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IBM Begins Layoffs, Questions Arise About Pact With New York
dcblogs writes with news that the rumored IBM layoffs have begun. "IBM is laying off U.S. employees this week as part of a $1B restructuring, and is apparently trying keep the exact number of cuts secret. The Alliance@IBM, the main source of layoff information at IBM, says the company has stopped including in its resource action documents, given to cut employees, the number of employees selected for a job cut. The union calls it a 'disturbing development.' Meanwhile, two days prior to the layoffs, NY Governor Cuomo announced that it reached a new minimum staffing level agreement with IBM to 'maintain 3,100 high-tech jobs in the Hudson Valley and surrounding areas.' The governor's office did not say how many IBM jobs are now there, but others put estimate it at around 7,000. Lee Conrad, a national coordinator for the Alliance, said the governor's announcement raises some questions for workers and the region. 'Yes, you're trying to protect 3,100 jobs but what about the other 3,900 jobs?' The Alliance estimates that anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 U.S. workers could be impacted by the latest round of layoffs. IBM says it has more than 3,000 open positions in the U.S., and says the cuts are part of a 'rebalancing' as it shifts investments into new areas of technology, such as cognitive computing."
Alliance@IBM has a page collecting reports from people terminated today.
i i i...black sabbath intro
Frankly, I'll never understand why anyone would apply for a job at IBM, unless he's already desperate. Here in Austin, I know plenty of people who have left IBM over the past few years, most of them willingly. I don't know anyone who has joined IBM in the last 10 years.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
They're constantly looking to move jobs from areas of relatively high pay (USA, England, Australia, etc.) to areas of relatively low pay (India, Philippines, China, etc.) Which is all well and good if the standard of work were maintained - but it's not. They pay peanuts, and they get monkeys - I've worked with some fantastically competent people from India and China, but the salary they'd command back home is more than IBM is prepared to pay.
I remember an anecdote of a change on a major financial company's test mainframe. It included, amongst other things, an IPL (Initial Program Load - the mainframe equivalent of the three finger salute.) The Chinese staff IPLed the production mainframe. The financial company blew its lid over that, and demanded the work be moved back to their home country, which it duly was ... and two years later, it was back in China again to save money.
I contracted for them for a while. They don't allow an increase in rates (if you want more money, go elsewhere, and you may be able to get back in later on), whilst frequently demanding that you take extra days off so they can balance the books, with next to no notice, and often unilaterally cutting your rate by 10%. Suffice to say that, if I were told about a contract at IBM, my response would be akin to Jack's in Halting State.
There are companies I would happily work at again if given the chance. Then there are companies I would only work at if I were desperate. IBM is in the latter group, despite (or perhaps because of?) their name.
... sell them to Lenovo?
The 90's called. They want their web page back.
Isn't there a federal law requiring notification to all affected by a layoff of the number of people in each position (job title)
and their ages? In the past, IBM has provided this, and I'm sure it wasn't because they wanted to be nice. Surely the
requirement hasn't gone away.... how have their lawyers managed to circumvent it?
I am suprised IBM kept any jobs open in New York state. I would love to see what sweatheart tax break they were given that no other business received.
ohhhhh it's Her fault...
Obviously, these jobs were cut because there were not enough skilled STEM employees available. This is a clear sign we need more H1Bs.
How about if you assholes retrain the 3000 people for the 3000 open positions?
Assholes.
International Business Managers....consulting and management is the core business. Computers and software at IBM just fool the customers into thinking there is a product to purchase.
Ok fine, you don't want to hire local talent? You can't sell your products/services locally! Move your headquarters to one of those hellpit countries.
I think this would be a reasonable way to balance workforce/workload.
This entire idea that any jobs should be protected is idiotic. If a job doesn't make economic sense it should be eliminated, that's the entire point of progress - eliminating inefficient jobs so that production can become more economical, as in cheaper, thus providing lower prices.
