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Massive Layoff Underway At IBM
Tekla Perry writes: Project Chrome, a massive layoff that IBM is pretending is not a massive layoff, is underway. At more than 100,000 people, it is projected to be the largest mass layoff by any U.S. corporation in at least 20 years. Alliance@IBM, the IBM employees' union, says it has so far collected reports of 5000 jobs eliminated, but those are just numbers of those getting official layoff notices. According to anecdotal reports, IBM appears to be abusing the performance appraisal system to cut additional employees without officially laying them off.
I know a company has to be profitable to keep people employed, but jeez, work with the unions to retain employees who increase shareholder value!
And other buzzwords.
Can't keep people if there is not enough work for them to do. My experience tells me that when people have time to doodle and hang out in large numbers it is time to refresh the resume and start calling friends in high places.
Looks like it could be my last...
Somehow, I don't think the blog post quoted in the Forbes article is the official stance of IBM corporate PR:
Response from IBM (via its Hong Kong office’s blog):
IBM does not comment on rumors or speculation. However, we’ll make an exception when the speculation is stupid. That’s the case here, where an industry gadfly is trying to make noise about how IBM is about to lay off 26 percent of its workforce. That’s over 100,000 people, which is totally ludicrous.
Despite claiming to be an "official" IBM blog, I don't believe a corporate PR person would say that speculation is stupid or refer to an industry gadfly making noise.
We just can't find enough tech workers here in the USA! Honest!
Love sees no species.
Layoff is the most disingenuous patronizing goddamned thing these rich assholes could say. Call it what it is. You don't want to give up a yacht this year, so you're firing a city the size of boulder Colorado. Call me cynical, but the ship is officially sinking.
Good people go to bed earlier.
It is disgusting really, and it's all about satisfying Wall Street. Read Cringely for more info, he's being blogging about this IBM situation for a couple of years. :-/
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Meanwhile Lenovo, the PC business they sold off that moved into tablets and smartphones is doing really well. All of the same chinese factories and technologies are available to IBM that were available to Lenovo, only the management was different. One decided it couldn't make money on making actual computer stuff, the other went ahead and made actual computer stuff.
One went a route of selling vague data mining services at high prices, a bit of patent trolling, and slow expensive lock-in mainframes. The other made stuff people want without the hard selling to dumb middle managers.
Dear Cynical,
Please refrain from discussion on a personal level regarding my recent purchase of another yacht. I would not ask you to give back the single dollar menu hamburger you are feeding your three children, that just wouldn't be ethical on my part. So I ask you please give the same respect back to your 1% overlords.
Thank you for your time in this matter,
Make it a great day!
Will they be hired at 9% cheaper?
The speculation is that IBM is trying to push the dividend to a record level. In the process they may very well destroy the company. Because the only way to get the dividend to that level is to basically wipe out long term profits for a short term boost.
That's probably the goal, the new MBA generation from the baby boomers is taking the point of view of taking every dime out of the company and giving it to the insiders even if it guts a major American corporation and hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost to China.
It's funny but the CEO from the Movie Dick and Jane reminds me so much of these CEO's that are only out for themselves, yet he was supposed to be fictional.
This isn't the first time that IBM has done mass layoffs and it won't be the last. This is to be expected, to be surprised by it is to not learn from IBM's own history(Sure you can keep your job, but we need you to move to Southeast Asia and we're going to pay you Southeast Asian wages. Oh, you don't want that? Here's your severance package.).
They needed to find some way to afford the bonus to the CEO and her lieutenants for all the "value" they delivered in 2014.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-ibm-redefines-20150202-column.html
If there's one person at IBM who deserved a bottom performance rank it's their CEO.
you're firing a city the size of boulder Colorado
A ironic comparison as the city of Boulder is firing themselves every day, if you know what I mean.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And so the robo-employment apocalypse begins.
Nobody will abuse a time off policy where there are no vacation days and time is taken as needed. If it is abused it can be addressed by the performance review process.
I always understood how that will stop employees from abusing the "as needed" vacation policy.
I never understood what will stop the employer from abusing it. Until now.
The guy who lied about having a PhD from Stanford, and of being an early Apple employee? Who 20 years ago had a humor column in a now-defunct magazine, before John Dvorak took it over?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
I'm sure many Slashdot readers will be directly affected by this, either being laid off themselves, surviving the layoffs only to go work in turmoil every day, or have their spouse or other loved one laid off. That's hard to deal with. Times will get better, of course, but it sure may not seem like it right now. Our hearts go out to you.
Didn't the CEO get a +$15 million bonus just the other day, plus a 100k pay increase? The money has to come from somewhere...
Where is this 100,000 number coming from? The linked article says 5,000 are documented, and then asserts without proof that the full number is/will be 100,000.
Until there's more evidence, I don't believe the 100,000 number.
What ever happened to skepticism (in the original, benign sense of the word) or critical thinking skills?
(This is NOT an assertion that there will be substantially less than 100,000 layoffs. So please, no one claim I'm saying that.)
Maybe Watson can help them file for bankruptcy protection once it and the CEO are the only employees left.
I know a company has to be profitable to keep people employed...
IBM's net profit in FY2014 was $15.75B (down from $16.48B in FY2013).
IBM is just leveraging growth opportunities in the cloud to core competencies and strategic initiatives. They are executing a bold plan that will address urgent customer needs through CAMSS (Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social and Security). It is an exciting and prescient vision and a great time to be at IBM!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
These Koch-sucking idiots don't realize that fucking people over will have consequences. 4 or 5 people are getting richer, 100,000 people are getting laid off, and there are psychopaths all over the country who believe that's a good thing. I wish we could dope the water supply with antipsychotics.
If you have a 401(k) or any kind of mutual fund investment, you are part of Wall Street. That's how the system works, it's not spinning in a vacuum. That 6% return you got last year did not fall from the sky, it ended up in your pockets because institutional shareholders put pressure on companies like IBM to help the stock price and/or pay more dividends.
lucm, indeed.
Sometimes some management forgets that employees are stakeholders just like the people who have invested their savings are. In this case, IBM has had 11 consecutive quarters (three years) of falling sales. If they don't take decisive action to turn things around, the company will be gone and everyone will be out of a job. They haven't been able to keep brining in the money selling the old products and services, cloud services are keeping them alive for now but Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple dominate cloud, so there is no guarantee that IBM will be able to exist on cloud revenue five years from now. It sucks, but the truth is, IBM hasn't kept their customers happy, and with the customers leaving there isn't money to pay workers. On the other hand, Apple is opening a huge new data center where some ex-IBM staff might work, and several companies are expanding operations in Texas.
