This is just weird. Where does it come from? Why is it that insane people like this poster has to spout this kind of nonsense in random places?
Nothing good ever came out of religion. The foundations on which the US was built are entirely secular in nature, even though the people who built those foundations had different views on religion and Christianity. They were all smart enough to understand that only a secular country will survive. Countries lead by religious maniacs will alway fare poorly. Look at the current state of the US. That is what happens when you let the Christian version of the Taliban rule the White House.
So I suspect it's all true - although the actual count of employees to be outsourced might be speculative at this point since it appears IBM is keeping that number close to its vest.
Speculative? It's insane! There isn't 150,000 people in IGS to let go. Not even close. Will IBM hire an additional 100,000 people in IGS in the US so that they can let go this number of people?
Neither. Shouldn't it be obvious? American Express workers are definitely the hardest workers. They are (clearly) American, and the Express in the name, well, no need to say more...
While ending US operations isn't going to happen, cutting it down to 50% would fit right in to what IT companies have done in the past,
Not really. That deep cuts would seriously hurt IBM not only in the long run but also in the immediate short run. If IBM cut half its US staff the street would interpret that as a sign of severe problems at IBM, problems that IBM obviously have been hiding. This would trigger fears about inappropriate behavior, bad accounting, memories of Enron, and a massive sell-off would happen immediately.
Also, IGS cutting half it's staff in the US would amount to less than 40,000 people, probably far less, nowhere near the 150,000 that Cringely is using.
So not only is a massive layoff of this scale plausible, I think it's highly likely.
IBM will lay off and hire people here and there always. Some times they will lay off or hire a lot of people. IBM has acquired a lot of companies the past couple of years, layoffs are inevitable. These numbers are insane though. Insane for a simple reason: IGS doesn't have 150,000 people in the US to lay off. IGS doesn't have 150,000 people in the US period. So, will IBM hire all of these people before they fire them?
Cringely needs to lay off his mothers medication before he writes his nonsense.
Does anyone know anything about an actual breakdown of where those 350,000 people who work for IBM in the US are actually placed?
Why is it that people have such a hard time reading simple words and numbers? IBM doesn't have 350,000 people in the US. IBM has about 330,000 people total, IN THE WORLD. IBM has some 130,000 or so people in the US. Total. Less than half of that is IGS. But just for fun, let's say half of IBM is in the US and half of IBM is IGS (that is not the case). We end up with IGS being at most 80,000 people in the US.
IBM is, according to Cringely laying off half of IGS, which according to his drug-induced maths, turns into 150,000 people. Now, using too high numbers, we find that IGS in the US is about 80K. So, what is IBM going to do? Hire 220,000 people, lay off 150,000 people, all in 2007? Well, if they do, that means that IGS would grow from 80,000 to 150,000. Is that a bad thing?
Well, perhaps they won't do that. Perhaps they just want to lay off 150,000 people so that they can cut their current staff down to half of what it is now. That still means that IBM will have to get to 190,000 people before they can start their lay offs. So, how do you propose that IBM hire 110,000 people and then lay off 150,000 people to get down to 40,000 people in IGS? Why would they want to lay off people in such an insane way?
The fact of the matter is that Cringely was at a nasty party the other day. At that party he scored some heavy hallucinogenic drugs, and for some reason he decided to write this nonsense after taking those drugs for about a week.
A fly in that ointment is that nowadays, most of that capital is being redeployed out of the US, and it takes a while for the domestic economy to take up the slack with increased added value to crank the domestic incomes back up.
Sorry, no fly. Have you been to China? I was in Beijing the past two weeks. Great city by the way, I hope I get to go there for the Olympics. Any way, walking around Beijing, or taking a $1 taxi ride for that matter, is quite interesting. There is a lot of poor people for sure, but more noticeable is the fact that there are thousands of "western" cars on the streets. Thousands and thousands and thousands. Audi is apparently very popular. So is Jeep and VW.
The people in China making money on this stuff buy our stuff. They buy cars from GM and Daimler-Chrysler, they buy chemicals from Down Chemicals (huge amounts in fact) etc. The company I work for has outsourced a good bit of work to China and we have cut cost based on that. We have also been able to get a very large number of contracts in China though, and we are making money on those. Our Chinese employees are driving American cars and buying (real, not counterfeit) American goods.