If IBM employees cannot provide enough economic value to the market for the market to pay the company enough to offset their cost and provide for profits on top of it, then those jobs have no business existing and any government agreements and controls are no better than any other form of welfare, it reduces the market efficiency, reduces economic activity, mis-allocates resources, forces up prices that would otherwise come down, prevents the work force from being restructured thus preventing other businesses and by extension the market (buying customers) from the dividend of having a company restructured, preventing prices from falling.
This entire idea that government must protect jobs is both immoral and economically ignorant and stupid. Unions don't exist to protect the rights of everybody, they exist to protect the entitlements of the union members, destroying the competition from low skilled workers that can work for lower wages, this also means higher prices for no reason except government corruption whatsoever.
You can't handle the truth.
circle starts here, jerks
Time for outsourcing tax?
Better to at least keep the jobs hear other then paying for all of the welfare for the people out of work.
The law says over 49 people at one site.
Gov. Cuomo's press release says, "Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced today a major agreement today with IBM that will maintain 3,100 high-tech jobs in the Hudson Valley and surrounding areas. The company has committed to increase its minimum job commitment to the state by 750 jobs, and maintain the 3,100 jobs through at least the end of 2016."
3,100 jobs for whom? For people already living in New York? Or for people that IBM will fly in from India?
Why is IBM throwing people away instead of re-training them?
FAIL, both morally and strategically.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I did an internship in college at IBM in the summer of 2001 and it was awesome. But by the time I graduated they weren't hiring at that location anymore. And a couple years later they sold that whole facility to Hitachi (when they decided to get out of the hard-drive business). Looks like they've just kept going downhill since then. I'm kinda glad they didn't give me an offer :)
Why retrain a $125k/year 50 year old senior engineer when you can hire a $28,000 L1 or H1B with more recent and relevant education on new technology? It's perfectly legal, and you can get 5 engineers for the price of one old codger who can't handle change.
seriously drop the M for machines and change the I to India
'3000 open positions' .. 'cognitive computing' -- "So do you know how to be replaced by an outsourced position? If so, you're temporarily hired! Welcome to our new 'cognitive computing team'."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Won't someone think of the shareholders! Oh, and the bonuses.
I could not agree more that such "job protection" is against everything the government should be standing for.
What percentage will be tracked
back to the affordable health care act
and by who.
IBM is a massive company but with wide and
sometimes conflicting product lines. We will
have to wait to see what this does.
Some lay offs with "rich" packages have resulted
in valuable startups. Time will tell.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
My company hired IBM for an "assessment" and for "process improvement" - yeah now we are sending IT work offshore - I see where OUR jobs are headed... The same place all these IBM folks are going - to the unemployment line!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Maybe they tought Watson to program?
This isn't what IBM says it's doing...
"IBM layoffs expected. Instead, IBM adds 500 positions."
http://www.csmonitor.com/Busin...
I guess it's time for the yearly Communication Workers of America local 1701 to try to unionize IBM again under the name "Alliance@IBM". Don't they usually wait until March for this same old song and dance? Why's it early this year?
Maybe they tought Watson to program?
You guys are bitching that the tech firms are hiring the Indians and look at yourselves ... you can't even spell correctly !
You do realize that IBM really is an international company and has a lot of US employees don't you? If they hired only American workers, using your logic, every other country would refuse to let IBM sell products in their country. This, of course, would require IBM (and Apple, and GE, and Facebook, and Google, and Intel, and AMD, and...) to split into two independent companies - the US company and the International company. The former would sell overpriced and lame (due to the lack of volume/revenue from the local market to spend on R&D) products to the US. The latter would develop innovative products and sell them to the rest of the first world and the developing economies - and this would be good how?
One interesting question is, what percentage of revenue and profit come from the US market and what percentage of employe salaries and benefits goes to IBM's US employees. Certainly if that is around "in balance" there's little room for complaint (many years ago, I looked at this when they were publishing numbers of employees and revenue by region and it was clear that the US employees were sucking money out of other countries - but I have no idea how it is now and if it's just correcting for past abuses of feathering US employee's nests at the expense of unemployment in other countries).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Maybe they tought Watson to program?
You guys are bitching that the tech firms are hiring the Indians and look at yourselves ... you can't even spell correctly !