“I was included in the resource action in spite of consistently high performance numbers. I am the only woman in the work group and one of only a handful in the whole region. The male partners that were retained have crucial chummy drinking buddy relationships with their customers. The treatment and support of professional women, in spite of the window dressing at the top layers is appalling.”
if the drinking buddy relationship is crucial and you haven't maintained said relationships, then don't you think that's why you're being fired? If you are unwilling to maintain this crucial customer relationship, why should you be retained? Is there some reason why women can't be good drinking buddies too?
They're behind this, I tells ya! They had this in the works since 1981!
right?
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
They didn't need to do this to stay profitable. They're running 20% gross margin and a profit margin of 12.9%.
Yep, same cat.
Yep, same cat.
He basically says that since IBM is going downhill and losing market share, they should just continue to do what they are doing now, with the same people.
I bought absolutely nothing from IBM in the last 10 years. I plan to buy nothing from them in the next 10 years. I use none of their services. So it makes sense to me for them to become a smaller company.
This would be forbidden in a civilized society. At the very least this would call for a bailout to the people loosing their life livehood.
They didn't need to do this to stay profitable.
Companies exist to produce profits, not to provide employment. If an employee is not providing net value, then it is better for the company, and the overall economy, for that employee to go somewhere else. In the long run, it is better for the employee as well.
Is this another case of vitality curve management? GE's Jack Welch was the quintessential example of this policy and is considered one of the most effective company leaders ever.
Unless you worked at GE and were condemned to watch the layoffs year after year until you were finally canned due to being part of the bottom 10% -- or watching the dysfunctional games people played because of the policy
Around the time of the first dotcom crash in 2000, a wiseacre named Pud Kaplan started fuckedcompany.com, a blog covering press reports of failing companies mostly in the tech sector. There was a very active forum where similar-minded people anonymously chimed in to gleefully stomp on company graves and the careers of their CEOs, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.
One guy (or maybe it was several) commemorate each failed dotcom with the same eulogy:
They had a vision
C'mon people! Let's give these guys a break. They had a vision for something great and they tried their best to make it happen. Not every business succeeds, in fact almost many fail. They had the guts, the vision and the nerve to be great.
Yep, same cat.
He basically says that since IBM is going downhill and losing market share, they should just continue to do what they are doing now, with the same people.
I bought absolutely nothing from IBM in the last 10 years. I plan to buy nothing from them in the next 10 years. I use none of their services. So it makes sense to me for them to become a smaller company.
If you aren't a big company they probably don't make anything you can possibly buy anyway. They have sold off their printer division, their PC division, hell even their server division!
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
After the last layoffs/firings/whatever, I'm surprised that there's anyone left at IBM. I'm guessing that in this round, a whole bunch of lifers would be gone, and w/ them, any knowledge of legacy systems that only IBM knows & does.
It is disgusting really, and it's all about satisfying Wall Street. Read Cringely for more info, he's being blogging about this IBM situation for a couple of years. :-/
It's been happening for years. During record profit times in the 90s instead of investing in the company they issues record shareholder returns. In leaner times the shareholders demanded the same returns so that is when the chopping began.
The performance system has long been used as a justification for things, especially why you would not be getting a pay rise. I'm sorry, even though your 'individual' performance was a 1 your entire business group only achieved a 3 so you are not eligible for a pay rise, please encourage your colleagues to do better i.e really *be* the asshole.
Innovative, Bastard Managers.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
They didn't need to do this to stay profitable.
Companies exist to produce profits, not to provide employment. If an employee is not providing net value, then it is better for the company, and the overall economy, for that employee to go somewhere else. In the long run, it is better for the employee as well.
You do know that layoffs lead to your most experienced productive staff leaving, because it's easy for them to get employment elsewhere right? So while a big corp thinks layoffs are a way of losing the chaff, it's more effective at losing the wheat. Slowly hiring if you want to grow and slowly losing staff through attrition if you want to get smaller is the right way. If your business sucks, get your staff to start new ones internally. If they're competent, they'll have plenty of ideas.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I was told recently that IBM is building a site in Raleigh NC. So I'm a bit confused of this news when I hear building and cutting.
Now we know what happens to IBM employees when people stop buying IBM equipment.
These cocksuckers are actually Democrats who gave Obama almost a million dollars to help him get reelected.
http://influenceexplorer.com/o...
How has six or seven years of Obama worked out for the workers at IBM?
Not living in the US myself, but I thought the US government was telling everyone that the US economy was doing great?
Can someone on Slashdot, who's actually living and working in the US, paint a picture without the government propaganda?
The mountains of madness have many little plateaus of sanity - Terry Pratchett.
the stock price will go up.
The article says only 5,000 have been laid off, but "the rest are being laid off without being laid off." That sounds like hand-waving to me. I suspect the truth is somewhere in between the two numbers.
You do know that layoffs lead to your most experienced productive staff leaving, because it's easy for them to get employment elsewhere right?
No. IBM is not asking for volunteers. They are cutting their under-performers. Employees usually know which of their coworkers are deadwood, and if done right, some pruning can lead to a morale boost. The big risk is if you don't cut deep enough and have to come back for another round.
Right, but if you are the top 10% performance rating and you see layoffs, you start looking. Regardless of how much profit they are making, you see that they are going to grow their profit by downsizing and that says a lot right there to someone with a long career ahead of them: 1) it may one day be you, 2) They're probably going to "core competancy" themselves into stagnation, your skills will degrade and you will get bored, 3) If you were upwardly mobile, your chances of promotion are going to shrink, 4) New projects, new development, etc. are all going to be shelved in place of band-aids for what exists, not good for you personally, 5) They'll use this as an excuse to reduce bonuses and give fewer RSUs/stock options, you probably can get a better deal elsewhere.
In a nutshell there's never a good reason to stay around a company that is laying off like this. The only reason is comfort.
not 100,000. But the media will report it as more, with little proof to back it up, because bigger numbers are more impressive even if it's not true.
