13 ms·

What the IBM Layoffs Look Like

186 points by navait 11y ago

dinkumthinkum 11y ago
So, I'm trying to figure out the general HN view based on the comments in seeing ... Is it the case the HNers generally view programming as a fairly low paid blue collar position?
jayess 11y ago
"Resource Action." That's even worse than my previous corporate cog job where they called it a RIF, "Reduction in Force." Who sits around and justifies themselves by coming up with idiotic terms like this?
- softawre 11y ago
  My company uses RIF, though I bet we're not alone (just in case, was it in Indy?)
- johnward 11y ago
  Referring to humans as "resources" in general is creepy to me.
  - strongai 11y ago
    Yes it is. I believe the usage comes from the days when calling them 'personnel' was deemed creepy!
PierreRochard 11y ago
When I worked at Deloitte they made a similar decision to outsource to India instead of training staff to learn Python and automate the time consuming, low value work. That's when I decided to leave, best move of my career.
- SandB0x 11y ago
  How was the quality of the outsourced work? Did they find an existing software house in India and send them specs a deadlines? Did they hire individuals?
  - tomashertus 11y ago
    This is one example of outsourced work(CSS code) to Asia: .scanResultsTable th:first-child+th+th+th{padding-right: 30px; text-align: right; width: 35%;} Don't do it guys, really don't....
    - pavanky 11y ago
      That's not generalizing anything at all.
    - gizmodo59 11y ago
      Its hard to digest this level of logic at a site like HN.
  - PierreRochard 11y ago
    They weren't outsourcing software development work, they were outsourcing the manual task of checking PDFs against XLS files. The quality wasn't the problem, the throughput and cost are. I wrote an app that parsed the PDFs but no manager wanted to learn Python to review the code, so they told me to move on :(
- alexandrerond 11y ago
  I heard Deloitte and such consulting firms barely reach 1.5 year of retention (as in, in average people leave in that time). So you're best move is also the most common.
  - johnward 11y ago
    I too have heard that those consulting firms "churn and burn" young talent. I'm a consultant at IBM so I don't know if it's actually much different though. I've seen decent turnover in my org.
shepardrtc 11y ago
I currently work at a multi-national corporation that has offshored a vast majority of its development and infrastructure. Any savings in cost of payroll is absolutely outpaced by a massive increase in expenditure required for project overruns and failures due to lower quality of work, terrible communication, lack of real SME's, and worthless organization. The upper management's reaction to this was to bring in consultants who are considerably more expensive than local talent and are often laughably ineffective. Especially since they have to fly back home every single Thursday. The sense of impending failure among the local employees for every single project is palpable.
- EvanPlaice 11y ago
  In the bigger picture of things 'expensive' is a highly relative. You have to also factor in risk and the other secondary costs. Not sure if this applies to your company but I have some prior experience as one of those SME/consultant/contractor guys. For one particular multi-national company whom we did a lot of work, they had an entire dedicated team of (underutilized) engineers/technologists that should have been more than capable of doing the work we provided. Aside from the hour or two of daily PM work, the entire staff would disappear for the rest of their shift and reappear just in time to check out. To this day, I still have no clue where everybody would go. I'm not talking about an isolated incident, I saw the same pattern take place over the course of months. Why was this allowed? Why was the company willing to pay us a premium to do work that could have been handled internally? It was a non-union shop. The company had established a very firm and well defined scope of work. Adding additional responsibilities could screw up the balance and put the company and it's daily operations at risk. In the bigger picture of things, paying contractors/consultants a premium + expenses to do the extra work is an order of magnitude less expensive than the possibility of unionization. Just the cost savings on HR overhead (ex managing disgruntled workers, hiring new people) alone probably made up for what we charged. You should've seen the amount of hell raised when the coffee provided was downgraded from Starbucks to a cheaper blend. The whole work environment felt a lot like some sort of bizarre Mexican standoff between worker and company interests. The company would have a very difficult time maintaining operations and hiring replacements if their workers were pissed off enough to leave. Meanwhile, as much as their workers