That "and" should be "yet". The ellipsis should be a hyphen or a semicolon. There shouldn't be a space before the exclamation mark.
We'll keep your resume on file, AC.
Why is IBM throwing people away instead of re-training them?
My guess it that they are dumping hardware folks, and hiring software folks.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
There are a lot. I've worked for them for a year and a bit and a bunch of people started around the same time in development and services. The hiring for Watson is just starting and getting a lot of attention.
Just because corporations lie all the time, it doesn't mean they won't stop lying someday ...
IBM is well known for outsourcing and abusing H1-B and to a lesser extent L1 and L2 visas.
Mind you, Microsoft is worse.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There is a lot of truth to that, however some of those old codgers have knowledge and skill sets you can't find anymore.
There are a few new tech companies that have seeded their start up with poached old codgers from some of these companies. The result is a much greater depth of technical knowledge. And that has resulted in some products that are profoundly more innovative.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Read his latest blog posting on their tailspin:
http://www.cringely.com/2014/01/23/ibm-sells-intel-server-business-company-doomed/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ibm-sells-intel-server-business-company-doomed
I got laid off from IBM almost 7 years ago, and my initial reaction was "Free at last!" Luckily I found a good job where I worked before them, and using the tech I learned at IBM. Typically, they sent my job to one of their cheap facilities in Brazil, and expected me to bring those guys up to speed in my last 30 days ... yeah, right.
My former manager told me a couple years later that the client, a rather large auto company working through a big gummint bailout, got fed up with the scant tech knowledge of the platform, and communications problems (on our "team" phone chats before I left, all the Brazilians used Skype, and there was an annoying constant buzzing sound from that, never mind the thickly accented English I could barely understand, if at all), and demanded the work be done back in the US by the guy I mentored.
I think Cringe is dead on in his analysis: IBM is run by short-sighted, selfish management that is only looking to the next quarter's numbers, and how soon they can bail out with golden parachutes as they eat up the seed corn. They have even been calculating just how much they can break contracts and labor laws weighing the short-term profits against the penalties and fines they have to pay when caught out by customers or the law.
Free at last!
M isn't for Machine's it's Math. The more you know yada yada
more recent and relevant education on new technology ... one old codger who can't handle change
There must be some fancy Latin phrase for "reasoning by stereotype". In legalese it's "assumes facts not in evidence". In plain English it's called spouting bullshit.
Wrong group dumbass, thatwould have been Ozzie in his solo career. Black Sabbath did not release Crazy Train, it came out in the 80's which is AFTER Ozzie was kicked out of the group.
Get a clue! IBM India was hit with layoffs earlier this month. So was Malaysia, Belgium, Argentina, Brazil, Netherlands, Norway, France, Italy, and Scotland. No one is immune from the wrath of Big Blue.
That's funny (as well as being a good point) but India already got hit with layoffs. Labor laws in India being what they are, the layoff's there were harsher with employees given hours to return their laptops and leave the premises.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
An outsourcing tax would just result in jinking with the books so that it wasn't "really" outsourcing and any money generated would just go to the government. If they had to cut H1B visas they'd have to hire regular employees.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
I work at IBM in a low cost country (but none of those you mentioned), and I love it, it is really an empowering company that leverages the skills of those willing to, providing the tools, the mentoring and the environment to develop.
Nevertheless, I think that is not the case in the US and in some other countries that managed to be left behind in the tech skills race, as in the West Europe.
US workers have completely lost pace in hard skills development but the quietus resides in the fact that most of the population in the US/UK dont know any foreign language, and those who do, they are not techies.
Dust off the books and you'll get back in business, US.
Open your eyes, dude :-) the best talent in the US has left IBM in the last decade, for companies like Google and even MSFT. There are a few skilled lifers left, but IBM, like Battlestar Galactica, has her back broken really bad. She will never jump again.
The 2014 layoffs in Bangalore caught every one by surprise. Open your eyes, your site will be next before you see it coming.
You can't sell your products/services locally!
You can do this right now, it's called a boycott.
