 people in a room and then 150000 leave, how many people have to enter the room again for it to be empty?
They do if they expect anything resembling employee loyalty. Pay cuts plus a murky employment future will leave you only with fair-weather employees all too willing to jump ship when a better offer comes along, ultimately making lean times leaner for the company.
One would think that the events of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries have shown that the company needs its employees as much as the employees need the company, if not moreso.
A cynical approach to hiring only nets you cynical employees.
The rumors about LEAN and layoffs at IBM have been circulating for a few months, but have really intensified over the past few weeks. I jumped ship two weeks ago and two days after I gave my notice I received frantic IMs from co-workers who have been laid off, because 80% of the department is supposed to be outsourced - primarily to South America as part of LEAN. Two days later some of my ex-co-workers got re-hired, but, of course, as contractors without benefits. Yea, it is that easy.
The F500 clients are "not pleased", because they have been struggling with communication and logistical issues for quite some time with the new overseas staff, because you simply cannot expect that a non-native English speaker with (most of the time) heavy accent can elaborate highly technical and complex issues. We have been rolling our eyes for months while listening to daily conference calls with our South American or Indian peers. It simply does not work. The clients are paying a high premium for "excellence" and get served an understaffed, underpaid and "not very motivated" workforce. A server goes down in NJ and there is no staff to physically reboot the machine. I have seen instances where the client has to wait 3 months, before someone was found for "on-site" support.
My US co-workers are naturally all pissed off. Contractors are let go without notice after almost a decade of service. Managers are trained to be naturally unemotional alpha-males with mostly poor people skills. Teams primarily consists of an equal number of computer-illiterate managers/techleads and technically skilled people who *do the job*. Sure, it's their right to lay off people, but the way it has been implemented has been traditionally poorly managed. After all a serial number is easier to let go than a human being. The published reports don't surprise me at all. I know plenty of ex-co-workers who have been let go (and rehired) a dozen times during my time at IBM. I am not disgruntled ex-employee, because I thought that the IBM way was the "way to go", because I never experienced any other work environment.
I worked for IBM for almost a decade and I didn't even realize how miserable I was until I started my new position. When I got home from my first day at my new (non-IBM) job, I was so (positively) overwhelmed that I uncontrollably sobbed. This is what 10 years of working with IBM have done to me.
But I will say this much; my own legal system uses one (1) single core volume of some 3000+ pages. And the German work of codification, BGB, inspired the world as far away as China and Japan.
You haven't told us whether to count contractors as "people".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.