liked to complain, they had been working under such limited responsibilities for so many years that -- in terms of engineering and/or raw technical skills -- most of them would be useless elsewhere. This may in part explain why many large corporations show a strong preference for H1-B workers. Not only are they incapable of unionization but they keep the senior staff motivated by fear of their jobs being replaced/outsourced. Whatever the overhead cost/complexity, it pales in comparison to disrupting operations and/or being bent over a barrel on union/compensation negotiations. It also explains the preference for hiring millenials. Millenials have been screwed since day one. Starting from ridiculous education loans/costs. Extending to being forced to work unpaid/underpaid internships to make up for lack of unrealistic industry experience requirements. The idea of a company/union providing any form of protection is so far from our reality that we don't even consider it as an option. Tired of being screwed by your company? Pack up and move on to another company. Resume shows lots of movement? Too much ambition is bad for business. Can't deal with the stress/complexity of regularly changing jobs? Better learn to enjoy being screwed. Engineering for many industries is a cost center and hell hath no fury like a team of bored senior engineers with an over-inflated sense of entitlement. Outsourcing can be used to reduce risk, avoid management complications, and shift CapEx (ie permanent employees) to OpEx (ie disposable contractors). Offshoring sucks but there's virtually no legal risk involved with firing overseas workers en masse. H1-Bs cost the same as local workers but have so many legal limitations that they're essentially the modern equivalent of indentured servants.
thecosas 11y ago
Ouch
veeragoni 11y ago
I wonder Watson might have helped them to take such steps. Basically putting HR/Finance data into Watson hands and figure out optimum way of doing things with algorithms/forecasting etc.. Could be an interesting AI application.
- fermuch 11y ago
  It would be so funny if you're part of the group that trained him, and he ends up kicking you in the butt.
- samstave 11y ago
  God, that sounds dystopian as all hell. Just like in the movie Brazil - they ruin that guys life because a bug got in the type-machine which was putting out the papers for whom to go after, and it made the machine spell the wrong name. However, if you have not seen this documentary, I highly recommend you watch it, called "Human Resources": http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/human-resources/ http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/human-resources/ EDIT: What they SHOULD use watson for is to determine of those being laid off from the current position, how suitable they would be to internally apply for the one of 25,000 openings. They should limit Watson to tell them who should be RA'd to a new job - not who should be let go. Obviously those NOT scored to stay by watson are in the set of pink-slips implicitly.
  - ar0 11y ago
    Although I would guess this happens in a more "low tech" way all the time: It's so easy to switch some lines in an Excel spreadsheet or mess up the formulas (hey, it happens even to Nobel prize winners) that I bet there are management decisions (including lay-offs) being made based on wrong / "buggy" data all the time... It just takes one overworked consultant and in many cases no one will question the numbers on the PowerPoint graph. While clearly lazy / incompetent people who deserve to be laid off exist, I think one should stay humble and realize that a lot of how one's life works out is pure luck (or a lack of it), after all.
- amptorn 11y ago
  Watson is a red herring.
_delirium 11y ago
Sounds along the lines of what many people here were speculating last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220800
slantedview 11y ago
IBM rule #1: Do not ever work for IBM. IBM rule #2: See IBM rule #1.
- samstave 11y ago
  IBM rule #3: This rule intentionally left blank.
  - erbo 11y ago
    IBM rule #4: All rules shall be composed of series of nonblank characters, separated by blanks.
    - Retra 11y ago
      Encoded in EBCDIC.
- iaw 11y ago
  They supplied the Nazi's with computers to track the Jews which is one justification for rule #1
  - talles 11y ago
    For anyone wondering about this comment: http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corporation-Expanded/dp/0914153277 http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corpo...
jonawesomegreen 11y ago
Does anyone have any information on what sort of teams they are moving? The image in the article references Watson, but I would be willing to bet teams working on that sort of research are staying in the US. I would bet its the sort of "maintenance" teams that are moving offshore, as they are seen as cost centers.