You said you can't use paper money to get worthwhile things in the USA. So how do you get those worthwhile things?
IBMer here posting as AC, yeah I know but. (I do have 5 digit Slashdot ID.)
So I didn't get RA'd today but would eventually if I stayed, which I will not.
The real issue here is the boneheaded "Road to 2015" where Ginny Rometti and her predecessor Sam Palmisano pulled one of the most Kafkaesque things I've ever seen at IBM. To net it out, they promised Wall Street that they would reach $20 EPS by 2015, through a combination of profits and stock buybacks. They also promised $20B in revenue growth. That drove the share price immediately from ~$120 to >$200, although it's down to $180 now. But needless to say, all the execs with compensation tied to share price were sweetly remunerated for this. In a true irony, the decision to do this in the first place was because they had successfully done it with a prior $10/EPS goal a few years before, mostly via cost reductions, not value delivery.... so essentially they were doubling down on behavior that was arguably stupid the first time.
Now it's 2014 and revenue has actually been flat or DOWN since that Road to 2015 proclamation. What does IBM do? Do they say, "Well, we didn't make the revenue number so we can't achieve the EPS target"? Hell no -- they reaffirm the EPS target as though the revenue doesn't matter. So to get there, the whole organization is now run like a hedge fund, comparing numbers on a spreadsheet to define strategy. Naturally that dictates a decision to raise all your prices and slash your expenses. And that means screwing over the customers AND the employees, including the good ones -- which are still the vast majority. Wages are flat, annual bonuses have gone from 15% to 8% to nothing this year. Expense reimbursements (phone, home office, Internet) have been discontinued, and they even changed 401k matching from per-paycheck to year-end, so they get to play with the money all year, and deny it to anyone not actively employed on December 15. (Of course this makes layoffs all the more attractive.)
The result is the quality of stuff from IBM has gone to complete shit. I am not exaggerating. There simply aren't enough qualified people to deliver on the brand promise that created the "You'll never get fired for buying IBM" mantra. Honestly our technical debt in every important area scares the hell out of me, and customers are catching on. Every decision is based on, "Is there a contract that needs this?" rather than, "Is this the right way to develop product/services?"
Look, I'm no armchair quarterback and I don't expect any organization to be perfect. Criticizing execs is the classic lazy crutch of the worker. But this is simply the complete raping of an historic American company. We stood for something. Yes the international part was central to it, and we embraced it -- I've been to every part of the planet and met people so talented it is humbling. But now it's just geo-arbitrage and, as some have mentioned, not the top quality talent pursuit that used to be our hallmark. Make it cheap, do just enough to barely keep the customers from fleeing, and dammit MAKE THAT $20 EPS NUMBER IN 2015.
IBM has too much clout and too many government contracts to crater completely... but the crisis is coming and it's not going to be pretty. Ginny and her clique are going to oversee the hollowing out of IBM, and that's not good for anyone, even them. They'll get rich and move on like Palmisano did, but their legacy will be the destruction of IBM.
yep, it is true indeed, I know some key bright people in the US that moved to MSFT and FB, however couple things, on the one hand IBM is mirroring the market, meaning diversity at every place and every level, hence improving business practices and costumes in Geos that are not so attractive from the biz standpoint, and would otherwise find more difficult to develop. Then we have the possibility of the corp laying me off sometime in the future, and that is actually something we need to live with, if the time comes... well... I now speak 3 languages, taken lessons from a massive amount of subjects, gotten certifications from IBM and others, ie Oracle, acquired experience of global operations, team leadership, personal work-life balance, etc... and all that have to be worth some money not only for IBM
Have never worked for IBM but I have worked with IBMers on various projects mostly at Sterling Forest.
Best wishes to all of them.
Sig for hire.
Since they are essentially a "New York Company" they tended to get a lot of state contracts. Because of this, it would be a big mistake for IBM to lay off too many employees within the state. Right now there are IBM consultants working in many state agencies, babysitting mainframes. Consultants are pretty much free money for IBM; if there were suddenly a huge pool of IBM trained individuals entering the local job market, it'd be easy to replace the expensive consultants with cheaper ex-IBM employees (via cheaper consulting firms, or direct hire) of comparable skill.
he does do the needful, though.
so he has that going for him, which is nice.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
You forgot Poland, with over 5000 white IBM indians. And growing.