You can only expect people to buy the "most of world's data is stored on IBM mainframes" crap for so long. Virtualization made mainframes irrelevant. No one ever needed the full resources of a mainframe. They were only used to run multiple virtualized instances. The cloud made the difference between instances running on one piece vs instances running on multiple pieces of iron irrelevant because of cloud storage. You CAN compute a billion transactions in a day and then not use the hardware used for those calculations for the rest of the day now. Mainframe model simply can't compete with it. Oh, and all the legacy code which is presumably irreplacable because no one understands it... well, all the language research which was done because of the domain specific language fad has now made it trivil to tranlsate solutions between languages fairly efficiently. IBM simply has lost every single niche they had up to now. It's not the death of an industry as some suggest... just of the business model of that particular company.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
No. IBM is not asking for volunteers. They are cutting their under-performers. Employees usually know which of their coworkers are deadwood, and if done right, some pruning can lead to a morale boost. The big risk is if you don't cut deep enough and have to come back for another round.
This certainly was false in my area during the last big round of layoffs. (No word yet on whether we'll be seeing layoffs this time round or not.) High performers were cut as well as low performers. You're right that we know who falls into which category -- and it is very obvious that they're not just cutting underperformers.
In addition, whenever there are ill-conceived layoffs in process, there are always some employees that decide that they have had enough of taking on extra work while waiting for the axe to fall on themselves, and jump ship of their own accord. We've seen a couple of those already, and they tend to be high performers themselves -- since they're the ones who are confident of being able to find another job.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
For what it's worth, Cringely is still the only guy actually saying 26% (around 110,000). Most are pinning this at maybe 8,000 or so, even with the employee shuffling and bad performance reviews. It is certainly not likely that all 26% will be gone by 2/28 as Cringely specifically stated. Still not great that IBM is laying off, but they always lay off this time of year. The only reason this story got legs was because Cringely made up a huge number to get clicks.
er.....unions? Not here in the US. No IBM union.
If IBM is so full of deadwood that they need to get rid of them, then that means there is probably deadwood everywhere. And if anything, there's one thing we know for certain: deadwood is very apt at keeping only deadwood around (read: nepotism, drinking buddies, you-are-one-of-us, etc).
Is it perhaps a little too optimistic to suggest that dismissed employees found a competing company to rival their former employer? If all these layoff are just to appease shareholders, that means IBM is not doing their job. They are now in the finance game, not the science game. We already have finance companies and they contribute very little to the economy. Perhaps IBM needs to get back to what they were put there in the first place. If not, then it is time to found a company that does.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
...and yet the CEO just got a big raise after profits and revenue turned down for the 11th consecutive quarter. Go figure.
So the original article is from two weeks ago, and the followup is from last week. Shouldn't all this have already happened by now? I realize that part of the story is that IBM is using certain labels and methods to keep things on the down low, but it seems like we should've heard something more concrete by now if IBM really is getting rid of a quarter of their employees.
"hell even their server division!"
just their x86 "commodity" server division. They still make IBM big boxes which I program on (and have a smaller one at home - an iseries 520).
While I am sure there are some good techs available because of this, IBM had a massive glut of crap people that you wouldn't want unless you were absolutely desperate, the last set of layoffs saw a heap of them turn up on our door looking for jobs and we turned away every single one of them as unqualified. Maybe they got rid of all the crap in the last round of layoffs, but somehow I doubt it.
"They are cutting their under-performers"
They are cutting top performers who are in their 50's and 60's and closing in on the longevity needed for certain insurance and pension benefits.
And being top performers they are relatively well paid.
Has nothing to do with under performance, although IBM instructed their management to give an underperformance review along with the termination date so they could cut the severance in half to 13 weeks or nothing when they put them on "performance improvement needed in 30 days" plan.
Looks to me from the outside like they choose the least costly way based on management's take on need from each "resource" for transition help.
That may be true, but they're being very underhanded in the way that they're conducting these layoffs. Apparently some employees took a deal in the past couple of years that protected them from layoffs, in return for early retirement after a few years of reduced hours. The only exception was if they got the lowest score on their evaluation. Suddenly competent employees are being found incompetent, so that they can be fired.
That's one example. I don't work for IBM, never did, and after they pull this, they'll have trouble convincing anyone who has another option to work for them. They've screwed themselves for years, any agreement they make is clearly not worth the paper it's written on.
I think IBM's management must know the company is in its death throes, they're just slowly shedding people to minimize chaos.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
you obviously haven't dealt much with IBM in recent years. It is unlikely these layoffs altered the number of qualified techs on the market at all.
Yes, the same guy who is one of the most respected prognosticators and pundits of Silicon Valley - and technology in general.
where they put the card readers.
That's all.
It's not a layoff, they are just relocating jobs to India and China
If you read the fine article, you see that IBM says they don't respond to rumors and then...
Next paragraph...
IBM responds to the rumors.
Funny-- and indicative or their credibility.
It sounds like it's going to be huge layoffs- almost certainly with a high degree of age discrimination, reduced service to clients who outsourced jobs to them.
But I think IBM is dying-- can't adapt to the mobile world. So I can't entirely fault them.
But from talking to ex employees- IBM has been gutting their talented staff for at least 15 years with stack ranking, offshoring jobs to lower cost/less talented offshore resources (there are talented resources offshore-- but they do cost about $35 to $40k, not $10 to $15k).
Management continued to take high salaries.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That's because IBM hasn't made consumer products in 10 years, closer to 15. If you have bought anything from the multitude of businesses that still do rely on IBM products or services, you have indirectly supported IBM as well as benefited from their stuff.
Having worked for IBM as a contractor in the past - this.
The way they treat contractors is crap: forced time off at very short notice (so they can hit the numbers they "need" to hit); forced rate reductions at contract renewal time (take it or leave it); maximum hours per week (but I'm on call, but I'm not allowed to take time off during business hours); ...
Short version: if somebody were to offer me another contract at IBM, I would consider it. I would take it, if and only if the rate on offer was at "if they're fool enough to pay it, I'm fool enough to take it" levels. Somewhere around $5,000 an hour would probably be sufficiently enticing on a twelve month contract. It would be a similar story for a permanent full time position.
That's because IBM hasn't made consumer products in 10 years, closer to 15. If you have bought anything from the multitude of businesses that still do rely on IBM products or services, you have indirectly supported IBM as well as benefited from their stuff.