- johnward 11y ago
  Probably not watson. r/ibm has mentioned Global Technical Services.
arafa 11y ago
It's surprising they mention regulatory work (around data privacy) going offshore. I saw that happen at another company I worked for and it didn't go well. When the feds realized there's no one in person they can talk to and hold responsible, those jobs all came right back less than a year later.
planetjones 11y ago
Sad, but it's happening everywhere. I have nothing against the best people being employed irrespective of their country of origin. But I really feel ill at ease when companies like IBM say quality does not matter at all and let's just cut costs as recklessly as possible.
- dimgl 11y ago
  Why? You get what you pay for. Most of the stuff I've reviewed from outsourced companies is pure garbage. These companies are simply shooting themselves in the foot by doing this.
  - planetjones 11y ago
    Some companies e.g. banks have no choice but to keep using IBM products as their whole infrastructure relies on IBM mainframes and tools. Companies like IBM just want to milk cash cows like this and 'maximise shareholder value'. So they try and get everything done as cheap as possible. On a PowerPoint and in an investment prospectus it looks great. Truly a race to the bottom.
  - cobookman 11y ago
    Short term gains and long term destruction. And totally agree that most of it is garbage.
- cortesoft 11y ago
  If it is happening everywhere, then how come it is still so easy to get a tech job and why is it so hard to find good developers here in the United States?
- EvanPlaice 11y ago
  Corporations have to answer to the board. The board acts in the interests of investors/stakeholders and will eventually have to deal with 'extracting value' from the company to meet short-term investor demands at the expense of long-term sustainability. To make matters worse, the CEO/board can justify higher levels of compensation if they greatly expand the size/scope of the company. Whether or not the growth matches the market trends. Just look to all the comments of employees complaining how their job is to warm a seat and/or maintain excess/unnecessary administration overhead. The exception are companies like Facebook that refuse to cede decision making to the board. It pisses off investors when the company fails to extract value at a rate matching investor expectations but I bet FB will fare much better in the long-term. Unlike companies like Yahoo/IBM that morphed into pump-and-dump chop shops of underutilized talent.
thenewwazoo 11y ago
IBM has literally no disincentive to do this, either de jure or de facto. The threat of H1-B applications being denied is either laughable or [there aren't enough of them anyway] depending on who you ask. And IBM employees, like most tech workers, don't think they need to act (read: bargain) collectively and thus have no recourse. Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor, companies will continue to treat their employees as fungible, on an increasingly global scale.
- parfe 11y ago
  >Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor Never going to happen. The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing they're above the simple garbage man or postal worker. After all they create such value. Admitting a union would help acknowledges they're not special.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    When you feel like you can sum up a few million opinions as the result of a stupidity that you personally do not suffer, the odds that you are correct in your assessment approach zero.
    - draw_down 11y ago
      On the other hand, anti-vaxxers exist. Many of them.
    - parfe 11y ago
      Programmers eagerly work in EA style sweatshops producing games and other software with massive unpaid overtime, or count themselves lucky that IBM kept them for just a few extra months to train their replacements. IT workers could demand protection from the same abuses that custodians and delivery drivers fought for and earned decades ago. But then the industry might need to admit their collars aren't as white as they pretend.
      - 11y ago
danso 11y ago
Are there many/any companies that take the "automate yourself out of a job" credo seriously? That is, realizing the benefits of designed automation, produced by experienced developers who want to ascend from their initial roles by delegating that work to a well engineered system? I guess it's possible to outsource jobs while rewarding employees who are able to raise the tide for everyone, but it kind of sounds like IBM and most big tech companies see it as a zero sum game that is winnable by driving down labor costs.
- accountatwork 11y ago
  IBM is particularly dysfunctional in this regard. I keep in touch with a lot of friends at IBM and a common story is that they'll cut headcount by one on a local team and hire two or three people overseas. The overseas people will require so much handholding to produce correct work that it consumes in entire person's time locally, negating any potential cost advantage and causing massive delays, as simple work items require corrections taking multiple round trips between people in different time zones. I don't have anything against overseas labor and I've worked at companies where the overseas dev teams are first class citizens and produce work that's comparable to the work produced here, but IBM is not one of those companies.
swagtricker 11y ago
This sort of stuff simply reinforces my own bias in the form of my two rules of professional IT work: 1.) If at all possible, don't take a full time job in a technical org who's membership is greater than Dunbar's number (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number) 2.) If at all possible, don't take a full time job in a technical org that is viewed as a cost center (e.g. the code you write/systems you maintain don't generate revenue). These are no guarantee of job stability, but the violation of rule #1 (e.g. big honkin' tech == dumb decisions & middle mgmt morons) or rule #2 (e.g. you are a cost to be managed & cut) are far more likely to lead to job instability. Jut my personal experience & $0.02USD.