Money flows back and forth. That is the nature of capitalism. In the next 10 years China will probably rival Europe and North America as the biggest export market for US companies. We can thank the outsourcing for kick-starting that. Now we just have to learn Mandarin, and the art of selling to the Chinese, not just buying from them.
IBM is just keeping up; if you don't like outsourcing, you shouldn't have let congress, the senate, and the president (the last one) make it legal.
Are you serious? Do you really, genuinely, think that congress and the president (the last one) made outsourcing legal? Do you really think outsourcing is something new?
Outsourcing is an inevitable part of capitalism and technological development. If you don't like it, you can join the communist party and try to ban all technological development.
The sun is already setting on IBM, ever since Microsoft came into the scene by licensing DOS with every IBM PC. Adding to IBM's woes are PC-Clone (thank god for that) that allowed competitors like HP and Dell to flourish
IBM never cared much for the PC, never invested a lot of money in it, never banked it's business on it, never really gave a shit. OS/2 was a good OS, far better than the competition at the time, but since IBM couldn't give a rats ass about it, it failed to an smarter, more agile startup. That didn't bother IBM much, and rightly so.
IBM isn't, hasn't ever been, and will never be a company that is overly interested in what goes on on your desktop. IBM cares about your data center, and over the last few years IBM has become the king of the data center. More of your critical data resides on IBM hardware and is managed by IBM software than you will ever understand, simply because you are focused on the PC side of things. Who care about the PC? It's a fancy way of running an HTML browser. This browser gets all it's data from IBM systems (exaggerated, but still), and that is what matters to IBM.
Who is left to challenge IBM on the back end? Sun is dying. HP is struggling. DEC is gone. There is Linux, but for a big data center, IBM is probably your best Linux bet. On the software side there is Oracle. There are others too that you have probably never heard of, but none of them have the size or the penetration of IBM.
As I and others have said elsewhere, Cringley is on some serious drugs here. IBM GS doesn't have 150 000 people in the US to lay off. Hell, IBM in total in the US probably barely has 150 000 people. Cringleys article is drivel, end of story. The guy needs to snort a hell of a lot less coke and shoot a hell of a lot less heroin before he writes his dumb-ass shit.
IGS consists of many divisions. They do both consulting like Accenture, and also implementation which Accenture pretends to do, but Accenture to a high degree outsources their implementation work.
In my personal opinion, big companies like IBM and Accenture are far better off when they stick to business analysis and consulting, and leave the implementation of software to the smaller and more agile companies. It is very, very hard for a large company to maintain a large staff of highly competent tech workers (hard core coders if you wish). Perhaps they should not try.
How about from an IBM employee? As far as I can tell, it's true.
I just wish people would do an absolute minimum amount of fact checking before they spread this kind of, quite frankly, garbage.
Firstly - I have no doubt IBM is laying off a lot of people, there is probably a need to in some areas. Layoffs are part of running any business. Some times a lot of layoffs will happen too. Trying just a little bit of basic maths first would be appropriate however. The numbers in this article are absurd.
As far as I know IBM has around 320 000 employees world wide and some 120 or so in the US. The layoffs this article are talking about are in the US, and they are only within the IGS part of IBM. IGS doesn't account for more than half of IBMs employees in the US, at an absolute maximum. That means that if you lay off the entire IGS division, you'd lay off some 50-60 thousand people. Where Bob gets the other 100 000 from is anyones guess. Perhaps they are laying off people in India and outsourcing those to China, and they are laying off people in China to outsource them to Poland.
Sadly sensationalism is more important than basic fact checking. The state of our current journalists is really, really sad. Cringely is at the very bottom of the heaping pile of dung that they call journalists today. Cringely is useful for little else than pirana food. Sadly I think that feeding Cringely to pirana would be cruel and unusual punishment, for the pirana.
As if the company would ever officially fire him for not installing illegal copies... I think it would only lead to his boss(es) finding or creating a reason for fireing him.
