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IBM Added 70,000 People To Its Ranks In 2015, And Lost That Many, Too (businessinsider.com)
walterbyrd writes: IBM is very particular in hiring for the hot new skills where IBM is expanding like machine learning, big data, mobile, and security. However, even with adding 70,000 people to their payroll in 2015, IBM actually ended the year with a slightly lower headcount than when it started, according to a SEC filing. IBM is always very careful when talking about its global headcount, which has been going through major shifts for years. It won't say how many people it lays off each year, or how old they are or in what areas they work. It only talks only about "resource actions" or "workforce rebalancing" in terms of the total amount of money it spends on them. It spent $587 million on such things in 2015 (and nearly $1.5 billion in 2014), it said.
So, they are only paying lower wages, then?
I am at a loss at knowing/understanding what IBM does. Do they make computers still. Why would I buy an IBM computer now as opposed to a Linux box of no pedigree.
Did they fire 70,000 Americans and hire 70,000 H-1Bs?
$1 billion savings?
A: They are hiring outside skills and labor to screw you, personally
B: IBM is identifying the best skill and labor, at the lowest cost, to lower price of product they manufacture (benefitting consumers)
Seems like only a politician can answer the question "correctlty"
Gently reply
I wish I was an IBM worker. Not a big shot developer, just a wise cracker amidst the unknown happy servants. Serving to myself actualy, not for a genocide plot, like people like to do on other companies. Oh wait a second...
C: They are firing people at the start of the year and 'hiring' people near the end of the year to avoid dealing with the politics of offshoring
Or in other words, "we don't pay retirement packages and we don't believe in careers at IBM". Remember folks capitalism has no bounds, no emotions, no respect. The perfection of corporate slavery is complete.
The talent left this company a long time ago.
- The research folks on Watson all left after the Jeopardy publicity stunt. they're all at greener pastures. The CTO for Watson left fairly quickly.
- The people sold off to Lenovo have mostly left - though Lenovo was a bit better than IBM
- The people working on Cloud are basically what was left over after the SoftLayer folks left, and the remnants of old System X & P. Musical chairs. The Softlayer CEO and exec staff also left.
- The Blade Network people and the entire Systems Networking business left to Google, AWS, and other greener pastures
- The DB2 people have mostly left to new startups.
- Just about every key architect for CPUs has moved to ARM competitors
Did I mention that their pay and bonus sucks? One mans loss it another mans gain... Just about every company outside of the HW business has benefited from influx of talent running away from this company.
BTW - That new company called HPE... it's basically the same as above with another name....
Let's not be coy...we all know what this Corporate DoubleSpeak means.
"resource actions" = "firing people"
"workforce rebalancing" = "firing people"
"rightsizing" = "firing people"
"personnel adjustment" = "firing people"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Same headcound, but 1/3 the compensation. That's absolutely fucking disgusting. Top management should all rot in hell.
- 70,000 US workers
+ 69,500 Foreign workers
This can work across age groups as well.
My understanding is IBM is rapidly shrinking it's American workforce and replacing those folks with H1-Bs from India. They are not only losing years of knowledge, they are replacing it with people who barely speak english. What sucks for them is that not only do customers realize they're getting shafted, but the quarterly income, which management uses to base their rediculous end of year bonus, both suck ass.
The politicians tell us is that giving perks to big companies will create jobs.
This is a lie.
Jobs are created when people *start* companies, or when small companies grow. Big companies generally have all the workforce they need, and don't hire more people just because they get more money.
Indeed - it's the big companies who look to cut costs by shaving quality or outsourcing or moving to Ireland. You don't generally see the small, lean, hungry startups looking to outsource from India or move to Ireland.
I cringe when I see the federal government giving [ice cream maker] Ben and Jerry's a grant of $200,000 to increase their competitiveness, because that money spent on sales training could fund 4 small startups, employing 5-7 people each.
Next time you hear a politician, check to see if their speech doesn't end with "and this means more jobs" or similar. It's their way of selling their influence and making it palatable to the voters.
Not at all coincidental wth their ongoing layoffs, since December 2012 IBM provides absolutely zero match on 401k contributions unless you manage to survive the year's cuts and still be working for them on December 31 of the year.
Get laid off on December 30? No 401k matching for you. Stock market went up that year? Sorry, better luck catching the wave next year.
P.S. Wang's were not dedicated word processing machines as the very first minicomputer on which I played Colossal Cave was a Wang. (puns not intended)
or eliminated?
