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IBM Added 70,000 People To Its Ranks In 2015, And Lost That Many, Too (businessinsider.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the look-at-the-numbers dept.

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.

7 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. A shell of it's former self.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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....

    1. Re:A shell of it's former self.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I don't know where you are getting your info from, but I've been in DB2 for the last 19 (nearly) years. Most of the top people from 19 years ago ... are still there. There have been some retirements, and some loss at the mid-to-low tiers, but most of the people I knew as the smartest from 19 years ago are there, but far more senior now. And I'm still there, don't know why.

  2. Nothing lost (almost), nothing gained by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    - 70,000 US workers
    + 69,500 Foreign workers

    This can work across age groups as well.

  3. Hiring There, Not Here, or Laying Off Here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Corporate DoubleSpeak by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Not so much H1B's but more a case of offshoring to lesser skilled individuals. Every time my team lost a local with the job offshored, the offshore team would say they need 3-4 people to do the same work and often got the hiring approved to do so. At it's peak, my team had 24 people, locally we are now down to 3 while the offshore team numbers 82 (and growing.)

    Many teams in the U.S and elsewhere spend more time working on escalations resulting from offshore workers than productive, value added work or spend extra hours trying to catch up on the work they are supposed to be performing. I've been called into issues at all hours where the customer has had enough of waiting on an offshore team to resolve a problem - in one case, the offshore team claimed they couldn't determine the server they should be looking at and the customer, after waiting 2 hours, went nuts about it. I get a phone call and am able to tell them the most likely server name within 5 minutes of being briefed and this was for a system that had been managed entirely by the offshore team for the last 3 years.

  5. Re:"resource actions" or "workforce rebalancing" by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Workforce rebalancing" means sending jobs to India and Brazil.

    It's not "outsourcing" because they're going to IBM India and IBM Brazil.

  6. Re:lower wages by fluffernutter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So what skills should I shoot for? The ones that will be valuable third quarter this year? Fourth? Perhaps I should just go for broke and strive to be valuable for the last half of 2017.

    --
    Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.