It's worse than that. I worked at a very large bank. We had absolutely no IBM equipment, software or services, although we were loaded up on Sun and Oracle.
Companies exist to produce profits, not to provide employment.
Only theoretically. Unemployed people don't buy products. They stop buying expensive fripperies (think Rational) first. Then they cut back on essentials. Finally, they starve. Trickle-down wealth is an illusion, but flood-up poverty is real. They also don't pay taxes, meaning that essential government services have to be paid out of the pockets of those who still have assets to plunder. Unless they really want to be invaded by Costa Rica.
If an employee is not providing net value, then it is better for the company, and the overall economy, for that employee to go somewhere else.
The old Libertarian Disneyland fairy-tale. Sometimes there simply isn't "somewhere else". As in the Great Depression. Supply and Demand can become really warped when there's too much demand for the supply, the suppliers can choke off the supply with little or no pain, but the demanders cannot go elsewhere or wait them out.
The standard party-line quackbacks for that, of course, are
A) Find a job that's in demand. if times are bad enough, almost no jobs are in demand, or are at best only temporary at Depression-depressed wages.
or
B) start your own company. which requires a completely different set of talents. Otherwise people would do this more often.
The company I work for is considering to outsource their service division to IBM...
Companies exist to produce profits
Nope. Companies exist for the benefit of society. There is no natural limit of liability and there is no natural corporate personhood. These are all artifices of law because it is believed that it is to the benefit of the country with those laws that such things exist.
That and only that is why companies exist.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Tell that to a Senior Lotus Administrator who got fired two weeks after getting a PBC 1 evaluation... A guy who never made serious mistakes or got a bad look from his managers... Believe me, the order getting thrown at the trenches down here is "cut as much expenses as you can". Some first line managers have better ways to deal with this shit. Others simply look at their team's salaries and begin cutting like crazy...
The problem is that management doesn't always have a clue who's a top performer or who's not. Many IBM'ers rarely see their managers now, because they work from home.
That means that lots of good employees get canned, and the lazy employees who took credit for their work keep their jobs.
... or anywhere else for that matter...
He just took a bashing from IBM for reporting it, yet there it is. Robert, sadly you were right once again.
Would somebody please go out and just fire this stupid retard Romettey who just took $10 mil for her great fucked up planning and leadership?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
That's the biggest impact. Even if they do successfully cut the bottom 10% and none of the good people, the whole approach destroys corporate culture and drives negative behaviours - particularly from the people lacking the skills/confidence to get a job elsewhere.
This will cause the great people to be rather more receptive to the approaches they'll already be receiving from competitors, and even if IBM don't ask any top performers to leave, they're going to lose many.
The less effective they are at identifying those bottom 10%, the worse that'll become, so basically they're fucked.
If you want to reduce your workforce, take out an entire division or department, make it clear that's what you're doing, and do your best to find new roles for the people you want to keep. The rest of the company will understand that far better, and be impacted by it far less.
"I know a company has to be profitable to keep people employed"
woah hold on there as long as the company has buzzwords they can reel em in on wall street and run at losses for many many years before the aftermath comes along.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
In my experience neither other employees or management are very good at identifying talent versus deadwood or at least picking the people who need to be cut. I've seen a lot of layoffs over the years it's shocking how often a layoff keeps friends of management and cuts steady workers. Very rarely have I seen just the deadwood, if any, get cut. The other issue is sometimes what seems like deadwood just has a subtler way of adding value. One time a person I thought was deadwood turned out to be an expert in a couple tools where in 40 hours they could get more done then the rest of us could collectively do in 80. Getting rid of them essentially cost us two jobs. Two higher paying jobs at that. I really think most layoffs are executed entirely wrong and its a major failure of vision. Companies trim a little people from all over if a company is doing poorly how is fewer people going to help it do better. Companies need to cut out what's not working, make a real decision, and move on. Even the employees would understand it better. Product x was losing money or product x is responsible for all of our revenue decline we had to cut it. If you are going to be doing a general cut you're probably almost better doing it draft style, start calling out birthdays until you hit your number, then letting management pick, at least that way you'll hit a couple cronies.
Last story, leaving companies and products out to protect the innocent. My current company has a bunch of products, they bought a software company that integrated, managed, and generated reports on a couple of them really well. After a year adoption was still a small percentage of total sales but growth was high, almost triple digits, and margin was 95+%, fastest growing highest margin product in the company. The way they did the integration was to stick a couple people for the software in each of the design teams so they could get info straight for the horses mouth and provide more feedback on simple things that could add more functionality to the software. A layoff came a year and a half ago, managers were told to pick dead wood, almost every one individually picked the people working on that piece of software because they didn't contribute to the managers core goal, which was the individual product. That product is now going end of sale this month. They hit almost the entire development team and have never recovered. The people who left lucked out though, most jumped to another company make a similar more agnostic product and are killing it right now.
The new thing seems to be cut one expensive, aged employee to keep two other "bodies". Managers don't "do work" thsts customer facing so they are more expendable.
This is fucking GREAT news, I don't care what the corrupt unions care, the stock price is up $4 already!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Last time I worked at IBM, there appeared to be no rhyme or reason as to why someone was picked to depart. It appeared to be a game of duck duck goose. I was sitting at my desk and someone I didn't recognize (not our manager) came in and told the guy across from me he was to be out by Wednesday. Much of our group was outsourced to India and I was given an opportunity to move from being a Unix admin to being a Web site programmer, a data center builder, or another Unix admin contract working on different systems. I spent my own money to take a relevant class and moved to the new contract. On the new contract, the admin who was our interface to the customer was let go with 3 days warning so we had to scramble to get the information she had on the customer.
Since it seemed random to me and others, we started looking and moved on. If there's no apparent way of showing your value, that you are just a cog in a big machine, then why stay?
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Yea, I had to take a 3 week furlough about 8 months after I started contracting for them. And it took 6 months before I could log in to the servers due to security checks.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
They sold the PC business.
They sold the server business.
Basically Lenovo+Lexmark is the IBM we knew after 1981 when the PC was introduced.
What's left of IBM is little more than newer (and smaller) versions of their 1960's mainframe and minicomputers. And "services". Services for what? What do they sell anymore other than warmed over AS/400's?
Basically IBM snuffed itself out.