Stuff like that is relatively easy to prove if he keeps a record. In order for the boss to dismiss him for other reasons, the boss would have to wait for a minimum of 6 months to build a credible cause for this issue not being the reason for his dismissal. He would in fact probably have to wait closer to a year. If the original poster still works for the same company 6 months or a year from now he is a fool, and then I really don't care what happens to him. I have no time for fools.
nless the manager is pure evil he will respond, if not for the first issue then for the second. In any case... if you are directed to move forward with the installation, you have a record that your manager was made aware of the situation and you reasonably expected them to resolve the issue.
Problem is - breaking the law, even unknowingly, is breaking the law. He is ultimately responsible, and his manager is clearly not interested in doing this the right way. A manager with that attitude will hang him out to dry if things go bad.
In addition to doing the only legal thing, he should also go look for a new job, working for a company like this is not a good idea in the long run.
And unless you are fired, HR isn't going to be able to do anything for you
If HR can't do anything unless you are fired, HR isn't doing their job, but that is another matter. If you are CC'ing an external party on this communication, given the circumstance, you are snitching, and in a bad way. I do agree that he should get legal council however, preferably from the company lawyer.
US employment law is completely different to that in the UK. In particular, IIRC most US states are still "at will" states, where either party may terminate an employment contract without notice, and for any reason not explicitly prohibited (e.g., by anti-discrimination legislation).
So you are saying the US needs to catch up with other countries in its employment legislation.
Sorry for the double post - should have preview'ed
Even in the US, most states have wrongful termination laws (I don't know of any that doesn't). Being dismissed for refusing to break the law is high on the list of things the legislators wants to punish hard. If he sticks to his guns and documents his actions (while getting legal advice - he can get that for free at this stage in most places in the US) and they start trying to push him out, he would probably end up with a nice cash settlement from the company that would allow him to take a 6 months vacation somewhere nice - punitive damage compensation in the US can reach interesting figures.
US employment law is completely different to that in the UK. In particular, IIRC most US states are still "at will" states, where either party may terminate an employment contract without notice, and for any reason not explicitly prohibited (e.g., by anti-discrimination legislation).
So you are saying the US needs to catch up with other countries in its employment legislation.
Even in the US, most states have wrongful termination laws (I don't know of any that doesn't). Being dismissed for refusing to break the law is high on the list of things the legislators wants to punish hard. If he sticks to his guns and documents his actions (while getting legal advice - he can get that for free at this stage in most places in the US) and they start trying to push him out, he would probably end up with a nice cash settlement from the company that would allow him to take a 6 months vacation somewhere nice - punitive damage compensation in the US can reach interesting figures.
Ethics is further down the list of things to be true to than survival. Especially since we're talking about something as abstract as violating a copyright.
If you break the law, you break the law, and you take responsibility. It doesn't matter if someone "ordered" you to break the law. You see, you can't be ordered by anyone to break the law no matter what, if they did your responsibility was to completely ignore them.
The one thing to remember is that the following is illegal for a company (1) to order an employee to break the law and (2) to fire someone for refusing to break the law. A company will normally get punished hard for firing someone for refusing to break the law.
If the original poster sticks to his guns and still experiences significant pressure over this issue after refusing, he should seek proper legal counsel. If he is fired and he lives in the US, he could end up with a decent settlement.
Personally, I'd get evidence I was ordered to do something, like an email, and then just do it.
Yeah, and that evidence would be cool reading for him in jail. He is responsible for his actions no matter what. It would be idiotic to do this when he can stick to his guns, bring in the HR responsible, document that he is sticking to his guns, and sue them if they fire him for it.
BTW, if they do not have an HR person, he should make a simple question in the next meeting with his manager (assuming he at this stage has documented everything): "Can I please speak with the company lawyer about this?"
When he utters that question, one out of two things will happen, they'll even back off or they will fire him on the spot. Either or he is better off.
Even better, cc your vendor and include a line like "I've included John from {insert vendor's name} whom you can contact to purchase additional licenses
Never, never, never. Don't do this. Bad idea. CC the HR person only. Keep it internal. Don't snitch like this, it is not your business to do that, and it can (rightfully so) make you entirely unemployable. Go the HR way and sue their asses if they fire you.
