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Perspectives On the Latest IBM Layoffs
An anonymous reader writes "After IBM reported disappointing Q1 earnings in March, to nobody's surprise, layoffs (RAs or 'Resource Actions' in IBM parlance) were announced two months later; June 12 seemed to be when most of the pink slips were handed out. While this is hardly a novel occurrence at IBM, this time the RA'd employee water cooler page is now open for everyone's inspection, and Cringely let loose with some predictable I-told-you-so's about financially oriented IBM senior management. Dan Burger at IT Jungle has a more numbers-oriented take on the latest round of layoffs."
Dude is hilarious. "I call them like I see them and always have. That’s my reputation. Ask Steve Ballmer at Microsoft if he likes my work and he may very well say “no.” Ask Larry Ellison. Ask Larry Page. You can’t ask Steve Jobs but you can ask Tim Cook. Do they like my work? No. no, and no. Now ask if they respect my work and every one of those men will probably say “yes.” Because I call them like I see them and always have."
And then in the "About" section: "Most recently, Cringely was the host and writer of the Maryland Public Television documentary “The Tranformation Age: Surviving a Technology Revolution with Robert X. Cringely." He also wrote for Infoworld until 1995, before getting fired.
What is the shocking truth about IBM? They don't release some corporate information that isn't required to be made public (no surprise), they do cost-cutting (maybe for stock buy-backs or something). Wow, that's one hard hitting blog article.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Though I feel for these employees that will watch their work go elsewhere, cheaper, more flexible/captive, and lower quality.
It's the lies IBM will tell its customers, starting with the quality lies, then the onshore/offshore lies, and finally the resource commitment lies.
And how the government customers will roll over and ignore the contract provisions.
And later will stop asking IBM to even bother to keep work and data onshore when it is required by law.
Corpratists. Crony Capitalism. we are being fleeced.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Indian Business Machines is based in Armonk - still?
Global IBM employment is clearly dropping but employment in India, for example, is rising, so is this a net global number or gross layoffs?
Of course they are hiring in India.
The IBM that used to be the leader in social reform and good corporate citizenship no longer exists.
That ended in the 90s.
In IBM’s big plans its customers are a necessary evil.
That is the case for EVERY big corp. See the: banking, airline, cell phone, cable TV industries for downright hostile attitudes towards customers. IBM isn't quite there - yet.
No IBM customer is asking the company to put fewer workers on their account.
That won't happen. Customers will just get more workers in India.
See people - business customers - why go through an American based services company when all they really do is resell Indian (and other third world countries) labor? Buy direct and save money! And you don't have to put up with the ex-ballplayer salesman who makes waaaayyy too much money just because he's over six foot, classically handsome and looks good in a suit.
RAs or 'Resource Actions' in IBM parlance -> RAs or 'Resource Actions' in IBM newspeak (fixed that for you)
Cutting costs not to go broke? Where have you been the last 40 years? Companies don't "cut costs" to avoid closing. They "cut costs" to appease wall street and the financial sector. Companies only make products and sell services as a front. Their real business is an incestuous stock market scam where they work staff to the bone, then fire them and ride the short-term profit wave caused by no having to pay said worker. (Your work and contributions earn a company money for many months after you leave. That code you wrote, contract landed, or book you balanced does not vanish when you leave.)
"Costs" are saved as executives and upper management get bonuses and make money hand over fist, all as the company is slowly chopped in to pieces and loaded with debt. Eventually the company crashes, and the execs float on their golden parachutes to the next gig, where they do the same thing all over again.
Eventually we're going to run out of things to run in to the ground. What then, America?
