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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.
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 am at a loss at knowing/understanding what IBM does.
IBM makes mainframes and provide services. You can never go wrong with IBM.
Why would I buy an IBM computer now as opposed to a Linux box of no pedigree.
The newer mainframes can run 2,000+ instances of Linux.
Me, 52 years old then, making ~$90K a year. Suddenly, new "Goals" for me every six months, (WTF, when I was supposed to become a Cryogenics Engineer?), and I was Performance Appraised Out, under the excuse of "Stacked Ranking". I was replaced by a Chinese Post-Doc, who was quite grateful for getting ~$35K a year.
He actually was a real nice guy, but way out of his depth. Classwork and Theses means nothing at 3AM, when one is stuck deep and hurting in the Bowels Of the Machine. Three decades of experience dulls the pain, and sharpens the wits.
Anyway, I never signed away my Patents; HR was as incompetent as Management when it came to these things, so I have been regularly unemployed for a few years now, and yet still very well-off because of Consultancy.
They are now on their second Post-Doc...
This wasn't IBM. But it might as well have been.
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.
I wish I was an IBM worker. Not a big shot developer, just a wise cracker amidst the unknown happy servants.
I used to work for the IBM Help Desk in the mid-2000's. We had a user with a German shepherd that like to use the laptop as a chew toy. Three different laptops. Manager told user to stop working from home. Of course, she brought the German shepherd to work as the company was dog friendly. Very big dog. Scared the crap out of us whenever she came with the dog. None of us wanted to become a chew toy.
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...
That or 70,000 were making too much money so IBM decided to replace them with fresh college graduates making 1/3 the previous salary.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Not true. Some of them were also eaten by lions.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
- 70,000 US workers
+ 69,500 Foreign workers
This can work across age groups as well.
I agree, this is very inefficient. They should aim for 5-8 times less compensation, not 3. I would fire half of the management.
You can't handle the truth.
The newer mainframes can run 2,000+ instances of Linux.
Citation?
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. Not to say there aren't reasons to use a mainframe - just that maximizing virtual Linux instances is rarely one of them.
If you were 52 and making 90K a year this was either 1985, you were just not very good, or the worst negotiator on the planet. I was hired out of college in 1994 @ $40k and am now making almost 8x that.
I just hired a "Chinese Post-Doc" last week, @ 180k. Your story is either total bullshit or 20+ years old.
I'm not surprised. I've met post-docs who can't develop anything useful if their life depended on it and I know engineers who've been in industry for years who can't compete with freshman CS students I know. It's rare to get $180k as an engineer in academia unless you're doing something on the side.
You have to nurture your skills. I suggest spending at least 20% of your free time learning a new skill that is in demand.
I've met brilliant engineers and dumb engineers not worth their salt. There is definitely a spectrum and it's not correlated to the number of years of experience.
It helps if you have good networking skills and you're willing to relocate.
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.
Feel the churrrrrn.
I was 35, making $96K/yr, and was absolutely astounded to learn that postdocs, some as old as me, doing highly technical skilled and learned shit were only making $30-35K...
It helps if you have good networking skills and you're willing to relocate.
It helps if you negotiate a new position at a new company every 3-5 years, especially if you are willing to relocate. Helps the salary numbers, that is, total drag on quality of life.
The applications I have seen are for under-utilized web servers, so, yes, a mainframe can run 2000+ VM instances with LAMP stacks serving web sites that are only visited by 100 or so simultaneous users.
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.
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
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.
IBM, like Oracle, has its loyal followers. They have been both abusing their customers, charging outrageous fees for bad quality, etc. But I guess there are just enough masochists out there in positions to make the decisions which hardware to buy and which consultants to hire.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
The needful, then they revert the same because they have one doubt.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As a consumer, boycott companies such as IBM, Sony and Disney. Period.
Uptime and I/O is why you buy IBM. Ask banks and insurance companies.
Also ask my previous employer. We had an AS400 that didn't need service until a disk controller failed when it was about 8 years old.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
It's not justabout being good or being a good negotiator. It's about getting the right expertise, in the right field, which turns out to be useful and rare later. It is about taking the right chances, and getting the right chances, about knowing the right people and getting along well with them. It's about luck, properties, determination, social skills
priorities not properties*. Damn swype
I had a conversation like this with an old greybeard (ok not that old, but he had a big beard and was (and I presume still is) incredibly sharp and very good at wrangling all sorts of obscure systems, as wellas common ones with excellent uptime.
Uptime and I/O is why you buy IBM. Ask banks and insurance companies.
Me: they're really reliable aren't they?
Him: yes, they are very expensive.
Me: But I'd heard they are have great uptime with swappable everything etc.
Him (with a sly grin): Yes, they are *VERY* expensive.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
Still raises the question of "doing what?".
Say what you will about the relative performance to Intel and the sad lack of updates, but AMD cpus are pretty good at running VMs. A cheapie 4x16 core 1U opteron box with half a terabyte of RAM (I still have trouble grasping that---my first machine had 32k) costing about $10k can run, well, of course it depends. 64 instances with a generous 8G RAM and a full CPU each. Going for a 20u rack costing 200,000 gives 1280 instances of linux, with a dedicated CPU and 8G RAM each.
If the CPU usage is low and you only want 1G RAM (like the stuff from the super cheap VPS services), you're looking at 8x that many which means 10,000 virtual instances in a rack, or 512 is a 1U box.
Without adding in network cards, you get 40 GigE links out of that. Not a vast amount, but enough to more than sasturate any outgoing link you're likely to have with only one rack's worth of kit. Of course you can always shove 10/40 GigE or infiniband cards in there for more IO per machine.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
"IBM, like Oracle, has its loyal followers. [...] I guess there are just enough masochists out there in positions to make the decisions which hardware to buy and which consultants to hire."
Masochists? Say sadists better.
IT (no only hardware provision, but all of it) suffers dearly from the fact that the one making the decisions is not directly suffering the results. That's why everything-corporate, from hardware, to operating systems, to ERPs to, well, everything, looks the way they look.
If you are retirement eligible, you get your match regardless of when you leave. Source: I retired in June and got my match.
Relocate to where? India???
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
They don't need to hire H1-Bs, they have offices in all kinds of desperate nations.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You will also find out that despite all the organized hear-say, Russians have a very similar culture and behaviour as most Europeans.
And their language is closely related to ours.
For example:
east/osten/vostok
wool/wolle/wollese ("Hair")
listen/lauschen/schlusche
I say again.. why do I bother to stand for the Star Spangled Banner anymore. I mean if my own country is going to screw me over that badly, why bother to show respect?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
That's the question most intelligent people in most countries ask themselves on a daily basis.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Step 1) develop somewhat unusual, but in-demand skills.
Step 2) keep network contacts open for opportunities which value your skills.
Step 3) actually go, interview, and ditch your current company when something better comes along
Step 4) repeat steps 1-3 (or at least 2 & 3) as frequently as possible without becoming perceived as a "jumper," which, really you are, but if you can convince each next employer that you're ready to settle down for 15-20 years, that's what they really want.
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.
It's not justabout being good or being a good negotiator. It's about getting the right expertise, in the right field, which turns out to be useful and rare later. It is about taking the right chances, and getting the right chances, about knowing the right people and getting along well with them. It's about luck, properties, determination, social skills
We are talking about making $90k per year year, not $200k. It doesn't take much if any luck to find a niche in the IT industry that will pay $90k per year.
You seem to be describing the kind of luck it takes to be in the right industry and the right time to get 2000 hours per year of $250 per hour consulting gigs since your skills are so rare. That I will admit is mostly luck, but building skills that will provide a low six figure income is an almost certainty in the IT industry if manage your career intelligently.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Pick something you are good at and have interest in - that's not squarely in the sites of every tech school and 3rd world code farm.
By coincidence, I ended up in medical devices. I know people who have specialized in avionics, video monitoring, oil and gas, quality systems, and any number of other "big niches" - if you're at a big company in a big pool of people with high turnover, look around and see if there's a low turnover corner you can get transferred to - if not in your current company, then in another. Skills don't really come from school, they come from experience on the job.
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.
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.
Like, Philips?
Philips hires any PhD it can get, providing it's a decent one, including those darn foreigners from the US. There just aren't enough graduating locally. But hey, if you don't like that, we can sure stop hiring from the US. The Chinese are smarter anyway.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Using the zSeries to just run Linux seems a bit of a waste somehow. I mean: transactional processing, great storage, always-up, backup, version management... it was all invented on the mainframe and some days I realize the x86 world *still* hasn't caught up. VM/ESX still isn't as good as VM/ESA, in some ways. Backup and version management software is still better on the mainframe. The storage? Well... we just started using a multi-million dollar solution from EMC. It's absolutely amazing. But 10 years ago the mainframe already did that, and better. We will have to deal with stuff that on mainframes was settled 30 years ago and isn't even a configuration option anymore.
Mainframes and appliances may be expensive, but when you start factoring in the cost of maintenance and downtime, they become economical pretty fast.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Ah, yes. You are entirely correct.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That's why they **never** just say that.
Instead, they say, "We'll give you 1 week's pay for every year of service up to 26 weeks to train your replacement."
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.
Do you really believe that Belarus is anyhow better than Germany?
No sig today.
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!
I am at a loss at knowing/understanding what IBM does.
IBM makes mainframes and provide services. You can never go wrong with IBM.
Really? I've seen IBM perpetrate spectacular failure with their "services".
Well then how is that at all relevant or useful? I bet you can run 2000 VM instances on a high end commodity Linux server if you don't want to them to *do* anything.
Sales speak: the "average" server farm has a lot of highly underutilized boxes in it. With their "mainframe" approach, they can provide adequate / economical service for 2000 "normal" boxes in a "typical" site. Yeah, none of those "quoted" words really mean anything, we actually used our processors in our application, and as such, IBM was about 40% more expensive than Apple Mac Pros, for comparison.
I'm sure it's hard to pin down the cost of a z13 mainframe, but from what I can tell a high end one is in the several million range at *least*.
Say $5M for one, that runs 5000 really anemic VMs (like 1/10 core each, so they are useless for real load). You can get literally thousands of servers for that price, or more realistically a reasonable number of servers that will still be able to provide multiple cores per VM, making them actually useful under load.
Seems like the only advantage of the mainframe is it's highly fault tolerant. ie. solve the problem with hardware and money instead of good software design. That works to a degree, but it's still vertical scaling. Most Internet companies have long abandoned that model for good software architecture and horizontal scaling - which if done right provides much better fault tolerance, of course.
Yep, we surely weren't impressed by the IBM offerings in 2006 - and our (self titled) "Chief Science Officer" was proposing an array of 50 Mac Pros as the cost effective alternative. I was in software dev, we took his "200 core" application and cleaned it up so that it ran as fast as expected on 4 cores - that's the real cost savings: not adding an un-necessary nested loop layer that adds 100x to your processing load.