Bad advice. Snitching is a bad thing. You don't have to. The proper, legal, way is the right thing to do. Refuse the request. Don't go above someones head (that is usually a bad idea). If you have an HR department, talk to the HR person. The HR person is in legal hot water if he complains and later get fired for sticking to the law.
As I said - there is a proper process for this, and it is trivial. He sticks to the law. Refueses all such requests. If they fire him, he sues them. They're not going to fire him. If the organization is of some size, his manager should be in trouble once the HR person gets involved.
I sent such an email. Was then called into the managers office and told in no uncertain terms that if I sent an email like that again I'd be kicked out of the building. They don't like that stuff because it's tracable.
This company had one MSDN for 100 employees. An unlicensed exchange server, mostly unlicensed XP, unlicensed VS2003, unlicensed office, you name it, they didn't license it.
You really shouldn't let someone bully you like this. If you are ordered to break the law by your company, refuse. Make the refusal traceable. BCC your self off-line. Talk to your colleagues about it so that they know you are refusing if you can. Discuss it with your HR manager if you have one.
If they keep insisting, keep refusing until they either back off or fire you. If they fire you, sue their asses. You'll be better off.
This is bad advice. He is personally responsible for what he does, no matter what his boss is telling him to do. If they get audited, no matter what kind of record he has documenting he was ordered to do this, he is responsible and will pay the price.
This is what he should do:
Stick to your guns. Don't install the software. Document this.
Tell them that if they are not willing to accept that, they are going to have to fire you.
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This is just weird. Where does it come from? Why is it that insane people like this poster has to spout this kind of nonsense in random places?
Nothing good ever came out of religion. The foundations on which the US was built are entirely secular in nature, even though the people who built those foundations had different views on religion and Christianity. They were all smart enough to understand that only a secular country will survive. Countries lead by religious maniacs will alway fare poorly. Look at the current state of the US. That is what happens when you let the Christian version of the Taliban rule the White House.
Speculative? It's insane! There isn't 150,000 people in IGS to let go. Not even close. Will IBM hire an additional 100,000 people in IGS in the US so that they can let go this number of people?
Neither. Shouldn't it be obvious? American Express workers are definitely the hardest workers. They are (clearly) American, and the Express in the name, well, no need to say more...
Not really. That deep cuts would seriously hurt IBM not only in the long run but also in the immediate short run. If IBM cut half its US staff the street would interpret that as a sign of severe problems at IBM, problems that IBM obviously have been hiding. This would trigger fears about inappropriate behavior, bad accounting, memories of Enron, and a massive sell-off would happen immediately.
Also, IGS cutting half it's staff in the US would amount to less than 40,000 people, probably far less, nowhere near the 150,000 that Cringely is using.
IBM will lay off and hire people here and there always. Some times they will lay off or hire a lot of people. IBM has acquired a lot of companies the past couple of years, layoffs are inevitable. These numbers are insane though. Insane for a simple reason: IGS doesn't have 150,000 people in the US to lay off. IGS doesn't have 150,000 people in the US period. So, will IBM hire all of these people before they fire them?
Cringely needs to lay off his mothers medication before he writes his nonsense.
Why is it that people have such a hard time reading simple words and numbers? IBM doesn't have 350,000 people in the US. IBM has about 330,000 people total, IN THE WORLD. IBM has some 130,000 or so people in the US. Total. Less than half of that is IGS. But just for fun, let's say half of IBM is in the US and half of IBM is IGS (that is not the case). We end up with IGS being at most 80,000 people in the US.
IBM is, according to Cringely laying off half of IGS, which according to his drug-induced maths, turns into 150,000 people. Now, using too high numbers, we find that IGS in the US is about 80K. So, what is IBM going to do? Hire 220,000 people, lay off 150,000 people, all in 2007? Well, if they do, that means that IGS would grow from 80,000 to 150,000. Is that a bad thing?
Well, perhaps they won't do that. Perhaps they just want to lay off 150,000 people so that they can cut their current staff down to half of what it is now. That still means that IBM will have to get to 190,000 people before they can start their lay offs. So, how do you propose that IBM hire 110,000 people and then lay off 150,000 people to get down to 40,000 people in IGS? Why would they want to lay off people in such an insane way?