- cortesoft 11y ago
  I assume for your first rule, it is only for a new job? I wasn't going to leave my startup job with the options right when we started to really grow and be successful.
  - swagtricker 11y ago
    It's a ballpark feel for the org. An admitted problem with my theory is that I've only seen behemoths (massive, nasty publicly traded beasties) and start-up to mid/small orgs with only 1-200 ppl having access to source control and/or servers. If an org can grow beyond the tribal size & still maintain trust & agility - please share! I've got a good theory about how Spotify operates (see https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/ https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-cult...) but I don't know if they've effectively crossed or exceeded this scope of personal trust & relationships.
- freehunter 11y ago
  The problem with that is there are certain parts of IT where you would never, ever, ever have a job if you adhered to that. Security, for example. If the company is under 150 employees, they probably don't have a security team. They probably aren't developing security applications or products. If they aren, they're probably not very successful (or are about to be bought out by a big company). And I would wager that 80% of all IT employment is done at companies where IT is not their main source of income. At that point, you're automatically a cost center. Your second rule is saying "never work anywhere that doesn't produce technology as their main business", which forces everyone to live in San Fransisco. Besides, IT is not a cost center for IBM, it's part of their core business. And they still lay people off.
at-fates-hands 11y ago
TBH, I've seen a lot of companies doing this recently. Cargill has been going through the same thing and they've been actively culling people who are close to be fully vested (20 year mark I believe). One friend who got their job "moved to the India office" said she lost over 400K in pension money because she was let go 6 months prior to her 20 year mark. After she started talking to other employees, she found close to a dozen mid-level managers who were all within 2-5 years of hitting the same mark. Also, I've seen a LOT of companies to do this and it never ends well. This is usually a harbinger of metrics slipping, profit goals missed and shaky investors getting out. Which in turn means the company is in a slide. Moving their stuff overseas is a way to show investors they're trying to cut costs. It never works. I can name a half-dozen companies off the top of my head that did this and it actually made the situation worse not better. Some of those companies are still struggling to make it back. Here are some off the top of my head: 1 - IBM 2 - Honeywell 3 - Cargill 4 - Thomson Reuters 5 - Best Buy 6 - Wells Fargo
- ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
  Ford and Chrysler too. I'm actually somewhat surprised by this move by IBM. Most companies I know of wised up to the fact that the total cost of ownership of the system goes up with outsourcing and you get a sub par product and as a result stopped outsourcing any kind of core development en masse. I myself have seen a few of the outsourced projects fail as well with a couple of exceptions where the core team was not outsourced but some of the "busy work" type development - CRUD etc - was outsourced and then integrated into the core product. Still was painful logistically and savings weren't all that great at the end of the day.
junto 11y ago
True story about IBM Global Services. I was working with a client that was integrating web services with another third party. IBM GS were responsible for managing third party's network. Our client gave IBM the IP addresses to be white listed. They filled in a lengthy time consuming form that got sent through layers of IBM management till some ops team in India finally implemented the change one week later. We started testing. It didn't work. We went back and forth for weeks. Finally we put a conference call together with all parties. Live on the phone we sent a series of SOAP requests over the wire. "Yes, we can see the requests", came the answer. We saw no response. Finally whilst on the phone call, one of the IBM Tech's piped up. "Did you want this traffic to go in AND out?", he asked. "Well, HTTP traffic isn't going to be of much use if we don't get a response to our request you idiots", was the answer I wanted to give. They pulled out the initial firewall request form. The request was to "allow traffic from our IP addresses in through the firewall to reach the client". They took that absolutely literally, and nobody thought to question it. They also absolved themselves of any blame. I detested IBM from that day on.