Corporatism != Free Market
Robert X. Cringely has been predicting this for years and just wrote a recent article on the subject.
The question of "why they exist" changes depending on perspective. From the perspective of a company or perhaps it's owner, their primary motivation is profit, and without this, they simply can't exist. People typically start businesses so they can earn a living, not to improve society, despite what their PR departments say.
From a societal or government's perspective, it's generally acknowledged that productive companies are also generally beneficial to society, as they produce goods, provide employment, and generate taxes. Thus, they are both protected and well-regulated by law.
From all perspectives, it's really only charities that exist exclusively for the benefit of society, and thus are given special advantages that normal companies do not have.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Our company bought their shitting dev stack. RAD, WID, WAS... Somebody is going on golfing vacations to Scotland and it's not me.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
if I give %6 of my paycheck to a politician, that's the party I support (pretty strongly).
That's 100k more people in the IT sector who won't purchase IBM products in the future. The US has a ton of ex-IBMers who feel screwed already. It's not like they magically disappear from the work force - most of them end up in better jobs and avoid IBM products. Not a reason to keep unnecessary employees, but that hasn't been the problem for years.
> you observe that IBM's problem is that their existing business is not generating new revenue. OK, but how does firing your employees help? It seems to me that by firing their work force, IBM is closing any doors for new revenue opportunities.
The revenue from those units have been falling for quite some time, and there's no reason to think that trend will reverse. To pick a random example, one division of IBM is Global Services, which has two arms, one called IBM Global Business Services (GBS), which provides management consulting and other services. So they have a bunch of management consultants on staff. If customers aren't buying management consulting services from IBM*, they have to lay off the management consultants. If they keep people around getting paid, but not producing any revenue, they'll go out of business.
That said, what they probably haven't done a good job of is moving staff that can be moved. For example, that consulting section probably has some accountants who could move to their cloud division. That may be a poor management decision to do layoffs by division rather than by job role. Maybe there's a reason people aren't asking IBM for management advice very much anymore. :)
* I don't know how their consulting division has been doing long term, I just chose one part of the company at random to use as an example.
I understand what you're saying, and honestly they have legal (and other) responsibilities to each group. For example, the #1 legal responsibility they have to employees is to pay them. Shareholders don't have to get paid. The primary responsibility to shareholders is that executives may not enrich themselves at the expense of shareholders, such as by making a sweetheart deal with their brother to be a supplier, or just simply taking corporate (investor) money and spending it on themselves. (Salaries and benefits approved by the board are of course the exception, execs can and do get paid, obviously).
There are thousands of pages of laws and regulations covering the company's responsibilities to it's customers. Just yesterday, I think it was, we had a story on Slashdot about the New York Attorney General going after some companies who didn't fulfill their responsibility of fair dealing with their customers.
Outside of legally enforced responsibilities, there are others too. A company has a responsibility to treat employees with dignity and respect. A tech company which fails to treat employees with dignity and respect will lose their good employees and suffer by it. Several specific types of "treat employees with dignity and respect" are of course legal requirements too, such as sexual harassment and all the stuff the EEOC deals with. Companies that don't have sound policies in place in this regard find themselves on the wrong end of wrongful termination law suits and such as well.
Now the big US companies bring in cheap Indian and Chinese workers
Wait ... let me get this straight ... They are offering H1-B visas to CHINESE NATIONALS from China???
I think IBM's management must know the company is in its death throes, they're just slowly shedding people to minimize chaos.
I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Sometimes managing is about managing decline instead of managing product and people. IBM could ignore the signs and implode like a supermassive star on the cusp, or it could shed weight and slowly bleed off in a more safe way, and possibly find a niche in the process. Two companies, one who slowly died and one who resurrected themselves doing a similar downsizing approach, are AOL and Apple.
You keep forgetting these are multinational companies, run by profit hungry mogules, who would eat your liver for breakfast. They are not american, British, Canadian, Chinese or any other citizen of the world but lying cheating, polluting, waste the earth and all in or on it for a dollar christans.
Companies exist to provide products and services to the community. Typically, that involves employees. When we lose sight of this - as we obviously have - then Bad Things start to happen. Dividends become more important than providing products and services. Or share price. Or perks for top employees. Or numbers of employees. Or a hundred other metrics that confuse and lead astray those in charge - and clearly confuse the onlookers.
In layoffs like this, the bottom is cut, but the top leaves because of the lack of security for the next wave. The only way to compensate for this is to raise the wages of the top 20percent, which immediately puts them on the hit list for the next round.
Either way the company can't get the experience and training they just lost back without incurring a huge expense. So its a tumble down the hill unless they find a way to make more products with a 300% profit margin to pay for the upper managements salaries, bonuses, and stock options.
The new Power8 core prices and performance are amazing, but they have no marketing genius to make the sales. Wonder where that went.
I do a lot of business with IBM.
I made a case a few weeks ago that this constant hiring of foreign nationals that are "Easy to manage and cheap". Means you just hired a crap ton of half baked yessmen. In 10 years at the company when the American perspective is gone, all you have left is to promote these folks with "experience". You end up with yes men all through the development and engineering teams, all very pleasant people mind you. In the end, just like with the Commador Amiga management, you get mediocre, not quite good enough, and definitely not innovative next versions or high demand items.
The idea that we will just hire experts in our speciality employee from somebody else, is just asinine, but after moving around quite a bit through this economy, I've discovered most managers either do not care or do not understand the core issues.
Starting a company, requires opportunity, an opening, and investment and that old stuff called money, a business will not survive without a product to be sold, without a buyer, who has money to spend, or a well off society. But guns and knives are available in all battles.
They are cutting top performers who are in their 50's and 60's and closing in on the longevity needed for certain insurance and pension benefits.
IBM eliminated their pension plans 20 years ago. Older employees may be more expensive because they've gotten lots of raises throughout their careers, but pensions aren't an issue; IBM's retirement plans are all 401K-based now. IBM actually did what you describe about 10 years ago. The used it to get rid of the people who had been grandfathered into the old pension plan. My former manager got nailed by that as did several other middle managers and execs I knew. I was in the transitional group. They dumped our pensions and instead gave us a one-time payout into a 401K (I got like $80K), plus set up a reasonably-generous 401K matching program, which they later made less generous (though still not bad, honestly).