The fact of the matter is that Cringely was at a nasty party the other day. At that party he scored some heavy hallucinogenic drugs, and for some reason he decided to write this nonsense after taking those drugs for about a week.
Huh? Another ignoramus spouting nonsense about things he knows nothing about I guess.
Sorry, no fly. Have you been to China? I was in Beijing the past two weeks. Great city by the way, I hope I get to go there for the Olympics. Any way, walking around Beijing, or taking a $1 taxi ride for that matter, is quite interesting. There is a lot of poor people for sure, but more noticeable is the fact that there are thousands of "western" cars on the streets. Thousands and thousands and thousands. Audi is apparently very popular. So is Jeep and VW.
The people in China making money on this stuff buy our stuff. They buy cars from GM and Daimler-Chrysler, they buy chemicals from Down Chemicals (huge amounts in fact) etc. The company I work for has outsourced a good bit of work to China and we have cut cost based on that. We have also been able to get a very large number of contracts in China though, and we are making money on those. Our Chinese employees are driving American cars and buying (real, not counterfeit) American goods.
Money flows back and forth. That is the nature of capitalism. In the next 10 years China will probably rival Europe and North America as the biggest export market for US companies. We can thank the outsourcing for kick-starting that. Now we just have to learn Mandarin, and the art of selling to the Chinese, not just buying from them.
Are you serious? Do you really, genuinely, think that congress and the president (the last one) made outsourcing legal? Do you really think outsourcing is something new?
Outsourcing is an inevitable part of capitalism and technological development. If you don't like it, you can join the communist party and try to ban all technological development.
IBM never cared much for the PC, never invested a lot of money in it, never banked it's business on it, never really gave a shit. OS/2 was a good OS, far better than the competition at the time, but since IBM couldn't give a rats ass about it, it failed to an smarter, more agile startup. That didn't bother IBM much, and rightly so.
IBM isn't, hasn't ever been, and will never be a company that is overly interested in what goes on on your desktop. IBM cares about your data center, and over the last few years IBM has become the king of the data center. More of your critical data resides on IBM hardware and is managed by IBM software than you will ever understand, simply because you are focused on the PC side of things. Who care about the PC? It's a fancy way of running an HTML browser. This browser gets all it's data from IBM systems (exaggerated, but still), and that is what matters to IBM.
Who is left to challenge IBM on the back end? Sun is dying. HP is struggling. DEC is gone. There is Linux, but for a big data center, IBM is probably your best Linux bet. On the software side there is Oracle. There are others too that you have probably never heard of, but none of them have the size or the penetration of IBM.
As I and others have said elsewhere, Cringley is on some serious drugs here. IBM GS doesn't have 150 000 people in the US to lay off. Hell, IBM in total in the US probably barely has 150 000 people. Cringleys article is drivel, end of story. The guy needs to snort a hell of a lot less coke and shoot a hell of a lot less heroin before he writes his dumb-ass shit.
IGS consists of many divisions. They do both consulting like Accenture, and also implementation which Accenture pretends to do, but Accenture to a high degree outsources their implementation work.
In my personal opinion, big companies like IBM and Accenture are far better off when they stick to business analysis and consulting, and leave the implementation of software to the smaller and more agile companies. It is very, very hard for a large company to maintain a large staff of highly competent tech workers (hard core coders if you wish). Perhaps they should not try.
Yeah - capitalism is a bitch. Let's find an alternative. There was this dude, Karl Marx did some analysis around this. Maybe his ideas are good.
For the sarcasm-impaired - buzz off!
I just wish people would do an absolute minimum amount of fact checking before they spread this kind of, quite frankly, garbage.
Firstly - I have no doubt IBM is laying off a lot of people, there is probably a need to in some areas. Layoffs are part of running any business. Some times a lot of layoffs will happen too. Trying just a little bit of basic maths first would be appropriate however. The numbers in this article are absurd.
As far as I know IBM has around 320 000 employees world wide and some 120 or so in the US. The layoffs this article are talking about are in the US, and they are only within the IGS part of IBM. IGS doesn't account for more than half of IBMs employees in the US, at an absolute maximum. That means that if you lay off the entire IGS division, you'd lay off some 50-60 thousand people. Where Bob gets the other 100 000 from is anyones guess. Perhaps they are laying off people in India and outsourcing those to China, and they are laying off people in China to outsource them to Poland.