- jlarocco 11y ago
  Haha, that's pretty similar to my experience with Indian tech workers in general. Very literal interpretation of English phrases like that. Maybe it's a language barrier?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - hkmurakami 11y ago
    Agreed, this sounds like an Indian outsource tech center problem that is universal rather than an ibm specific problem. Cultural differences rather than language?
    - maxxxxx 11y ago
      My experience is with Infosys. They definitely stream information from architect->tech lead->coder one-way. There is no channel back if something doesn't make sense.
outside1234 11y ago
This is why Trump is so popular. If you expand this to include blue collar workers that have been savaged over the last twenty years, you can see the vein of anger that he is tapping into.
- gaius 11y ago
  Indeed, Trump is the only candidate who believes manufacturing should happen onshore, as far as I can tell.
  - kough 11y ago
    Sanders seems to agree: [1]: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/reversing-the-slide-in-manufacturing http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/reversing-t... [2]: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/agenda/#step7 http://www.sanders.senate.gov/agenda/#step7
  - paulddraper 11y ago
    I hope so.
- pasquinelli 11y ago
  tapping into, and directing against the vulnerable.
- MikeTLive 11y ago
  trumps appeal is many faceted. He draws those with the bully mentality - people who would attempt to make themselves better by beating down those who might be above them. he promises things he knows he can not deliver, but that fit the needs of the people that would vote for him. they can't risk that he might actually be able to deliver and no one else is making those promises, and so they take a chance. like buying lottery tickets with your last dollar.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    You really need to read Trump's book to interpret him. His extreme statements are the opening positions for negotiating a deal. Start out asking for 3x what you want, then you can give up stuff you don't really care about and make the other side feel like they have "won" something.
padseeker 11y ago
IBM doesn't make much of their own software. They bought lotus notes, they made rational clear case a massive product by buying other companies and cobbling it together. There is literally not a single company that is adding lotus notes or rational to their enterprise development suite. Their dwindling profits are accumulated from older companies who cannot or will not put up the cost to transition to latest tools. However every month another one of those companies finally bites the bullet and replaces those outdated tools. Aside from Watson when was the last time IBM MADE SOMETHING? Maybe they have but I haven't heard of it. I feel bad for anyone losing their job but if your company does not make anything and is this large what hope is there?
- paulmd 11y ago
  IBM is fairly active in the hardware space - Blue Gene supercomputers and POWER processors have a pretty solid presence in the HPC space. To produce those products they do quite a lot of basic science in semiconductor and nanotech research. I agree with you in general though - IBM is all about the lock-in. zSystem, for example, is basically a product for mainframe users (i.e. banks) who are petrified of updating their software and will pay whatever it takes to get an incrementally faster replacement. It literally lets you run your System/360 programs that you wrote 50 years ago, and System/360 was designed to directly replace physical tabulator machines. So your program logic may be the best part of a century old. It's basically the IBM-est product.
  - padseeker 11y ago
    I was not aware of that. Thanks for informing me. If they had no value they would collapse and that has not happened. But I have wondered about their sub par products that are not growing and this does seem to be finally coming back to haunt them.
  - hindsightbias 11y ago
    z has supported Linux for a long time, they sell Linux-only models now.