I suppose older workers may use medical insurance more heavily (like most big companies, IBM is self-insured), but I'd think by their 60's that's actually declining since their kids are no longer on the insurance.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Companies exist for the benefit of society
Nice little fantasy world you live in there.
You do know that layoffs lead to your most experienced productive staff leaving, because it's easy for them to get employment elsewhere right?
Why yes. That's why IBM can do this, I'd be surprised if they had any "experienced productive" staff left.
Actually, I got great support from the iSeries guys about a dozen years ago when I was working on them for an employer, but I'm sure that's changed since then. And, also, since then, I haven't seen IBM gear on another job.
That is all.
If corporations want to be people, then corporations are sociopaths.
Corporations take from the environment - did IBM pay for the roads that lead to their businesses? How much of their gear is connected to the Internet, which is a US government/government sponsored university invention. But we're always told "corporations need to take take take only never give".
That is one kind of capitalism, not the only kind. The Japanese practice stakeholder capitalism, which means you think about everyone involved. You might say "hey look at their economy", but they shot themselves in the foot with bad fiscal policy and they have horrible demographics. Stakeholder capitalism is not doing them in.
If done right....are the operative words. The problem is that it rarely is, at least in my experience. Sad to say but it often comes down to who is buddies with the boss and has little to do with under performance.
Once upon a time, way back in the day, I used to work for a consulting company that shall remain nameless. For two straight years I was a top performer (or so I was told). I brought in a lot of revenue for them. The project I was on ended - through no fault of mine - and I find myself "on the bench" i.e. between projects and not bringing in any revenue. Three weeks later, me and a lot of other people get laid off. Were we under performers? Hardly. But we were not bringing in any revenue right at that moment. So we were deemed expendable.
And that's the problem. Management does not have time to evaluate thousands of employees so they take the quick way out. Little or no thought is given to the long term. This isn't necessarily your bosses fault. Your bosses boss is leaning on him to make a decision and he doesn't have much to work with.
IBM would be a lot better off if their quality of work was significantly better. We (a major US manufacturer) have IBM contractors helping us out with an Oracle eBusiness roll-out. The knowledge level of the contractors they send is well below what was promised. I work in middleware/integration and often find that I need to pull up the eBusiness API documentation because they have no knowledge of how to send standard data to the system (e.g. Shipments, Receipts, Inventory Transactions, Orders...). We've been slowly trimming down the number of contractors because it's faster for us to do it ourselves instead of fixing their mistakes. We'll do it right in 9 months versus having them do it wrong in 6 months and we spend another 6-12 months getting it to work properly. I'm sure it would help if we had better requirements (500 line estimate for max shipment notice size turned into actually being 80,000, 20,000 transactions / month from warehouse servers turned into 17 million, and tons of missing specs for required fields), but they wrote the specs.
I've sat in the park in Clearlake, CA and watched the meth deals going in and out of the bathroom, don't give me no trollmods.
My pop had his place nominally cleared out by meth-heads more than once, too.
Meth... it's a hell of a WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT FOR
etc.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nope. Without profits they don't exists.
You're thinking of state owned enterprises. They can do anything they want, including benefitting society (though not usually) and taxpayers are obliged to keep them afloat.
Nobody *owes* you a job, but if you read into what's happening, in some ways IBM did owe certain employees protection against downsizing just prior to retirement. So apparently what they did is deliberately give good employees bad (false) performance reviews, in order to make them fireable.
So there's a difference between "owed a job" and "negotiated in good faith and then shafted by lying bastards"
Companies exist to produce profits
That's idiotic. Companies most certainly DO NOT exist "to produce profits".
Companies exist to make products or provide services. Profits are a side-effect that act as an incentive for people to form companies to provide products or services. The raison d'etre of a company is to PRODUCE something - the profits from efficient overproduction are just encouragement for those with the means to produce something of value to the rest of us.
The fact that there are people like you who have lost sight of the real reason why companies exist - to provide products or services - and think they exist solely to line the pockets of the rich - is the major travesty of modern capitalism. It's the rot at the core.
This was in Forbes on 22.1., and dismissed by IBM on 26.1. (http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/26/us-ibm-restructuring-forbes-idUSKBN0KZ1WF20150126) quite convincingly: "IBM does not comment on rumors, even ridiculous or baseless ones," the company said in the email. "If anyone had checked information readily available from our public earnings statements, or had simply asked us, they would know that IBM has already announced the company has just taken a $600 million charge for workforce rebalancing. This equates to several thousand people, a small fraction of what's been reported." Not sure why Slashdot is picking up on this several days later... Is there any new indication that the 100k number is correct at all?
Well, they assemble them. They paid GlobalFoundries $1.5B to take away their chip division last year. The same chip division that advanced the state of the art in semiconductor design to help get the industry to where it is today.
Really though, what "business machines" does IBM make anymore? pSeries? zOS / System390? AS/400? What's the volume on those?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
As a former IBM-er, they also fire employees and hire contractors. Ironically, I ended up having that happen and wound up back in the same building, making 1.5 times the pay.
The reason why they do this is that they can do a mass jettison of people without having to report it.
Living in Austin, which used to be one of the biggest IBM areas, there are many, many stories of the greatness of Big Blue, and how far they have fallen.
What made IBM great in the past is that they were a one stop shop. It was expensive, but you could get your hardware, OS, database, applications, printers, cash registers, terminals, scanners, and any of the other core equipment from one place. Something break, a CE would be on site to fix it, no troubleshooting over the phone needed. Again, this wasn't cheap, but it was reliable and one didn't have the headaches of dealing with multiple vendors [1].
The IBM of present has two things going for it. The Zurich research lab and others, which are actually innovating. Second, IBM's mainframe technology... computers that actually are built from the ground up to be fail-resistant like nothing else out there. zSeries boxes also have kept with the times. One mainframe that takes a rack, one DS8000, and a decent tape silo would be able to handle as much web traffic as many isles of 1U x86 machines, just because the mainframe has so much I/O capacity available to it.
However, other than those two things, IBM's move to trying to beat out Tata and Infosys at their own game is just perplexing. IBM shouldn't just try to be a "consulting company", as they are not going to win... Tata can bring out divisions of people on the MCSE/CCIE/CISSP level who will work for $15,000 a year, and IBM just cannot beat that, no way, no how.