Sadly sensationalism is more important than basic fact checking. The state of our current journalists is really, really sad. Cringely is at the very bottom of the heaping pile of dung that they call journalists today. Cringely is useful for little else than pirana food. Sadly I think that feeding Cringely to pirana would be cruel and unusual punishment, for the pirana.
Stuff like that is relatively easy to prove if he keeps a record. In order for the boss to dismiss him for other reasons, the boss would have to wait for a minimum of 6 months to build a credible cause for this issue not being the reason for his dismissal. He would in fact probably have to wait closer to a year. If the original poster still works for the same company 6 months or a year from now he is a fool, and then I really don't care what happens to him. I have no time for fools.
Problem is - breaking the law, even unknowingly, is breaking the law. He is ultimately responsible, and his manager is clearly not interested in doing this the right way. A manager with that attitude will hang him out to dry if things go bad.
In addition to doing the only legal thing, he should also go look for a new job, working for a company like this is not a good idea in the long run.
If HR can't do anything unless you are fired, HR isn't doing their job, but that is another matter. If you are CC'ing an external party on this communication, given the circumstance, you are snitching, and in a bad way. I do agree that he should get legal council however, preferably from the company lawyer.
Sorry for the double post - should have preview'ed
Even in the US, most states have wrongful termination laws (I don't know of any that doesn't). Being dismissed for refusing to break the law is high on the list of things the legislators wants to punish hard. If he sticks to his guns and documents his actions (while getting legal advice - he can get that for free at this stage in most places in the US) and they start trying to push him out, he would probably end up with a nice cash settlement from the company that would allow him to take a 6 months vacation somewhere nice - punitive damage compensation in the US can reach interesting figures.
If you break the law, you break the law, and you take responsibility. It doesn't matter if someone "ordered" you to break the law. You see, you can't be ordered by anyone to break the law no matter what, if they did your responsibility was to completely ignore them.
The one thing to remember is that the following is illegal for a company (1) to order an employee to break the law and (2) to fire someone for refusing to break the law. A company will normally get punished hard for firing someone for refusing to break the law.
If the original poster sticks to his guns and still experiences significant pressure over this issue after refusing, he should seek proper legal counsel. If he is fired and he lives in the US, he could end up with a decent settlement.
Yeah, and that evidence would be cool reading for him in jail. He is responsible for his actions no matter what. It would be idiotic to do this when he can stick to his guns, bring in the HR responsible, document that he is sticking to his guns, and sue them if they fire him for it.
BTW, if they do not have an HR person, he should make a simple question in the next meeting with his manager (assuming he at this stage has documented everything): "Can I please speak with the company lawyer about this?"
When he utters that question, one out of two things will happen, they'll even back off or they will fire him on the spot. Either or he is better off.
Never, never, never. Don't do this. Bad idea. CC the HR person only. Keep it internal. Don't snitch like this, it is not your business to do that, and it can (rightfully so) make you entirely unemployable. Go the HR way and sue their asses if they fire you.
Bad advice. Snitching is a bad thing. You don't have to. The proper, legal, way is the right thing to do. Refuse the request. Don't go above someones head (that is usually a bad idea). If you have an HR department, talk to the HR person. The HR person is in legal hot water if he complains and later get fired for sticking to the law.
As I said - there is a proper process for this, and it is trivial. He sticks to the law. Refueses all such requests. If they fire him, he sues them. They're not going to fire him. If the organization is of some size, his manager should be in trouble once the HR person gets involved.
You really shouldn't let someone bully you like this. If you are ordered to break the law by your company, refuse. Make the refusal traceable. BCC your self off-line. Talk to your colleagues about it so that they know you are refusing if you can. Discuss it with your HR manager if you have one.
If they keep insisting, keep refusing until they either back off or fire you. If they fire you, sue their asses. You'll be better off.
This is bad advice. He is personally responsible for what he does, no matter what his boss is telling him to do. If they get audited, no matter what kind of record he has documenting he was ordered to do this, he is responsible and will pay the price.
This is what he should do: