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Reports Coming In Of Mass IBM Layoffs Underway In The US (ieee.org)
Tekla Perry writes: Last week, IBM reported to investors that its workforce at the end of 2015 was almost as big as its workforce at the end of 2014 (within less than 1 percent), in spite of a year in which 70,000 employees left the company, to be replaced with new hires and acquisitions. Today reports are coming in that massive layoffs across the United States are underway, likely one-third of the U.S. workforce, according to one soon-to-be-laid-off-IBMer. In addition, a recent change in IBM's severance policy may leave workers with less cash than anticipated. IBM maintains that things are just business as usual, but this appears to be the day IBM Watchers have long warned about.
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 in the US or so - and who knows where everyone else is employed, not here.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Workers are also reporting work is being moved offshore to Hungary and Brazil.
Donald Trump will wave his magic wand and force all American multinationals to keep jobs in the US.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
If not Trump,
Are you fucking kidding me?
Trump is a selfish demagogue. He's held every position on every subject. He gleefully advocates war crimes. He's whipping his supporters into sickening frenzies. Once a mob of racist fucks gets moving it's hard to control them. For fucks sake, he's quoting Mussolini, and pretending not to know who David Duke is. Yet here you are, suggesting he is a sane choice.
Seriously, WTF America?
You can vote for me as I've decided to throw my hat into the ring and I have a great plan to solve the debt crisis. Since I'm just a nobody the odds of me being elected are at least a trillion to one, which means a few wagers on my self should cover a lot of the current US debt.
But here's where my brilliant strategy comes into play. Since it looks to be Trump vs Clinton at this point, it's a battle of which candidate do you hate less. I will legally change my name to Neither (just Neither, no first name) which means I'll likely get a majority of votes in any state where I'm on the ballot. I secure a win and pay off the debt in one fell swoop.
And for my encore, peace in the Middle East. I'm already working on a news letter you can subscribe to.
That's what IBM did wrong: set short term money/earning goals that were so aggressive that they burned long-term good-will to reach them.
Technology is such that one can often sacrifice the long-term to get short-term gains/features/improvements.
If you want to succeed in consulting for the longer term, then view yourself as a reputation company instead of a product/deliverable company. Measure your success by how happy your customers are at least as much as by current profits. If you make them happy, they'll go to you again for other projects.
You can use your good-will as a selling point in that you invite potential customers to interview current and past customers having similar projects. If your competitor(s) is a jerk, then the potential customer will find that out either when the competitor cannot provide sufficient references, or when their references tell the truth (Oracle, cough cough).
Table-ized A.I.
If not Trump, then who do you recommend I vote for?
A Democratic member of congress and Democratic national senator from your state.
Just FYI, we have a pretty damned good President now who has for five years asked Congress to do basic stuff, like not give tax credits to companies for their exporting American jobs, and instead give those tax credits to companies bringing jobs into the United States. No go from the Republicans. They listen to people like Carly Fiorina.
So stop focusing so much on the presidency. No matter who is President, if we have an old-school Republican congress, American workers, including American IT workers, are going to be screwed.
Good thing the economy is so healthy! People should have no trouble finding positions at equal pay. Furthermore, I expect a suspension of the H1B program until all these people are employed again.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
An Uncle of mine owns a paid for house in Nashua, NH and has worked for IBM near there for decades. Some folks are just going to settle where they are, and where they are doesn't offer a a f*ck ton of alternative employment opportunities.
It really just depends on where you are in your career, I suppose.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
They will probably move most of the positions to India, Brazil, Hungary, where-ever ...
IBM has had a strong presence in India for more than 30 years. Global companies hire globally. Get over it.
set short term money/earning goals that were so aggressive that they burned long-term good-will to reach them.
Story of any major corporation, be it a software manufacturer (fuck you, it's our computer now you're just the user), a fast food chain (let's replace all our ingredients with cheaper stuff and the customer will never know the difference), a consumer goods company (let's make the cheapest possible product we can in China who cares if it falls apart/doesn't remove stains/poisons pets - we have brand recognition and market share baby), clothing manufacturers (let's make clothes in Bangladesh that are so badly made they literally fall apart after two washes, and charge premium prices) and I could go on. It's the story of the world.
Some visionary busts his ass building a leading company in the business, and then he gets sick and dies and his kids fuck it up, or he sells it and some CEO fixes things for a record profit in a few quarters when his stock options become vested and who cares if it all comes crashing down the moment he cashes out and leaves the company, etc. It's a symptom of capitalism, really. Screw the customer for as much as you can, screw the employees as much as you can, grab the cash and to hell with anyone else. Actual success requires more than this.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Hi - I've worked for IBM for decade and a half, and I can offer you my perspective for why I stay:
1. People can have two different perspectives on their company (IBM, Oracle, VMWare, Google - any company). Some people think of their company as a faceless, monolithic corporation which makes bad decisions and doesn't have your best interest at heart; and that perspective is valid. :)
Other people think in more immediate terms - when I think of "IBM", I think of 15-30 people around me - co-workers and immediate layers of management - who I know, enjoy, and trust. This perspective is also valid.
