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IBM Offers Retirement With Job Guarantee Through 2013

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the out-to-pasture dept.

dcblogs writes "IBM is offering employees who are nearing retirement — and may be worried about a layoff — a one-time voluntary program that would ensure their employment through Dec. 31, 2013. The program, described in a letter addressed to IBM managers, 'offers participants 70% of their pay for working 60% of their schedule.' Participating employees would receive 'the same benefits they do today, most at a full-time level, including health benefits and 401(k) Plus Plan automatic company contributions.' In 2006, IBM employed about 127,000 in U.S. The Alliance@IBM, a CWA local, now estimates the U.S. workforce at around 95,000. How far IBM will go in cutting is up for debate, including one radical estimate."

16 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. They're acting like they're in trouble! by ZorinLynx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why the heck does IBM need to cut so many jobs? They're actually doing rather well by all business standards.

    Yet here they're acting like they're hemorrhaging money and need to cut costs fast.

    American Airlines did this sort of thing too, along with voluntary furloughs... But they're actually in trouble and have a reason to.

    WTF?!

    1. Re:They're acting like they're in trouble! by SJHillman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Cutting jobs that aren't needed is one way to continue doing well by business standards. The longer people on the payroll, the more they cost - if you don't generate more for the company than you cost, why should they keep you on staff?

    2. Re:They're acting like they're in trouble! by AdrianKemp · · Score: 1, Insightful

      This is something that I feel has been lost in recent years, and I blame the political correctness garbage.

      I work with people every day that have no job to do. I'm not talking about the typical "I'm the backbone of the company and without me they'd sink" attitude that so many people have. I mean they literally sit and play solitaire all day. They aren't doing bad work, because they don't have any to do.

      Yet, they aren't fired, because you need fourteen thousand strikes and a paper trail eight miles long to do it.

      I salute IBM in cutting jobs, the global computer market has changed, and IBM is no longer at the forefront of the entire market (nor can they be, it's so much bigger than it used to be).

    3. Re:They're acting like they're in trouble! by S77IM · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They've painted themselves into a corner. They experienced rapid "growth" by decreasing the bottom line. Now investors expect that, and so in order to keep up, they must continue aggressively decreasing the bottom line. If they stop, their stock price will drop as growth slows dramatically. It sucks for all involved, because eventually they'll run out of bottom line to cut, and then everybody's screwed except the investors (and executives) who sell just before that happens.

      This is exactly the sort of thing Steve Jobs was talking about in the quote about bean-counters taking over the company and loss of product focus. Making enterprise software on an IBM scale, and doing it well enough to grow constantly, is really super hard. Short-term gains through off-shoring are easy.

        -- 77IM

      --
      Student: Is it true that the foundation of the universe is paradox?
      Master: Well, yes and no.
    4. Re:They're acting like they're in trouble! by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Cutting jobs that aren't needed is one way to continue doing well by business standards.

      Provided, of course, that these are actually jobs that aren't needed. Corporations sometimes suck at that part.

      Several years ago, the entire project team I was on was notified we were being let go. As we got closer to our final days, Sales had their knickers in a twist because they had a huge business deal on the line for the product we built.

      Trying to explain to a panicked salesman that fixing that bug or adding that feature wasn't going to happen because your last day is the end of the week is always fun. It boiled down to "wow, how unfortunate for you to be trying to close a multi-million dollar sale when the company has decided they don't need any of the people involved". Of course, the salesman was frantic about the sale and his commission -- couldn't quite understand why that was no longer our problem.

      I've seen several instances where the bean counters decided to get rid of certain people without actually knowing what their role was.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    5. Re:They're acting like they're in trouble! by vlm · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Difference between education and training:

      Educated guy has stuff to think about and do; hobbies; lasts a lifetime.

      Trained guy has nothing to do but go to work, nothing to do at home but watch TV, maybe drink.

      I've seen both types retire... uneducated retirement isn't pretty and they don't live long, educated guys have a freaking blast after retirement.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    6. Re:They're acting like they're in trouble! by MozeeToby · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Where do you work? Most every state in the US has at will employment; you can fire whoever you want whenever you want, as long as you aren't doing it in retaliation or to discriminate, and even then the burden is o the fired employee to prove. Maybe your company signs contracts with their employees, or explicitly states that you won't be fired without cause, or (more likely in general but given your 'playing solitaire' comment pretty unlikely) maybe they're unionized. But outside of those situations there's no reason your company couldn't fire 90% of their workforce tomorrow morning without warning.