$5 Billion Semiconductor Fab in India where, presumably low-wage robots(?) will use backward and primitive equipment (oh, no... wait... it'll be brand new high-quality equipment) to make chips... beacuase, you know, they may be preparing to lay-off thousands of people in New York state (the article, and others indicate hundreds, but also note they have assured New York they will keep about 3K jobs in the state, where they currently are reported to have about 7K) , but they just cannot POSSIBLY find enough skilled tech workers in the US and desperately need to have more H1B visas to help them push down wages.
If you are a geek/nerd/engineer (working for ANY firm, not just IBM... they affect the "standard" wages) you need to SERIOUSLY hassle your congress critters to squash H1Bs and outsourcing (which the giant firms are using to suppress ALL tech/engineering wages and benefits) and make them more worried about YOUR VOTES than about "Big Blue's" money. Your wages and benefits are aleady lower because they have been doing this, and each and every day you are working is a day you are not getting dollars you should have been and that you will never recover. You will have less stuff in your youth and a poorer retirement when you are old... and the guys on Wall St will be enjoying the yachts they "earned" by suppressing your pay.
Nice troll.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
IBM has decided the only way it can make money is to buy and sell other people's companies. Keep the ones it likes, rebrand them and send most of the workforce overseas. For the ones it doesn't like sell them to foreign companies. Forget making 'things', even forget services. Just buy newer companies, typically software and smaller niche industry companies that combine specialized hardware and a narrow service focus for a specific task. Slap a Websphere or IBM Security or Tivoli name on it, push it out into the market arena and see what happens for 2 years. If it works, great, if not, toss it in the bin or sell it to China if there's a hardware component.
Roadmap 2015 almost guarantees that IBM will have near zero US employment soon, and as far as being a US or NYS company? That's paperwork. Become an India based holding company. May as well sell the services division to them soon - they're eating IBM's lunch because customers only care about cost and price, that's it. There is almost no value add for IBM proficiency in the services business. Customers don't care what works and what doesn't as long as everyone is protected by SLAs and insurance. Crappy is good enough. So when IBM waltzes in with a squadron of people to hawk the micromanagement that IBM does like no one else, customers ask "Well that's great but I'm not paying twice as much for an hour or two more uptime each quarter."
The basic problem is that Ginni Rometty is in over her head. But it's not her fault it's the fault of a culture that only looks inward for executive talent. Only lifers need apply. Moreover the senior executives behave like pirates: they are simply disconnected from the realities around them unless they're stripping assets and selling off pieces of the company. SEVEN straight quarters of declining revenues and the best thing Ginni can come up with is sell the low end server biz, the MCC div and of course fire another 5,000 people. Because when you're an IBM lifer that's the only thing they've ever done, the only thing they know how to do.
We IBMers know it, the press knows it, the analysts know it, Customers are beginning to figure it out... but after 2015, what? 40$EPS by 2020?!?
Oh.. we can play that game. Engaging rant:
This old codger who can't handle change started out on mainframes writing missile guidance code, made the transition to minis, then to UNIX systems, and now I write code for you latest portable devices. I've seen and done it all.. in production, not school.. microcode, assembler, C, right up through C# and Java. Don't have a linker or a loader? Get writing. You think you're working on a problem? You've been working on that code for a few days or a week? Son, real problems take a fucking year for a team to solve!
And you know what? Age discrimination does not bother me, the lack of mental agility, flexibility, and work ethic of my coworkers under thirty does. They're fucking lazy. Intellectually lazy. Get your ass to work on time lazy. Ambition lazy. For every genuine whiz kid I'll show you a thousand of these apathetic excuses for an engineer. The same dumbasses who can't work with multivariable calculus without Matlab. What disturbs me even more is that they don't have transferrable skills; instead of concentrating on principles, even higher ranked engineering schools seem to be turning out kids who know the current fad, the tools used in that fad errr technology platform, and how to contrive some simplistic systems.
