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Layoffs at Microsoft, Intel, and IBM
Normally I try to avoid posting straight business news, but I think that these 3 stories combine to something meaningful.
Muleguy noted Microsoft is laying off 5,000,
Mspangler reports that
Intel is cutting 5-6k, while
nonyabidness afraid4myjob submitted that IBM Layoffs have begun with no number, but estimates as high as 16,000.
Once upon a time, a company had loyalty to it's people, and the worker's were expected to have some loyalty to the company. If the company had a rough quarter or a poor year, people pulled together and worked harder. A company USED to do layoffs to avoid going bankrupt. Workers viewed each other as extended family members - it was common for workers to get together at each other's homes on weekends and holidays. Families got to know each other, work was done in a 'team' enviroment; and if you pulled your weight and did your job - you could expect to retire with the company you worked for. 20 years of service was celebrated, opportunties for promotion were biased such that someone who had shown loyalty to the company had first dibs, over someone coming in from the outside.
Today, despite record profits, companies close plants and terminate people - so the few executives can reap huge bonus's. Getting laid off by a plant closing, business downturn, or poor managment decisions punishes employees who were powerless to avoid the mistake - but end up taking full responsibility in that they have to sell their homes, and re-locate to find work elsewhere. With the cost of housing - this means that the 401K money must be robbed today, so they can continue to make mortgage payments while they try to sell their home, and have money to bring to closing when their home sells for less than what they paid for it.
I've been there, I've had my retirment almost depleted because companies transferred jobs to India, a plant closing, terminating a project I was involved with, a company purchased and moved overseas, and a company that failed due to poor managment. Now after 20 years, I finally have solid career.
When did all this change? Why did this change? It certainly hasn't been for the better - for the USA used to lead the world in production, in technology and development. People used to matter, now each of us is just a cog in the company machine. We are all expendable, and will be dropped on a whim. I wonder why.
Jack Welch, when he took over GE started the whole 10% of your under-achiever hog-wash.
Now, if you have poor achievers in your company, who have been there for decades - as GE had - perhaps a 1 time 'cleansing' is necessary. But, if you are doing your interviewing competently, and are teaching and mentoring your new hires - to continuously 'fire' 10% of the workforce is not only stupid, it's counter productive.
Consider, how long does it take a person to learn his job function and all the nuances that take it from being merely fulfilled, but where he can then magnify it? Given the proper motivation, a below average performer can become a top-performer. If a person knows what's expected, is shown how to do this, and is encouraged - he will either refuse to conform (termination case) or he will improve. I've seen this, I've done this and it works.
Other employees see this, and morale improves. People do not want to leave that group/company. Motorola USED to be like this. When Samsung came into town, they had to offer 20%+ salary bumps to attract Motorola employees to leave. Why? Because the people at Motorola knew that they were 'safe', that they had a career and a future with the company. Then Hector Ruiz came along and killed Motorola, before moving on to AMD and killing them.
I do not subscribe to the 10% cull; because you very quickly come to the point that you are cutting good people, and replacing them with good people who you will fire in a year or so. This creates a hostile work environment (why should I welcome you, help you or agree to work with you - if I'm competing against you to keep my job?), slows projects down (people shift departments constantly, at the slightest rumor of a reduction in headcount in a particular division), and you spend a great deal of your time where 90% of your employees are waiting for 10% of the team to come up to speed with their job requirements.
Show me a company that embraces the 10% cull, and I'll show you a company that is on the way down the tubes. Companies that terminate the poor performers, not due to some obscure quota, but do to performance - tend to retain their employees for the long haul. IBM used to be famous for this, and they rose to world domination. Motorola used to embrace this, and they used to have a world-class semiconductor market, communications division, automotive parts, space, micro-controllers and cell phone groups. The people make a company great - not the managment. Management has never made a company great, but poor managment has certainly killed more than a few.
Previous economic discussions on Slashdot have included several posts with the sentiment: "I'm choosing to ignore this recession. I still have a job so I'm going to continue as before. The only economic problem we have is psychological."
Are you still so certain that your job will remain when another 5% of your customers are about to become unemployed? Are you still so optimistic that you could easily find a new job with a million other educated and experienced workers back on the job hunt too?
Even if this recession were purely psychological, it has set a wave in motion that will splash around for a while causing layoffs and bankruptcies. If there is a rational basis for the economic shrinkage then it could be even worse. I wonder how long it will take to return to growth and optimism.