As someone who has worked at IBM, the company needs to reinvent itself, similar to how they managed to do so after John Akers:
1: Consulting is useful, but blow for blow, it is going to be a loss against others that can bring to bear thousands at dirt cheap prices with top tier certificates. Keep consulting, but it isn't a primary focus.
2: License or make one's own technology and make it good. Take the company, PureStorage. they are on pure SSD, so the concept of a "disk" is not part of their product, other than modules used to write in parallel for data protection. Make something a generation ahead of the other guys, price it not too insanely, and sell that. For example, make a SAN that doesn't give a care if it is being used as a tier 1 device or a tier 2. Think WAFL or OneFS, except with always-on deduplication done similar to PureStorage (where data is written to SSD and deduplicated on the fly, then another process does an offline dedup pass to further save space, while keeping redundancy in case of bitrot, drive or controller faults. The trick is to have a product more expensive, but does more than the competition. For connections, have the interfaces work with FC, FCoE, iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, WebDAV, and other protocols at the same time. FC might need a SFP change-out, but that isn't anything impossible. The trick is to replace the competition's stuff with a product that does more in less rack space. For example the HP Moonshot that can fit 45 Xeon E3 blades in a 5U form factor. That is something which will replace the average 10U, 16 blade rack with ease. This is what IBM needs to do. Innovate and mutilate.
3: Start negotiating with other providers. Get with Microsoft and make AIX into an OS which can handle Active Directory natively. If the enterprise could run Exchange and other items on UNIX, especially AIX [2], they would beat a path to the door.
4: Find markets for the cool stuff. Make a consumer company and make a TSM appliance with a deduplication backend similar to an Apple TimeCapsule that functions as a server initiated backup appliance, a switch, a NAS, a wireless AP, and a firewall. With ransomware only becoming more sophisticated [3], having a backup server initate backups where malw
Actually, the first people to get 3s years ago were the team players; If you put your team ahead of making yourself look really really good compared to everyone else, you won't get above a 3.
1s became so rarified they became political.
2s became the new 1s and politics crept into the process, so the 2+ category had to be created (basically a 2.5).
Let us not forget that sizing projects is being broken; GBS folks can't CLAIM much over 40 hours weekly despite working 60 to 80 hours, and, when the next support contract is written, during the sizing, they use garbage data. GIGO.
And also, most bean-counters often mistake brownian motion for progress.
If you work at a large tech or services company, rest assured that your top execs are scrambling right now to figure out how to emulate IBM's exploitation of the loophole that lets them lay off employees with the performance management system without technically laying them off.
This is bad news for all US salaried job holders, but especially those in large enterprises with a lot of low-profit business. Even if the job you work is profitable in essence, these companies would gladly dump you in exchange for an H1-B or just replace you with higher-margin work. Even profitable, high-performance employees are on the chopping block nowadays in the quest for ever-increasing profits.
That's idiotic. Companies most certainly DO NOT exist "to produce profits".
Companies exist to make products or provide services. Profits are a side-effect that act as an incentive for people to form companies to provide products or services. The raison d'etre of a company is to PRODUCE something - the profits from efficient overproduction are just encouragement for those with the means to produce something of value to the rest of us.
That's silly, most investors would be perfectly happy with a company that made absolutely no products and provided no services as long as it was making an adequate return. Yes, as a society the reason we allow such activity is that it's generally beneficial to the rest of us but that's the side effect not the profits.
thanks for the info. I am going by what I read on Alliance and don't remember the initials involved, I'm sure you know what they are, but several people commented they were approaching being eligible for some type of pension benefit, maybe a longevity clause on the 401K concerning matching or some other additional funds that IBM would be liable for, or stated they were approaching FHA(sp?) insurance eligibility. Both sounded like what I wrote in my post. Maybe you can explain a little of it. I'm mainly interested as affects the Systems group for IBM I on Power ongoing operations, although the bigger story is kicking these long time IBMers to the curb.
Not large, which is sad given how good the IBM I is. Plus the sales that are made are considerable and practically all ROI installing their OS on a standardized Power hardware.
So while it makes no sense to me they would abandon this lucrative market (should be lucrative) I am keenly interested in what is happening.
Many of the competent people bailed out of IBM already because of abuse from the Upper Echelons, and most of the rest have been promoted into management (sometimes against their wishes) by the Pointy Haired Bosses. What they have left in the trenches are the Wallys and Dilberts, the folks who are so incompetent or dispirited that they can't get jobs anywhere else. It's too bad, IBM used to be a great (if expensive) company to work with.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Most likely it will be the highest paid non-executives that get cut, at least that's what I've seen.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
They didn't need to do this to stay profitable.
Companies exist to produce profits, not to provide employment. If an employee is not providing net value, then it is better for the company, and the overall economy, for that employee to go somewhere else. In the long run, it is better for the employee as well.
Many employees are cost centers rather than profit centers. IT costs money. However, IT keeps the wheels turning and hopefully allows profit centers to be more efficient so as to increase profit per employee. By your reasoning, getting rid of IT would be a good thing, that is, until some outage prevented profit center employees from using their information infrastructure to do work and make money.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
The company I work for is considering to outsource their service division to IBM...
"You got a wallet? We got a Hoover!" -- IBM.
If you're looking for new opportunities, look at http://salarytalk.org for researching companies and their payscales. This data is from the US department of labor so it's highly likely to be accurate.
We're being outsourced to IBM right now. I guess they're keeping their call-center employees.
In addition, whenever there are ill-conceived layoffs in process, there are always some employees that decide that they have had enough of taking on extra work while waiting for the axe to fall on themselves, and jump ship of their own accord.
I have personal experience with this.
I had 11 years with IBM, and left 2 years ago. I had several good years being rated as a good performer ("2", which later was called "2+", and had a "1" year near the end, too). Never had a bad performing year (a "3"). I enjoyed my job and felt strongly about sticking with IBM. I was young and idealistic, and tended to take-on very heavy workloads. An average work week for me would be over 50 hours. (I shouldn't have worked that much, but it did produce results which were appreciated, at least for the first 10 years of my career.)
But things rapidly changed. As mentioned in other comments, I witnessed layoffs that seemed indiscriminate to a victim's performance level (but it did seem as though the retirement-within-5-years and within-10-years workers were more likely to be let go). And my own performance ratings went from "keep up your work, you're valuable" to "we have difficulty defining what you do for us" over a 6 month period. I felt like the performance system was being leveraged to force-out certain people.