In my generation the comp sci folks weren't comp sic, they were physics, math, and other branches of hard science and engineering. A year of calc, a shot of statistics, and a course in discrete? What a joke. Yes, that's the ACM requirements for a BS.
So, I personally don't have a problem finding jobs.. I'm sure some other of us old ones do.. but as a 5'10" version of Jack Palance, all I've got to say in my case is 'bring it'.. on all levels. One of the side-effects of being a soldier early in life is the never-say-die attitude, which can also work against you.
Oh, and another thing, why is it so many of you 'engineers' and 'computer scientists' don't actually seem to know how to apply formal methods for mission critical stuff?
And whatever happened to people who knew their way around a machine shop and how to solder? No, doing the 'makers' bullshit doesn't count, nor do all of those lame-ass cold solder joints on that project from Nuts and Volts last month. And why don't more of you read Dr Dobbs?
Sorry for the rant. I need some coffee; y'all caught me uncaffienated. And for what it's worth, I'm fully ready and prepared to retire and make room for the rest of you; I'm just counting down the days to 65. For all the venom above, you kids have been handed a shit sandwich, and all I can say is 'fight the good fight'. I came right after the baby boomers, and they sold me out too.
Why don't all these layed off IBM folks - and other layed off IT people just band together and start their own IT company(ies) and compete with these folks. The big corporations are going to kill off the best and brightest for the cheapest. So you get what you pay for - seen it many times. You pay very little you get little quality - PERIOD. The pitch these newly formed companies could use is "quality first" (hmmm heard that before somewhere....). Don't give customers fully buggy cr@p! show them you can give them better quality products. I mean if their going to pay big $$$ would they prefer a quality product over some POS? Hell I'd pack up and leave to help form one of these companies, I just don't have the business knowledge to do so, I'm a technical guy. Some I've heard say unionize tech workers - that won't work - unions are being dismantled.
IBM is laying off people everywhere. Not just in the US or India. Every GDC (Global Delivery Center) around the world is cutting jobs at an alarming pace. It's part of the "exciting journey" Ginny Rometty has invited us all to share. It essentially consists of fixing a high enough economic goal for the year, not reaching it, and then skip paying the productivity-tied bonus for 99% of the employees. It also makes wonders when you have to justify the massive layoffs. Also you can sell smoke to the techs by forcing them to take useless courses when you are at the semi-senior level (the Think 40 initiative), and not handing them any type of high skilled trainings. all in the name of the productivity...
Their cloud-based future aims to have many scarcely trained monkeys building virtual machines from a web frontend and then just a few of medium-to-highly trained techs in the back end solving the performance and connectivity issues. I guess Amazon has taught them a valuable lesson...
Novartis, one of the major global accounts IBM has, is leaving the company on December. It represented over 14K servers in 17 datacenters across the whole globe. When asked why, they said they were pretty happy with the service, but they wanted LOWER rates per human resource. So as you see it's not just a matter of IBM not wanting to pay for genuine talent, but also a matter of the big players in the money game not wanting to give a penny for that genuine talent.
OK, I know I might be over-simplifying stuff here, because what IBM wants from outsourcing is paying as low as they can while charging the customers as high as they are willing to pay, but it's worth mentioning everyone in the big money game has been trying to stretch their profits at the expenses of the workforce as much as they can, and this has been exacerbated in the last decade or so.
... is the capacity of the employees to subsist with lower and lower wages. This isn't about a job position being "inefficient". This is about getting less and less people working for more hours with a lower pay to fulfill the same work goals. And that basically ends in a sweatshop.
Your whole statement is moronic as it could be, and reveals you are in a very comfortable position, you don't care for your co-workers and you have ultimately bought the whole "freedom of opportunity" bullshit. Work should be equally distributed between all the employees, and they should make a salary decent enough to allow them not just to survive, but to expect a certain level of progress in their lives.
I worked for IBM for 29 years, straight out of college, starting in 1976. I left on my own after watching the downhill slide for a while.