I've got news for you, kid: After firing the 10% worst-performing staff, a company STILL has a 10% worst-performing staff, along with newly lowered moral.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Well psychology is a real experimental science. Economics isn't. That is why economics is strongly affected by politics. Do you ever hear of liberal and conservative chemists? Or even psychologists? Furthermore, economics doesn't want to acknowledge the findings of psychology, so it is just plain wrong on many things. Economics is a social science like sociology. It is a discipline that attempts to be reasonable, but is ultimately not guided by the discipline of experimental results or even the need to only propose testable ideas. There is a lot of sophisticated math in economics, but without experiments that is just a rich toolbox to make up any story you want about anything.
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And here I am looking for a job at IBM, Intel, Sun, . . . . Maybe I should take the in-laws up on their offer to let their son-in-law with a CS PhD live in the basement for a few years.
> IBM is at a 20 year high for employment; the highest since it dropped 150k workers in the 90's.
Yes, but where? We've done a huge amount of hiring in India, Argentina, and Brazil, and have been laying off US employees left and right.
We are absolutely cut to the bone in the US, and have been mildly dysfunctional for the last couple years as a result. Every time you try to get anything done, people have either been laid off or reorg'ed to death, and no one knows who to talk to anymore. Last year I was reorg'ed four times, and I can't even tell you who I report to beyond my first-line manager (seriously - I don't know off-hand).
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Yeah right. Im sure thats true a certain percentage of the time but the scenario "why pay someone 80k when we can get a slave for 24k" plays itself out too.
The problem with H1-Bs is that both of you are right. You're giving two extreme sides of a continuous spectrum of arguments. Increasing supply of labor with constant demand will lower equilibrium price, so yes you can get wage slaves. Likewise, decreasing supply will raise price, so you'll get Americans demanding $10/hr to tend fields.
Neither of these scenarios are wrong, it's a comparatively simple market situation. But the government is going to have to clarify what it means by "no available person" to fill a job. At what price? It's the law that's out of touch with economics.
I had a boss who thought like that. He wanted to annually cut the bottom 10%. The problem is defining who that bottom 10% is... some of his buddies were jerks who deserved to disappear, but no chance they would go. Not to mention this constant mentality of "we have to fire people" is horrible for morale.
Basically the people who get fired are the ones farthest from the boss who wants to do the firing. He just tells everyone they have to fire 10%, and then he gets to sleep well at night, while everyone else suffers the agonies of the damned.
Personally I will never hire an ex-Microsoftie; they don't have morals or ethics that are worth a damn, or they wouldn't have worked there in the first place.
I'm not willing to categorically eliminate tens of thousands of people like that. I've worked in enough organizations to realize that no matter how fucked up a company may be, any individual working there can still be competent.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
My recollection is that the IBM layoffs of yesteryear focused heavily on senior staff, cutting many of their jobs to avoid paying pensions. They hired a lot of the people back as contractors afterward. I wouldn't bet on the junior staff being at the heavy end of the cut...
I suggest you study advanced economics more critically. Having a PhD in economics from a top-tier program, yes I agree that armchair economists are much different from real academic economists. However, I also think there is a tendency for many economists to place too much reliance on ornate mathematical and statistical models and not enough time spent stepping away from the computer, looking out the window, and asking whether or not those models are realistic. Note that looking out the window and seeing what people are actually doing is NOT the same thing as running 10,000 regressions to try and prove your model is correct. Common sense has no substitute.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Bullshit. The money that governments are currently spending on bail-outs and stimulus programs is not coming from any private parties. It is coming from the future.
It is coming from the future in the form of debt. It is based on the faith that eventually there will be enough wealth to cover the tremendous costs of yesterday's bad decisions and today's corrective actions. These debts are high risk since there is no collateral to back them. However, if these become bad debts, that means we're screwed anyway. We'll be back in the day when it is more valuable to know how to clean a pig sty than to know Python or even the Pythagorean theorem.
It isn't like we've got much choice in the matter. Marketplace decisions for the last few years have left us with trillions more dollars on paper than there is real wealth to back, and with all the risk management schemes, there is no way to attach the shortfall to any one region or segment. It's now a general system failure. We're screwed if we don't act, and we might be screwed no matter what we do.
It would be nice to see those who were responsible for watching the marketplace who should have raised the alarm about this five years ago hung screaming by their cojones in a Texas desert. That wouldn't help us out of the bind the world is now in, but I and others would feel a bit better if that were to happen. Which should count for a little something.