- stoicform 11y ago
freehunter 11y ago
Disclaimer: I am a (US) IBM employee, but my opinions are 100% my own Shipping jobs overseas sucks. I live in the Midwest where most cities were hit by manufacturing going overseas, and my own family was impacted hard by it, like most people's were. I work in IT, so of course I know how much offshoring sucks. And I know what I'm about to say is going to be controversial. I'm not saying it to be glib or to downplay the pain that losing your job inflicts upon the whole family. What I'm saying is a warning. Because this kind of stuff isn't new. It's not like this is the first time anyone has ever heard of sending jobs to other countries. And in terms of layoffs in general, IBM has 500,000 employees and is constantly restructuring itself to stay competitive in the ever-changing tech market. When mainframe and storage had a big layoff last year, my response as an IBMer was "we still have mainframe and storage people?" We spun off (or spun down) those parts of the business a long time ago, you had to have realized that your days were numbered. I work for a hot part of IBM. A part of IBM that makes the company a lot of money. My job is fairly secure. But I know it won't be like that forever. Hell, it won't be like that for more than a handful of years. Because things change constantly. Right now I'm working on a project that will automate quite a bit of my work. And I'm hoping to take the skills from I've learned from that and using them to launch into the next hot thing. Yes, when it's my turn to be laid off I will complain so loudly that they will hear me in whatever offshore country happens to take my job. But to be honest, by then I will be working somewhere else, doing something else. Because this isn't a new thing. Everyone knows that companies offshore and outsource and lay off employees they don't need anymore. And if you read the article, it seems like these people knew it was coming, but stayed until the end anyway. Layoffs suck. Offshoring sucks. But have you seen IBM stock lately? I've never gotten a bonus and I've never gotten a raise, because those two things only happen when we're making money. There is no way in any universe that you could look at your job at IBM and think "yeah, this will hold me until retirement". That's not a reality in today's job market. My grandpa worked at the same factory his whole life from the day he graduated high school to the day the factory moved to Mexico. Between that and the five more years he worked until he retired, he had five different jobs. That's the reality of today's job market. It sucks, but you have to just accept it. Two years, maybe three. If you're still at the same job after that, you're probably cheating yourself.
- borvo 11y ago
cognivore 11y ago
I can't think of two many companies that are more irrelevant to the future of computing. What does IBM actually do anymore? Seems to me they just need legions of consultants and cheap developers to bleed their customers under the guise of offering "solutions."
- dominotw 11y ago
  They seem to do bunch of smaller startups like these https://www.compose.io/ https://www.compose.io/
  - mooreds 11y ago
    Here's the wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_IBM#Acquisitions_since_2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
- paulddraper 11y ago
  I don't think Softlayer and Bluemix are irrelevant. That's my prediction.
  - mkohlmyr 11y ago
    I think IBM Marketing Cloud might have a future if they don't screw it up. It's really 50/50 at this point. Some of the products (UBX) are good, but the architecture / API design / quality seems suspect at times. They've improved on Silverpop massively since the purchase and re-brand, but it still leaves plenty to be desired. If they gave the team that built UBX free range to re-build Silverpop from the ground instead of skinning it better they would have a serious competitive product on their hands. Between that and Softlayer / Bluemix / Compose / Cloudant they have a serious cloud offering if they do some consolidation.
guelo 11y ago
Establishment Republicans and Democrats agree that this is good, this is the way things should work in the globalized world. This kind of thing explains the rise of both Trump and Sanders.
- hackuser 11y ago
  This suddenly hit home today, reading this IBM article. I wish I'd seen your comment before I posted mine to another subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263317
randyrand 11y ago
Why do Americans think they are entitled to higher pay for the same work?
- johnward 11y ago
  Cost of living?
  - paulddraper 11y ago
    Which pays other people, and begs the same question.
- stonogo 11y ago
  We expect higher pay for the same job because we do not do the same work.
- Retra 11y ago
  Are we just supposed to accept living in a world where we don't get what we want from it? What kind of cynical hell do you live in?
martin_bech 11y ago
Why anyone in this position, would be willing to train his replacement, is beyond me.
- jmcgough 11y ago
  A friend of mine was in this position. It was a requirement for her to get severance, as degrading and awful as it was.
  - johnward 11y ago
    Yeah it's either train and get severance or leave now. However, IBM just reduced the severance from 2 weeks per year of tenure to a standard 1 month. At that point I'm not sure it even matters.
- jtbigwoo 11y ago
  When this happened at a company I worked at, the line from management was, "Stay for two months and train this person and your severance is 6 months' salary. Don't train them and you leave in five minutes with 6 weeks' severance."
_jnc 11y ago
Why do they enforce having a referrer set? If you refresh the page it becomes a 404.
