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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.

3 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....

  2. Corporate DoubleSpeak by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...
  3. Re:"resource actions" or "workforce rebalancing" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.