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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.
I know some folks who currently work at and worked at IBM. It is not "B". It is taking people who put a lot of time in and are very good at their job and not even giving them the opportunity to lose some salary to keep their jobs. I heard a story from one friend who was at IBM where they were excited to be working with a new team to support them in India but then suddenly being laid off with the Indian team taking over their jobs. So its a train-and-dump scheme a lot of the time.
What IBM isn't realizing is that a lot of these folks will be relearning the know how without the benefit of those who were knifed in the back and also that in other cultures being an engineer for 10-20+ years is not the goal, they _all_ want to be in management and gain "rank" rather than experience and technical know how.
Invariably you get a bunch of freshers with no real experience being lead by the bureaucrats. Its really unfortunate to see very smart very talented people be summarily fired after training what are supposed to be supporting teams and engineers. I also bothers me they are not given the opportunity to meet new terms to save their jobs.
What is not realized is in other cultures the competitors often build up a presence near to or sometimes next door to a place like IBM and poach engineers and intellectual property. And given IBM is all about decent (not trollish) intellectual property this is not a long term good strategy to be using scabs to replace true blue engineers.
You can also read some stuff here about the former IBM union http://www.endicottalliance.or... - they were not a strong or unreasonable union but you can get a feel for how many good long term employees are facing the firing squad.
In 1985 IBM had 230,000 employees mostly in the USA. Now its 71,000 - and who knows where.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
The most I have seen is is on the z13 which has ~140 cores - you can run a bunch of separate instances of Linux but it's nowhere NEAR the same performance as running Linux on fairly cheap dedicated "standard" servers.
According to the IBM marketing material, the 2016 Z13 can run up to 8,000 virtual servers on a single system. Slide deck doesn't break the down specs for each of those virtual servers. A Slashdotter who commented on another article said he ran 2,000+ instances of Linux on an IBM mainframe.
http://www.slideshare.net/fgonza93/new-ibm-mainframe-2016-z13
My 4 years old daughter wuz aped.
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.
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.
Both of the two big companies I worked for were all IBM.
The first was a manufacturing site. Every stage of production, process monitoring, lab qc, raw materials ordering and handling, etc. was all run from a single IBM AS/400 system. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that were still the case 17 years later. It worked. This company was also part of a big conglomerate, and the entire set of businesses were all running on big IBM kit. The only change I saw was that they had started to migrate to Compaq and Dell for user-facing systems, which were mainly used for 3720 terminal emulation (replacing the real terminals on token ring) and other tools.
The second was a big pharma company. They were all IBM from servers to desktops and laptops. I liked the ThinkPad. I thought having to make a support call to India (from the UK) for every little (and large) support issue was a bit of a joke though.
Coming Back on the topic of this entry, IBM created this initiative called Think40 a while ago. You were supossed to seek training and IBM would enable you to take it, in order to complete at least 40 hours of training pero year. In practice, they created a video library with some mild chats about topics as diffuse and shallow as they could (introduction to cloud, introduction to Agile, introduction to cognitive learning, etc) and called the day off. So you spend that 20% of your time watching those useless speeches and then try to find real learning resources on your own. IBM has grown to be nothing more than a hedge fund (and not a very successful one TBH). They buy and sell companies in hope of grabbing something useful.