I used to work at IBM (as a senior-level manager) and I can say truthfully that the only way IBM is going to make it is if it completely lets go almost all of its business units and rebuilds from the ground up. Every single LOB they have is archaic. I remember when I was first hired at IBM. They showed every new employee a propaganda video which was like a 10 minute montage of IBM's innovation since it started. That video ended with the final innovation -- landing on the moon. That's right. The last real innovation IBM truly contributed to was LANDING ON THE MOON. Fifty years ago.
In the last 20 years, all IBM has done is try to innovate through acquisitions. Buy a company. Put together a five year business plan to milk the acquiree's customers. "Blue wash" their products. Push new IBM bloatware to those customers. Get rid of 95% of the acquiree's employees through attrition... and replace them with IBM employees from other liquidated business units. Wash, rinse, repeat.
They have a requirement for all business units to ensure that a certain percentage of the workforce was offshore. Also, since their HR review process uses comparison against your peers... people get fired or put on performance plans every quarter. I remember going into ridiculous meetings where my boss would tell me that I didn't have enough of my peopl eranked as low performers... I needed to come up with some names. Didn't matter if my entire team met their personal goals. I had to rate a certain percentage a "3" or my boss would do it for me. Wonderful. IBM used to have a policy of matching 401k contributions with each paycheck. Well, they changed that to a one-time match in December. The kicker there was that if you got laid off/fired before December... then you lost all of your match. Nice, eh? It just so happened that the big layoffs came before the 401k match date. Lots of wonderful cost savings for IBM.
Meanwhile... during periods where several consecutive quarters of revenue misses happened... and tens of thousands of people were fired... Ginni Rometty and her peers received millions of dollars in bonuses. Nice, eh?
I could go on and on. But IBM is simply a crap company. My advice to anybody would be to stay away from there. If your company gets acquired by IBM... stick around for three years. Collect your paycheck, come in late every day, go as slow as possible in your daily work, don't fret while IBM ruins your product by demanding you include 20 year-old technology into your shiny product. Then leave after you are fully vested. Leave immediately and don't look back.
If you are a new college graduate and you get hired by IBM, stick around for no more than two years. You will get a much better job elsewhere. But do not stay.
IBM is a dying company. It has been shitting the bed pan for the last five years and it is only going to get worse. Steer clear.
IBM is hiring lots...in Romania, Malaysia, Costa Rica, and India. Many new there in 2015.
IBM is not hiring in the US or avoiding doing so at all costs. There are slots that are open, but they are going off shore.
Its fun when Romania is ending their day and US is starting. Complete break down as they walk out the door. "What about...? Oh never mind, maybe tomorrow...."
Malaysia skips what they aren't able or don't feel like doing.
Costa Rica, jury's still out though pretty inexperienced.
India's a mixed bag. Some areas they make the US look like bad amateurs. Other areas, not so much. Really difficult issues come back to the US to solve.
Why doesn't IBM clarify this? How many who "left" were over 40 years old - pushed out because of age? IBM is toast!
I've heard from a number of older friends in Silicon Valley that once they pass 40 yrs old, they don't get callbacks for jobs.
(Now, yes, some have outdated skills, but when someone in there 30s with those same skills is getting jobs, something is broke.)
It appears companies are getting rid of higher paid worker and replacing with cheaper, younger works (sometimes overseas), to bring this into the light, all diversity reports from companies should include age of employees broken down.
As a consumer, boycott companies such as IBM, Sony and Disney. Period.
Signings b feyz wnyz 2!; doez
It does not stand for I (heart) Bernie. If you can't make it then you will get fired. International is not US. Business is not communism. War is Peace. Central Services knows all this, and knows all that you do and are thinking of doing. So don't do it.
If you're 37 and work at IBM, there is a high probability of you being let go in a "resource action" the following year. But, because they only have to report terminations of those over the age of 40, there is no coverage of their rampant age-ism.
I got laid off from IBM 2 months after my 37th birthday, and my brother got laid off 2 years later 3 months after his 37th birthday. My cousin got laid off 1 year after that, 1 WEEK after his 37th birthday (which is in December, so they probably wanted him gone before EoY).
The three of us were in completely different locations, divisions, and job functions.
2007-2011 it was 2 employees hired for each employee departing.
Growth was countries that were cheaper than India.
Decline was countries that were more expensive than India.
2011 was quite disturbing. IBM Brazil employees were departing to IT jobs at the universities because the pay was better.
Somewhat lower wage, but 10x decrease in fuel cost, 3x decrease in housing cost, 3x decrease in food costs, 10x decrease in healthcare cost.