It should be obvious to every IBMer in the country - you will be laid off eventually. Your performance rating doesn't matter, what you are doing doesn't matter, your time will come. You can't plan on working them for the rest of your career.
So start looking, and jump when you find the right job. Don't worry about where you are in a project, don't feel you are letting the team down if you go. IBM doesn't care about you, why should you care about them.
Take a look at the Forbes list of 100 best places to work. Surf their sites, find where you fit, and make it your mission to get there. There are companies out there that care. I work for one in the top 10, they've been there for a while, and the difference between here and IBM is night and day. I'd never go back.
In fact, even though I can retire I really have no desire to, I'm having way to much fun here. Something I NEVER said at IBM.
No doubt companies are not dumb as politicians about keeping their money. Its all about survival these days, as much cutting that has been done and companies are now beginning to see shrinking profit margins again. Cuomo keeps talking about incentives to keep businesses in New York State but it really goes far beyond what he can do. His actions do not speak about saving people money. Raising tolls, increased taxes, general increases in cost of living in the NE don't help keep businesses in the North East States.
As an actual IBMer from a developing country, I couldn't agree more to your statements. IBM migrated from a stand-by-our-products company to be a stock-trading firm. They are looking to make more intelligent systems in the hope they could replace all the human workforce in some near future, and just keep low-level technical employees from whichever corner of the planet they could get the lower wages.
Let's not forget Pat Cronin, the mother of the failed "Global Delivery Framework", which aimed to replace the IDs of every IBMer in contact with a customer for generic ones, so they would become the IT equivalent of a call center operator, and would allow moving the delivery from one country to the next one based solely in the rate per resource... Well, turned out the customers wanted to know who did what in their servers, and they wanted to have somebody to yell at when things didn't work as expected... So now they pulled the "Client First" initiative out of their magic hat, which turns out gives nothing valuable to the customer, since it cuts the most experienced workers out...
I'm on my late-30s, worked my way up from nonlinear Physics to Linux (because we needed a reliable distributed calculus platform) and then to UNIX. While I realized I would be mediocre in the field of Physics, I have to acknowledge the scientific method gave me an edge over my younger coworkers when it comes to facing a problem. As you said, adaptation is a key word in the IT business, but also the greed for new knowledge is another key factor. And I'm not talking about just learning the basics of the latest programming trend, I'm talking about the will to MASTER that new knowledge and BEING ABLE TO TEACH IT to the junior guys. Now the one of the problems is the knowledge transfer chain breaks just one step beyond you, since those freshmen don't have the skills or the will to pass those newly learned facts and procedures to the guy sitting next to them.
the best talent in the US has left IBM in the last decade
The best talent in the US was out of IBM by the mid 1980s.
I work at IBM in a low cost country (but none of those you mentioned), and I love it, it is really an empowering company that leverages the skills of those willing to, providing the tools, the mentoring and the environment to develop.
Nevertheless, I think that is not the case in the US and in some other countries that managed to be left behind in the tech skills race, as in the West Europe.
US workers have completely lost pace in hard skills development but the quietus resides in the fact that most of the population in the US/UK dont know any foreign language, and those who do, they are not techies.
Dust off the books and you'll get back in business, US.
What a load of crap.
For starters, if you work for IBM at one of those low cost countries, you work in one of five places:
Brazil, Russia, India, China, Argentina.
Most of the people from IBM I've worked with in those areas are terrible. Most of them don't have the hard skills that you're lambasting people in the US for. Most of the IT workers there don't know how to do something unless you give them explicit instructions. There's very little critical thinking going on. Even those in those countries I've worked with AFTER IBM have generally been terrible. A monitoring team I trained up was generally less than useless. They could not follow the most basic of instructions and often had serious personality issues.
;-) I left 2 1/2 years ago (after nearly 15 years with IBM) when the writing was already on the wall. Your characterization of what happened at IBM is completely correct from my perspective. I will be happy when none of my friends work for IBM any more because then these layoff announcements will hurt less.
