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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.
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.
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.
Your math doesn't work out. The global population is roughly 7 billion, 1% of that is 70 million. There are more than 70 million people with flushing toilets, computers, and homes in the US alone, and there are other places where our standard of living, or better, is just as common (i.e. Canada, Japan, a surprising amount of the Mideast, most of Europe, ect.) At best what you describe is the global 1% is now the global 10%, and is probably more like the global 25%. Why do I bring this up? Because the old "you don't know how good you have it" is getting really old. Americans have been told that for fifty years now, as other countries have steadily overtaken us in quality of life, and as more and more of our income flows to fewer and fewer of our citizens. It's nothing more than a distraction, a rhetorical trick to try and avoid conversation about what's really been going on.
Well, when Big Blue laid me off in the big 2007 round, after 6 years in Global Services, and "training" my replacements in Brazil for my last 2 months, my reaction was "Free at last!" I went back, as a contractor, to the multinational UK-based company I left to go to IBM, and it has gone well since, right up to their current layoff round that I "volunteered" for to get a better severance package than I got from IBM as a segue to retirement - no games with a bad performance rating to screw me out of the severance (I hope - still waiting for the details...).
When I applied for my current position to move from contractor to "permanent" 2 years in, I contacted my former IBM manager for a reference, and she told me the client I had been working for demanded the work be brought back to the US as they were fed up with the communication problems (language and technology), and general incompetence, so the US-based guy I mentored over several years at IBM took it up, and that pleased the customer.
Sounds like IBM did not really "like' that lesson overall based on Cringely's (the Forbes contributor linked at the top) chronicle of IBM's decline since that 2007 layoff round. Look over his columns on that topic at his blog site - this is probably the best overall analysis: http://www.cringely.com/2014/10/27/fix-ibm/ . I think he has a good handle on what's wrong with IBM, and credible ideas for fixing it, but time is running out as they burn through their capital in terms of money, good employees, and customer goodwill.
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.
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.
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.
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.