not enough Indians...wait a minute..strike that. Too many Indians too :-D
I worked there for 2 years. There were some interesting technical benefits however the sysadmin team was highly siloed. I counted 12 teams that had fingers on the servers we managed. The worst part was the cog in the machine treatment. Some manager you'd never seen before would come into the cube farm on Monday, and seemingly randomly tap 2 or 3 folks out. They'd have their desks cleaned out by Wednesday. Your manager would find you 3 or 4 jobs but they'd require a transfer to a different location. When my sysadmin job was outsourced to India (we had to train them before we left), my manager found Data Center building jobs in Kansas, web programming jobs locally, and contract support for a company in Boston. Fortunately that was a telecommute position. We had folks from New York, Boston (on site), New Jersey, Washington State, and me in Colorado. The team was so broken due to the lack of face to face interaction that folks would leave and new folks come in every few months. I finally left when management tapped our customer interface and she had 2 days to transfer all her knowledge to the replacement. I could deal with most of the cog in the machine stuff, but the '2 days and you're out' stuff was extremely stressful.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Whenever I read news about IBM, I'm glad I got out of that place. When I joined the company in the mid-90s, during Gerstner's reign, it was a great place to work, and a very successful company. There were plenty of problems, to be sure, and Gerstner laid off lots of employees, but the company was focused on the future and on building new and successful business. The employees were generally treated quite well, performance was amply rewarded, and education budgets were generous and easily accessible to ensure that technical employees continued developing their skills and the culture was one of mutual support to get things done. For large technology companies, I think the approach to employee continuing skill development is something of a bellwether for the company's future.
When Gerstner stepped down and Palmisano took over, however, the company began a long, gradual slide. It became cost-obsessed and quarterly earnings-focused. Some belt-tightening was appropriate during the dotcom bust, but that actually didn't hit IBM very hard. The problem was that Palmisano's leadership team had no idea how to create new business, the IBM services group that Gerstner started and used to revitalize the company was reaching a kind of natural saturation point, so Palmisano started slashing costs to prop up profit growth as revenue growth got harder to find. Even worse, the cost pressure began to change the culture of the company, creating more internal competition which began to turn ugly.
By the time I left in 2011, IBM had become a fairly unpleasant place to work. Global Services was the worst, for example utilization targets were routinely set so high that it was impossible to take vacation time without working overtime in order to make up for it, and cost controls had squeezed out all career development funding unless you could hide it in customer contracts. Software Group was struggling and had shifted more to focus on sales rather than development. IBM has always been primarily a sales company, backed by engineering, but shifting the balance too far towards sales is a way to boost short-term profits at the expense of long-term success. I personally got caught in that shift; my job was transformed underneath me from an architecture and development role to a technical sales support role. I even hear from my friends in R&D that they were also getting squeezed hard, with increasing pressure to abandon work on any ideas that couldn't be productized within a few months.
When I heard that Ginni Rometty was taking over for Palmisano last year I just shook my head. Rometty was a driving force in squeezing services employees with ever-increasing utilization targets and ever-tightening cost structures. IMO, IBM needs another visionary like Gerstner, not another jumped-up middle manager like Palmisano, but that's what they got in Rometty. She's a smart, talented, aggressive jumped-up middle manager, but still not what IBM needs, IMO.
I'm glad I left. I really should have done it a few years before I did.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Big corporations are in business for one purpose only: for the shareholders. There are good things that come from it, like our 401K and health insurance funding. However, 401K holders are little people and, come end of the day, have no voice in the decision making of a companies direction. Bean counters spreadsheets prevail at the cost of doing what is right or morally sound. It is really sad too that peoples lives are nothing more than line items on a spreadsheet.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
Unless you have a program set to delete all your code unless you input a password every week.
Eventually we're going to run out of things to run in to the ground. What then, America?
A country with a third world level of wealth disparity, bankrupt government because the tax paying middle class will no longer exist and we'll just have poor (non-taxpayers) and rich (don't pay enough), and we'll come to the conclusion that the American dream died in 2008.
I wasn't aware that IBM had any American employees left to layoff, unless the CEO fired herself.
IBM has been offshoring for years. I have known for a decade that working for IBM is the worst possible choice. I have been contacted several times by an IBM recruiter and I simply laugh at them.
The death of large firms like HP, Dell and IBM is inevitable. Whether the process of dying involves offshoring their services and/or manufacturing of their main hardware products, the cause is simply mismanagement from the top and lack of innovation on a large scale. IBM innovates in things like the Watson computer but that is a small division which if separated out from the main services division might prosper better on its own. Blaming employees in other countries who work for IBM for the reason for IBM's downfall is just bigoted nonsense and shows a closeted approach to looking at the real causes which is shitty management.
Dear IBM,
Everything you sell costs too much.