    7. Re:They're acting like they're in trouble! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Who wants to retire? You sit in your house. Alone. Nothing to do. Better to just keep going into the office, and sharing your knowledge/skills.

      Who wants to work? You sit in your cubicle. With your fellow cow orkers. You've got things to do - things so odious that others have to actually pay you to valuable money to do it. Better to just sit in your house, working on some project that you, personally, found so interesting you'd do it even though nobody's paying you, and share your knowledge/skills.

    8. Re:They're acting like they're in trouble! by AdrianKemp · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I don't work in the US, I understand that your laws are better, however from what I know you're also a little ways from reality.

      While it's true that the employee in the US has to prove discrimination to actually win any sort of suit, they by no means need to do so to cause serious problems for the company.

    9. Re:They're acting like they're in trouble! by vlm · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A prime example of theoretical vs practical.

      The legal costs of defending someone filing a lawsuit, even a completely frivolous one, are so high compared to the cost of some salary that its cheaper to collect a folder of signed disciplinary actions and formal gathered evidence than to just toss them out on the street like a bouncer in an old western movie tossing a guy outta bar.

      There are also numerous legal issues with your exaggerated example of firing 90% of your company... here we have "at will" theoretically, but the company has to pay a rather substantial fine to the state if they fire more than 50 people with less than 60 days warning. I really have no idea why. Technically its not "at will", in the same way that our financial system is not a "free market" but we pretend it more or less is.

      Never forget than 50% of management is below median. You might think they would want to dispose of the deadweight, but they may be idiots.

      Finally, or they may realize if they get rid of the peons they won't be able to justify their empire based on # of direct reports. One place I worked at, the manager really wanted to be a director, and he's not getting that promotion unless he has the minimum of X front line employees, so lots of solitaire was played. Out of business now, of course, but it was a rational strategy for that boss at that time. I'm sure he's a VP (if not higher) somewhere now.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  2. Re:old people don't know anything about computers by ZorinLynx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Heh, I'm sure you're being facetious.. but in the tiny event that you're not...

    A while back we had some IBM big iron on campus, and our regular IBM tech was a guy in his (estimated) high 50s. Never have I seen someone who so *intricately* knows their shit as this man. He casually explained to me, while working, exactly what the capacitor cards do in the p690, why the system is designed the way it is, and so on. His troubleshooting ability was amazing, too.

    This is expected when you have three to four DECADES of experience. A newly minted college grad may be able to sling C# code like there's no tomorrow but he won't have this experience.

    I think IBM is making a mistake by letting these people go, and I'm betting they'll suffer down the line for it.

  3. Re:old people don't know anything about computers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Kid....computer and programmers existed long before your parents where born.
    Making a statement like this only reveals that YOU don't know ANYTHING about computers.

    Google Ada Lovelace, google Donald Knuth, google, Charles Babbage, google Sir Tim Berners Lee, google Steve Wozniak, google Konrad Zuse, google Wilhelm Schickard, google Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, google Herman Hollerith. google Alan Turing.

    YOU are N0ob. Now go back and play some idiotic shooter game.

  4. Re:old people don't know anything about computers by cdrguru · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is the sort of attitude that permeates the computer industry today. This is why we have people building software that absolutely and faithfully recreates the problems that were solved in the 1960s and 1970s - the people doing the work have absolutely rejected the idea that there is anything to learn from the past. History is dead to them because they think everything they are doing is new and different. They think they are striking out in unknown territory when in fact they are just walking alongside the same path that was covered 40 years ago.

    Today, many of the same problems that are encountered are simply recreations of things that happened before. A huge problem is file systems that do not have sufficient robustness to deal with unexpected outages and hardware errors. If you have a file system that fails if you shut the power off unexpectedly at the wrong time you have something that was designed from a blank piece of paper. This kind of problem was dealt with in the 1970s in several different environments but nobody working on recent file systems have any experience with those solutions. Mostly because "it is all new" is an attitude and considering anyone over the age of 40 to be outmoded and incapable of dealing with all this new stuff.

  5. Re:old people don't know anything about computers by P-niiice · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Companies think they can build systems to retain the knowledge that actual experienced employees would give them. And they end up spending multiples of their salaries to do it. And it never works, and always gets torn down for the next management book of the month.

  6. Re:Does It Involve Being Digitized? by ajlitt · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That explains Watson: an all-digital mechanical Turk that feeds on the souls of employees who expected a pension.

  7. Re:crossover point by Microlith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Eventually it will be a global market

    It's not a global market until I can move to the areas where the cost of living is cheaper and look for work on a whim. I can't, however.

    It's a global market, but only for corporations.