I do miss some aspects of working at IBM - the people and the vacation, but, as they say, life is better on the outside.
I hate to break it to you, but if you're going to correct someone on facts, you should at least get your spelling right. His name is "Ozzy" (Osbourne), not "Ozzie". You're thinking of some old TV show called "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet".
Customers pay for value.
Value is fixing technical problems that helps customers do business.
Haapy techies fix customer problem, fired techies and fareast newbies don't.
IBM is sacrificing tech for stock price.
Customers will leave whem their problems is not fixed.
IBM will have great earnings on nothing.
0 * a lot = 0
R.I.P. IBM.
Another former IBMer here, also with a 5-digit Slashdot ID. But I left years and years ago when I saw where things were headed.
Way back in the day, IBM was a technology company first. TJ Watson drove the company and took massive chances on things like the 360. IBM regularly bet the company on new ideas and regularly took chances with big projects and big ideas.
These days IBM management really has no clue where they're driving the company nor about technology. We used to have a black joke that IBM management wouldn't invest in a new technology until they saw it on the cover of Businessweek, but they've lived up to that recently.
To give you idea of what's gone wrong at IBM I'd direct you to a (paywalled) article at the WSJ from last month and summarized well at http://annexresearch.wordpress.... The key point to see how well management has performed is to look at the amount of stock IBM has outstanding. It's gone from 2.3B shares in 1995 to around 1.1B today. Do the math on how much money that represents and you can see that what IBM management has been "investing in" has been stock repurchases, not new products. That IBM management can't find anything better to do with their money shows just how out of touch with technology they are.
So call me a victim of "the classic lazy crutch of the worker" if you will, but I'm quite able to show you a raft of companies that have created innovations and value with far, far less than IBM has spent on stock repurchases.
Earlier this year, slashdot featured an article about how IBM is dumping "a billion dollars and thousands of researchers" into a new Watson group based out of New York City.
... What?
Now, less than two months later, they're axing half of their New York work force? And their explanation is that they're shuffling their investments into new areas of technology, such as cognitive computing? Isn't that what Watson is?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Hahaha, we get so many "can you do the needful" replies from our Indian teams it's hilarious. Thanks for that GN.
I agree, Cringely talks like he actually works at IBM - he's completely right about everything that's happening. It's very sad considering the institution of integrity that IBM once was. It's now run by crooks and scoundrels. Thomas Watson would be in tears....very sad, indeed.
The technical debt scares me too. What angers me: you speak to the engineers who actually (would) write the code - and they would... if not spending time in meetings to justify it and been told: don't
Obviously, these jobs were cut because there were not enough skilled STEM employees available. This is a clear sign we need more H1Bs.
IBM stands for International Business Machine. International means that it does not call USA home. It means it follows the market and where it can find the lowest of the low salaries.
If you poor down your society (as is happening in the USA and elsewhere) , that society will not have the money to buy your goods and services. I call that aspect, the "Walmarting of America"
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
An employer needs to have staff to setup,maintain,improve services to others and to itself. It benefits from a motivated workforce, but is obsessed with cutting costs over increasing efficiency. An Employee needs to have a job to allow him to be a consumer at the store, a parent to the next generation and so much more... an element of local society. He/She provides time to the employer who needs to use that resource efficiently as possible for yesterdays, todays and tomorrows challenges. Fast forward to today. The employer is obsessed with cutting costs, and loses sight of efficiency and productivity goals and only presses their employees to pass on their knowledge to lower paid workers, with the illusion of promotions and advances at the workplace. Is it best then for an employee to quicklly and efficiently train someone where the wages are rising, and not require the local employee to be productive? Are we doomed by leadership that does not seek productivity and efficiency over cost and global exposure? Too often we end up withtoo many managers and no one to guide coherent policies, consistent methodologies, and in short a sane working environment. Real work is not appreciated, and, as such its getting done less frequently. Rush a project get a promotion, leave a stinky turd in the wake for others to suffer. Bitter? Yeah.. we still have the same challenges as 20 years ago. It was 1970 that we went to the moon. What have we done lately?
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.