Sincerely,
Every IT worker ever
I hope that reaches their market research division. Maybe that will help solve that big mystery of why they're doing poorly.
Just like the Auto industry will IBM be nationalized to save jobs ?
A global economic system of surfs, its what every administration is fighting for, even everyone's hero BO. Political party doesn't matter anymore kiddies so don't go there. Eventually we need to stop fighting each other, and fight our own government here in the US.
So why do you suddenly feel surprised that the one profession that can easily work from home is now getting outsourced ?
No one is surprised.
What you are missing is the lies that corporate America tells: that they are going offshore because they can't get qualified Americans. It's of no surprise to anyone - except for you - that corporations are going overseas to save costs.
Suddenly you talk of Corporate citizenship! US companies have always made plans with their investors in mind - not their employees, and considering most of your companies make more money outside the US than in US... the only reason to call them a US company is because of their incorporation in Delaware.
What's this 'suddenly'?
And no, back in the old days, companies like Dupont, Ford, and even IBM, and many others, prided themselves on taking care of their employees, their communities and their investors.
Over the last few decades, that attitude has become "quaint" and corporations have developed this slash and burn mentality that benefits their CEOS at the expense of the employees and the shareholders.
This is about well connected and incompetent people getting these CEO jobs, fucking up a company, and getting compensated handsomely for performance that would have a member of the rank and file fired.
Your and the mod's naivete is pathetic.
Why not simply do a quick & dirty bad job of it? Prepare a few handouts, as well as, say, a quiz for the new replacements that's easy to fly through. Use that as the metric to tell the company that you've taught them what is needed, and that they are good to go. Then leave w/ the severence. The management is left w/ the impression that the offshored work force is equal to the job, and get the shock of their lives when things start disintegrating. After that, it's just a matter of time before the shit hits the fan, but by then, it's too late to take it out on the employees who've been let go.
That way, no need to really swallow one's pride - pull a fast one on both the employers, as well as the offshore workers, and then walk away w/ the severence. Let them figure out how to run things once you're gone.
Dear IT worker
We are moving everything to India, Eastern Europe, Brazil, Africa and any other place we can think of. Hopefully, that should solve this problem.
Sincerely
IBM
Moving everything to India is a real innovation from IBM. Since H1B visas are not enough to find cheap work, why not move the whole company there.
If you've been treated unethically, you have no obligation to be ethical towards your abusers if that will cause further damage to you.
So don't refuse to train them - IBM will give you bad references and other damaging punishments. Train them wrong. The moral responsibility for the hardships this will create for customers (and blameless foreigners who are just trying to feed their kids) will rest with IBM; it's their actions that caused it. Management is the art of using people to everyone's best advantage - asking workers to train their replacements before being let go is clearly bad management, and an obviously bad idea.
Thankfully my employers have always behaved ethically towards me so I've never had to compromise myself that way, but seriously it looks like your best option.
This is a racket, most of these offshore companies bid to do the support for IBM, HP and DELL.
And you wonder why the jobs are leaving? Unless you can do the same work for a 1/4 of the price these types of support jobs are gone.
But look at what you risk to do that. You can easily go to jail, and even if you don't good luck getting a job in the future.
IBM pools its resources, maybe it's time we pool ours?
Please donate: http://ibmemployeelegalservices.com/
Exactly. What is all this angst about? Did IBM lose money last quarter? No -- they made $3.00 per share (which was in fact an improvement over the previous year) instead of their projected $3.05 a share. And for this they are laying off thousands worldwide. Employees, and even customers, are not a priority anymore. The only thing that matters is the stock price.
I've been through supporting security for a lot of different customers as they transition in an out of my department at IBM, but I do have to say the last transition to India surprised even me. During my first meeting with the new team, two of the three individuals could not figure out why the Office2007.exe saved to their desktop would not install. I had to remind them that their laptops were linux not windows and then explain the difference. Note: Wine is not allowed and the approved installer isn't in that format. I could go on and on since a normal transfer takes two weeks and this one took more than three months.
Not really sure why the new team is allowed to perform at 4% complete every month, when we used to get hassled if it dropped below 95%.
I'm so glad I switched to a different role in the company. Would feel bad for the customer if they weren't a large investment company.