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.

Comments

Re:What does IBM do?

[__aaclcg7560]

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.

"resource actions" or "workforce rebalancing"

[zenlessyank]

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.

Re:"resource actions" or "workforce rebalancing"

[JoeMerchant]

The classical pension was too easy for management to abuse - fired on the 29th year, etc. 401(k) is the way of today, and only works if you choose to participate.

Re:"resource actions" or "workforce rebalancing"

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically what they did was can the old farts and replace them with younger folks and H1-bs.

I was one of the younger folk back in '94. We were told the older folks "didn't have the skills" and "didn't want to learn new skills" so they had to go.

Then over night, I woke up and found out that I "didn't have the skills" and was replaced by folks who did "have the skills" - doing exactly the same work.

Technical skills are age and wage dependent in this profession. At 20, C++ is a great skills. At 50, C++ is out of date.

Re:"resource actions" or "workforce rebalancing"

[Dr. Evil]

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

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

A shell of it's former self....

[Anonymous Coward]

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....

Re:A shell of it's former self....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Corporate DoubleSpeak

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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"

Re:Corporate DoubleSpeak

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Bu bye Americans, hello H1-Bs

[Snotnose]

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 big lie of the pols

[Okian Warrior]

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.

Re:The big lie of the pols

[Sibko]

Jobs are only created when entire new industries open up.

Let's simplify things down a bit to make this easier to grasp:
In order to compete in an established market, you need to produce a better/cheaper product than your competitors.
Every 'cost' in the entire chain of production fundamentally boils down to human labor
Reducing human labor reduces costs
Reducing costs improves efficiency
Improving efficiency allows better competition in the marketplace

There are no new jobs being created; only jobs being lost as we create new practices, techniques, and technology to reduce the amount of human labor needed for production of goods. Walmart replaced all the local grocers because walmart was more efficient than they were. Walmart "created" jobs only insomuch that nobody bothered comparing walmarts' "job creation" to their "job destruction" from undercutting local competition.

Yesterday we needed a team of 1000 to create a widget. Today we need a team of 100. Tomorrow it'll be a team of 10.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to say this is a bad thing. It just is.

So remember, the next time a politician or CEO talks about how many jobs he's creating; what he really means is that he's moving a bunch of jobs into a certain location from another, and almost certainly the end result will be a decline in total jobs in the world, not an increase.

Re:What does IBM do?

[__aaclcg7560]

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

IBM has been dying for years...

[javabandit]

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.

Re:IBM has been dying for years...

[Dr. Evil]

I disagree about the innovation. They're making great strides in "global resourcing", learning systems like Watson and still have amazing private physics research. As a physicist, it might be one of the better non-military places to work.

Otherwise, you're spot-on. I worked there longer than I should have. I know almost nobody working there anymore. They were all fired... I mean layed off. Their jobs went to Brazil.

The corporate bloat always made me wonder why anyone would chose to do business with them.... but having worked for similar giant companies, it seems they expect a similar management style in their vendors. Having a second-line manager to complain to when your sales rep's backup failed you and their boss can't help, seems to be some kind of expectatoin. You won't get that in a mom-and-pop shop.

The company varies by division. 2 years and leave is reasonable for most areas, but if you're in physics, or you're in big data and learning systems, or managing global resourcing projects, you might not find a more interesting place to work.

Hiring There, Not Here, or Laying Off Here

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hiring There, Not Here, or Laying Off Here

[turbidostato]

"Until the rest of world catches up to the US in wages, the pressure to off-shore will not change"

You see... it works both ways. Pray it doesn't end up being "until US catches down to the outsourced countries' wages, the pressure to off-shore will not change". There's only one US of A, but there's a lot of third world countries waiting to be the next India or Malaysia once their wages significantly grow over the starvation level.

Age needs to be reported moving forward

[justcauseisjustthat]

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.

Re:The solution is easy

[rl117]

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.

Re:lower wages

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:lower wages

[fluffernutter]

Relocate to where? India???

Re:lower wages

[fluffernutter]

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.