If *neither* of those perspectives offers a positive view, then certainly, it's time to go! But time & again, my management has stood up for us in face of market and HQ adversity. Will they always be able to do so? Possibly not. But I trust them to try
2. Skillset confidence: I believe I have 'dynamic job security", which means that I have faith that if IBM were to fire me tomorrow, I'd be able to find a job in the market reasonably quickly based on my skills, capabilities, experience, and reputation.
Having such faith, I extend it to my current position: I firmly believe that I am good value and provide good work to the company.
If my management ever believes otherwise - it could be because they're wrong, or it could be that I'm wrong. I keep my skillset current, I look hard to be useful beyond just "doing what I'm told", and generally try to be integral if not indispensable.
But point is, I don't think I'm about to be laid off, and I'm perhaps arrogant enough to believe I would see it coming with reasonable distance.
Did others feel exact same way, just before the hammer dropped? Possibly. Only they can tell, in the heart of their hearts, if they genuinely believed their job was secure and their performance/value sufficient. I certainly believe there are tons and tons of cases where companies do the wrong thing and get rid of people they shouldn't.
3. Fun
I genuinely enjoy what I'm doing, feel productive, and proud of the work and product we're creating. People may disagree (for decades, uncharitably, I've wondered if anybody was _proud_ to be working on MS Windows, for example;), but that's how I feel nontheless.
Why do your friends stay at IBM?
Well, they pay me a decent wage and are located where I want to live.
If (realistically, when) they get around to cutting my job, I'll find something else. But I could lose my job anywhere I go. Why should I lose sleep over it?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Your impression that only pure capitalism exists and nothing else is false. The world is full of shades of gray. There is a set where profit can be achieved without destroying a) the environment b) the worker force c) the brand. When you realize that "maximum profit" usually means offloading hidden economic costs onto someone else (which usually comes back to bite you in the ass anyway), it becomes possible to accept less than maximum profit as a goal. Very few people who build successful businesses do it ONLY for the money.
Look at Wal Mart. Absolute lowest price in everything - so low they put everyone out of business. Paid their employees as little as possible with as few benefits as possible. Even then, they get into financial trouble. Well what are you going to do when Wal Mart came to your town, put everyone out of business and then leaves town taking the few remaining jobs with it? Success story?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"would have dropped 2.5 million job-seekers into the workforce overnight"
Wouldn't these grey/illegal migrants already be in the workforce (illegally)? If anything, it hurts scumbag employers unable to exploit those that have no other options.
Bye!
IBM is laying off 1/3 of it's workforce at the time kids are told to pursue education for careers in STEM. Seems one of those things is incorrect.
My better idea is "stop bailing-out failures, and let nature take its course". That's the other half of what you have to do to be capitalism. Most of the areas with the worst history of customer service have a matching history of bailouts.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I work at IBM. I will tell you why people stay there, it is because articles like this that pepper slashdot are woefully inaccurate.
The thing people on /. do not understand is how big and sprawling IBM is. If you read through the people complaining in this story, you will see a trend - they are all in global services. Global services is the "outsourcing" arm of IBM - it is a body shop. GBS bids consultants out at the lowest possible dollar - they have to, because if they don't they will be underbid. GBS people are also, for the most part, interchangeable and expendable. GBS does things like call centers, Level 0 and Level 1 support, IT outsourcing. It is *NOT* cream of the crop people. GBS however is not all of IBM - it is just a part.
I work in IBM Security for example IBM security is not laying off people in the US, or anywhere else. In fact we have 1,000 job openings right now. We pay VERY well and are growing like crazy. IBM Security is now the largest enterprise security vendor in the world by revenue - we are larger than Symantec, larger than McAfee, larger than Cisco. But you know what? We're only ~ 10,000 people. That is out of the 350,000+ at IBM.
Think on this for a second and put it into some perspective - the largest enterprise security company in the world is only 2.8% of the IBM workforce.
IBM Security is just one of many very large business units in IBM - there is cloud, commerce, analytics, infrastucture, mobile, data, outsourcing, and Global Services. Every one of these is a multibillion dollar company all by themselves. People who work for IBM range from low level call center employees to software architects to nobel prize winners in physics to airline pilots. IBM is a MASSIVE beast and it is literally impossible to take any singular person's experience and try to extrapolate it across the whole company.
Posting as anon because I don't speak for IBM.