No kidding here. Better economics than Germany by a long way.
In Germany workhorses like us are working for all sorts of rentseekers like medical professionals, nothingdoers and nicely paid state officers.
Ca 2000 we had a small mainframe with 2CPUs and it was "new". That meant it's integer division did not work properly.
No kidding here. IBM has in many ways become an el-cheapo operation.
Then 2013 I tried to install a DB/2 ODBC driver. I could easily do this for Oracle, MS, MySQL and Postgres. I had to consult the onsite IBM sales engineer to do the same for DB/2. And then found out that their security concept is kind of, well, non-secure.
Just move to a place with competitive cost of living. E.g. Minsk, Belarus.
What companies can do, you can do, too.
Another thread that makes me ask why I bother to stand for the national anthem. Why respect a country that won't lift a finger to protect a way of life that people died to fight for?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If someone asked me to train my replacement, I'd just quit.
ibm vets young people for secret service jobs.
this explains the transitory nature of their workforce.
It's no secret IBM has been offshoring as many workers as they possibly can. Before I was laid off from an unrelated company, I used to work with a huge team within IBM who worked to support my client. They were the client's entire IT department.
Well, the client didn't like IBM's costs. Any conference call would have 30-40 IBMers from all over the place sitting in and billing for the time, even if most of them had nothing to contribute, and they loved these calls. And they didn't like leasing mainframe time or something. Anyway, the upshot was that the client hired a couple of the lead IBMers directly and IBM offshored everything else.
Net headcount stayed the same but it was really a couple thousand layoffs in the US and a similar number of hires in India.
When my team had to deal with this client, we had to talk to India and it's not our fault to say we could not understand them AT ALL. When the phone rings at 4:00AM something is broken and it helps if they can TELL us what the hell is wrong. We had to insist on an email-first policy. This greatly impacted my company's ability to support the client within SLA. We had to basically diag everything on our side to see if we could find a problem they might be calling about, and for our part, we didn't HAVE afterhour support, only a rotating on-call person for "something is on fire" emergencies, not routine troubleshooting like "the FTP was 45 seconds late for one file. Please provide root cause."
So this pushed a lot of burden where it wasn't needed.
I get that IBM thinks it can replace high-paid US workers with much cheaper workers in India, but at some point they will run out of jobs they can outsource and the annual labor savings will stop. It may also stop when India begins demanding more pay. It won't go on forever.
And then where will IBM outsource next? China? Russia?
Sig for hire.
so that's what it's called now.. when you take your american citizen-heavy workforce and turn it into a foreigner (and no, not the band*) and/or outsourced-heavy workforce.
___
* unlike ibm, the band's original nationality makeup was balanced.. three british, three american... and today, is comprised of mostly americans (or even entirely of americans at times).
Jobs are created when people *start* companies, or when small companies grow.
The compensation package for a small company is far inferior compared to a regular employee at a larger company.
Second, the resources available to small companies are far fewer and impart less desirable experience (not much room for large-scale anything).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The biggest downside is that the small business gets treated like dirt for those features.
At least with an established company, you can afford to say no more often.
Even if it does the equivalent of stirring the hornets' nest of economists, make it harder to send things offshore.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The projects that IBM was hired to do and provide their software products and service expertise have been a colossal failure. I have no idea why they are keep getting called back for more software purchases and service requests but I think that there is some stuff going on with previous leadership being ex-IBM employees and back-room deals going on. The hands-on implementers that they provide are not very good and their escalation people can't resolve issue that are happening with their own software products. The experts that they deffer to are in foreign countries and there are problems there also.
I've worked with IBM xSeries Intel compatible server hardware since around the turn of the century when they were trying to go after Compaq/Hewlett-Packard's business share in finance world and frankly their hardware was sub-par, even to Dell at that point in time. Things are slightly better now but there are still weird and unexplained issues with Lenovo/IBM hardware servers and blade systems now. Dell always was to be a less-expensive and more stable hardware platform if you couldn't afford the HP premium pricing for stuff that just worked reliably.
It's hard to parse the terminology, spin, etc. but Cringely's words were "IBMâ(TM)s reorg-from-Hell launches next week: IBMâ(TM)s big layoff-cum-reorganization called Project Chrome kicks-off next week when 26 percent of IBM employees will get calls from their managers followed by thick envelopes on their doorsteps. By the end of February all 26 percent will be gone." As I read it, he was talking worldwide. And as I read the current news, it doesn't sound as if that happened. Or did it?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!