Personally I will neverhire an ex-Microsoftie; they don't have morals or ethics that are worth a damn, or they wouldn't have worked there in the first place.
s'okay. Fortunately for the world, with an attitude like that, chances are high that you'll never be in a position to make that kind of decision.
Well, I've seen it once, and I can guarantee you it didn't work. In our case, we had already had pretty massive layoffs, so any deadwood was long gone. The basic problem is that you probably aren't going to get rid of the lowest performing 10%, you're gone to get rid of the 10% that the boss doesn't know or doesn't care about, regardless of how valuable those people are.
And on a basic level, I strongly object to the idea that it's a good business practice to just keep turning up the heat on your employees. I worked for many, many years for a very successful company that thrived because we kept a strong, informed staff that knew how to work together. We were acquired by a "high pressure, gotta deliver now, fire the bottom 10%, no time to do it right just do it!" company ,and the result was dismal failure after dismal failure. So to say the least, I'm not impressed.
As much as I would like to agree, I can't. The problem with this is that you can't just pick some random American and expect him to do some technical job requiring a serious education. Remember, since companies have been hiring H1Bs for so long (since before I started college, long ago), fewer and fewer American students have been going into "hard" professions, namely engineering, and have opted for other professions where they weren't so likely to be laid off at the first hint of economic problems. As a result, when companies want to hire engineers, the only place they can get them is from other countries, where people train in engineering in large numbers (China and India, mainly). When I was in engineering school in the 90s, probably less than half my classmates were American; many were not immigrants, but students on F-1 student visas. In graduate school, the numbers were even worse, as most Americans, wanting to make money (and needing to pay back student loans), opt to go straight into the workforce rather than spend more time starving in graduate school.
If you want to hire someone to do, for instance, deep submicron IC design, or even just "simply" VLSI design with Verilog, you can't just take some laid-off autoworker from Detroit and train him to do this in a week (or a month, or a year, etc.). It would be like trying to retrain some guy to be a physician. These jobs require many years of education. A smart society would value workers with technical skills, and find some way of protecting them from job loss every time the economy turns sour (about every 5-10 years), and reward them well so they don't decide it's better to just become real estate agents or start their own companies installing pools (as engineers I've met have done). Our society isn't that smart. What's the solution for this? I really don't know; they tried a command economy in the Soviet Union a while back, where high-level scientists were kept employed doing scientific work no matter what, but obviously that system didn't work out too well. But our system doesn't seem to work that well either, as it's short-sighted, and doesn't reward people for doing difficult (but non-managerial) technical jobs.
The kind of people breaking immigration laws are people who work in hourly jobs/etc. The engineers who're here are not going to stick around with no job - they can go back home and earn more money with their 'US experience'. And even if they stay here, they cannot collect any dole.
I'm generally against protectionism, but in a recession,
If protectionism is good in a recession, then it must be good all the time! I have no problem with people who oppose free trade. I'll tell them they're wrong, but atleast they are consistent.
The people who are selective in their views on trade are the ones I watch out for - "trade in A, which I consume, is good, but trade in B, which I produce, is bad".
How many H1-B empoyees working for 24k do you actually know?
So, most of us were "put out of business" by big farms, but now we do other things and (judging by waistlines) eat better than ever.
There's a difference between being put out of business, and choosing a different and better-paying profession.
And American waistlines are bigger than ever because our food is all crap, loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, trans fats, MSG, and other unnatural things. Americans ate a lot better 100 years ago than they do now. Millions of obese people, with obesity caused by drinking sodas and junk food, is not an indicator of "eating well".
Remember the Irish potato famine - over-reliance on local food has risks, too.
The Potato Famine was caused by many things, but somehow during that time, Ireland exported tons of potatoes to England, even though its own people were starving. That says to me that relying on locally-produced food wasn't the problem, it was economics and politics. If they had kept their food at home, they wouldn't have had a famine.
Finally, while the US is lucky enough to have arable land in varied climates, most countries aren't - should Panamanians eat bananas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
So you don't think Panamanians have fish in the water surrounding them on both sides? People in tropical regions got along just fine nutritionally before modern times, they just didn't eat the same foods as they do now. Buying imported food (in any country) should be considered a luxury for people that can afford it and want to spend the money on it, not a necessity that all people can demand as a right. Just because I live in the US doesn't mean I have a right to cheap bananas (which don't grow here).