I was fortunate that I decided to leave, found a job, and started that new job within 3 weeks. (I decided "I don't like my situation" and then had a successful job interview within a 48 hour period. Many of my peers were not so fortunate.) I have no regrets for having worked for IBM for 11 years, but the deterioration of my work situation wounded me personally, and so I have no regrets about leaving.
My heart goes out to those affected by the layoffs. It sucks. Good luck to you all.
One division of IBM is Global Services, which has two arms, one called IBM Global Business Services (GBS), which provides management consulting and other services. So they have a bunch of management consultants on staff. If customers aren't buying management consulting services from IBM, they have to lay off the management consultants (MBAs). If they keep people around getting paid, but not producing any revenue, they'll go out of business.
Would YOU pay IBM to advise you on how to run your business? No will anyone else, so they have no work for all those MBAs they hired to provide consultations to customers.
That's idiotic. Companies most certainly DO NOT exist "to produce profits".
Companies exist to make products or provide services. Profits are a side-effect that act as an incentive for people to form companies to provide products or services. The raison d'etre of a company is to PRODUCE something - the profits from efficient overproduction are just encouragement for those with the means to produce something of value to the rest of us.
That's silly, most investors would be perfectly happy with a company that made absolutely no products and provided no services as long as it was making an adequate return. Yes, as a society the reason we allow such activity is that it's generally beneficial to the rest of us but that's the side effect not the profits.
Can I have the secret for a company that doesn't provide any services, nor make anything to sell and still have a profit?
...why the headhunters are calling.
That's the way a company whose leadership is taking down the drain looks at it.
The leadership of a profitable company that is looking to improve themselves (and their shareholders' long term interests) looks at it like this.
We have positive cash flow and profits, but we have more people than we need to do our present work. That means we can deploy some of our people to TAKE ON NEW WORK and grow our sales and profits.
IBM denies the rumors of massive layoffs. So this could be speculation from people trying to manipulate the stock. Or it could turn out to be true, but it's not official until it happens or they announce that it's going to happen.
Hope u not referring to advertising company which is happening come March 1st
Same here hope you are not referring to an advertising giant they are already internally cutting staff before transitioning to IBM
> This isn't the first time that IBM has done mass layoffs and it won't be the last
--That doesn't really matter. If you have to layoff A HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE, your company has failed spectacularly. The market does not have enough resiliency to try and re-employ that many people at once, which means the majority of them are probably going to be on Unemployment for 6 months+.
--A lot of them should probably be looking to move to other states - or even to other countries - to get work again. Which is OK if your hiring company has a relocation package, but those have been getting scarcer in the last 5-10 years or so.
--The sheer number of people this will affect from the ripples is hard to wrap your mind around. Most of them will be going on short-rations, super-crunch survival mode and not buying items they would have normally purchased, such as TVs, cars, luxury items, etc. Bad times all around.
Wolfrider
Nope nope.
Corporations exist only at the pleasure of the society: they require laws to exist. Without which they would not exist. There are also corporation types which do not turn a profit. the only thing in common is the incorporation.
As for benefit: it is assumed that allowing people to pursue profit reasonably safely is of benefit to the society, since it creates wealth etc etc. Thus, it is believed that the existence of companies is itself of benefit ot the society.
That is why they exist.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Sure, an easy example is High Frequency Trading. There are no customers only investors.
"Companies exist to produce profits, not to provide employment"
Companies which focus on the short term figures at the expense of long term ones end up going under.
HP is in the final stages of paying that price. At some point it's going to end up as a brand name of an up-and-coming conglomerate and that will be the end of them.
"They are cutting their under-performers."
Underperformers is a relative term.
I have had employees that others resented because they didn't seem to do much, but when they did finally move, the results were impressive - and often not particularly visible to fellow employees for some time afterwards.
"most investors would be perfectly happy with a company that made absolutely no products and provided no services as long as it was making an adequate return."
Such companies exist. They're called Ponzi schemes.
Keep your prayers, preacher man. I've already been touched by His noodly appendage.
Just because you can't find data supporting more than 5000 layoffs, doesn't mean 100k won't lose their livelihoods!
PLEASE, stop asserting that there will be substantially less than 100,00 layoffs! ~
Well maybe, just maybe, women should learn to control themselves and stop raping their potential customers. Sounds like she deserved to get fired.
You, and those who think like you, are part of the problem, not the solution.
You know nothing, Shanghai Bill.
You sound like one of the arse kissers who make gaga comments about every executive video before its even published.
We Have Petitioned President Obama To Impose Tax On IBM Revenues, Not Profits;
https://petitions.whitehouse.g...
Casteism
Unlike Capitalism, Globalization is Zero-sum WITHOUT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Casteism
I'm an ex-Resource Action employee of IBM, though I got taken off the list through Herculean effort 5 years ago. Only 2 out of the 10,000 targeted for that RA got taken off, me and a guy up in the Northeast who should never have been on the list. I dumped all my IBM stock at $212, laughing all the way to the bank. Why anyone would work for this miserable excuse for a company is beyond me. There are still a few people there that are good, though most got the axe years ago. All IBM represents anymore is an overpriced vendor that has overpaid consultants flogging less than useful software and tools, IMHO. It's just a shame that a great company was destroyed by executive greed and board malfeasance. Time for anyone good to dump these morons and get on with their lives.
Disagree. The corporate structure is required in a society to create a platform to conduct business. Business is necessary for the socity to function. Companies provide the businesses that is needed in society. However, when companies cannot sustain themselves in the business environment they will fail, and cause significant pain to the society. At least, in our capitalistic world (non-socialist) the Companies are not here just for the benefit of the employees. The existance of well functioning, profitable companies benefits society. The people that are employed by companies can benefit themselves through employment, the company and the society. And the converse is true too. The company needs to survive so it can continue to be sustainable, and then it will benefit to society. Being profitable and having the potential to grow and compete in an everchanging market is the hallmark of a good company.
Got input from IBM, talked to Cringely, heard from lots of folks in the trenches--and came up with a few more numbers to consider, like 10,000 (Number IBM is now suggesting is accurate), 50,000 (number laid off second half of 2014 in India), 20,800 (26 percent of U.S. workforce, which some say is target) and others. See http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-...