- chei0aiV 11y ago
  If you use the url posted, it does a redirect from http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-offshoring#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c... to http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c... and doesn't work on refresh. But, if you remove the "#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews" fragment, the url works fine... http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-offshoring http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c...
icedtea 11y ago
it is happening on the same way for EMC now. My team,me and lots of people were gone for the deal with Dell. They've been transferring all the work to China. Right now, what i heard from my co-worker, the laid off is still ongoing.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
wehadfun 11y ago
IBM should just relocate to India.
pfarnsworth 11y ago
Aren't there laws that prevent these sort of stealth layoffs? It sounds like they might be violating federal laws by not announcing it properly.
- paulddraper 11y ago
  What? What are you referencing?
protomyth 11y ago
So, I guess Cringely continues to be right http://www.cringely.com http://www.cringely.com I notice he has an article on IBM on the top and his books is pretty good. I'm not sure I agree about Intel systems, but he at least reasons it out.
TaylorGood 11y ago
This headline from today is rather scary then: "Yoox Net-a-Porter turns to IBM to propel its luxury e-commerce experience" http://digiday.com/brands/yoox-net-porter-turns-ibm-propel-luxury-e-commerce-experience/?curator=TechREDEF http://digiday.com/brands/yoox-net-porter-turns-ibm-propel-l...
tunichtgut 11y ago
please someone send a link of this comment section to warren buffet that he can "figure out" why his IBM shares are down 2 billion dollars...
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  These sorts of comments about IBM have been appearing for years if not decades. The existence of previous comments didn't stop Buffett from buying IBM stock and the existence of the current comments won't influence him either. Nonetheless, he's probably having second thoughts. In the past he's admitted he didn't invest in technology companies because he couldn't understand them. Foolishly he violated his own guidelines here. A number of years ago I owned Burlington Northern stock as it was being acquired by Berkshire. The merger terms allowed choosing cash vs Berkshire stock vs some combination. I chose cash, because I was uncomfortable with owning the giant conglomerate which Berkshire now is.
  - tunichtgut 11y ago
    I think cash was the wrong decision. BH resembles the US economy. Nothing wrong with that.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
I wish there was more "onshoring" of jobs to very low cost of living areas in the USA. For example, I live in Arizona and the cost of living is so much less than Silicon Valley and San Diego where I have worked before. Life is good in the country and I wish more companies would consider setting up development offices where low cost housing was very nearby office space. Save money and still be in convenient time zones. I have what is probably an unpopular opinion, but I can't really blame corporations for using foreign development centers. However, I would like to see them penalized via slightly higher tax rates.
- paulddraper 11y ago
  Or just remove corporate tax.
hackbinary 11y ago
Won't buy IBM/Lenovo stuff ever again. It was too late to stop the purchase of our new VMware cluster and SAN last year, but this year we will not buy replacement IBM/Lenovo backup storage servers. Roughly £20,000 which is not huge, but then again, it is not nothing either.
paulddraper 11y ago
IBM is notable for the exception to Crockford's do-good-not-evil license: "IBM, its customers, partners, and minions may use JSLint for evil "
platform 11y ago
) IBM pension liability approaches 100 billion USD [1] ) IBM has a number of low profit IT services. Cutting the services completely out of their portfolio, for one reason or another, at this point in time -- was not an option My conjecture is the above are the reasons, and will continue to be reasons for layoffs specifically in US or other high-cost locations Another prediction: If you look at the list in [1]. And see an IT company with large generic IT services portfolio, and shrinking product portfolio (software or hardware does not matter) -- they will do similar layoffs until they become 'leaders' again, or declare bankruptcy or get a bailout. [1] http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/05/corporate-pensions-most-underfunded/ http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/05/corporate-pensions-most-und... (this list is from 2013, but my search for more recent data indicates not much has changed)

186 points by navait 11y ago

So, I'm trying to figure out the general HN view based on the comments in seeing ... Is it the case the HNers generally view programming as a fairly low paid blue collar position?

jayess 11y ago

"Resource Action." That's even worse than my previous corporate cog job where they called it a RIF, "Reduction in Force." Who sits around and justifies themselves by coming up with idiotic terms like this?

softawre 11y ago
My company uses RIF, though I bet we're not alone (just in case, was it in Indy?)
johnward 11y ago
Referring to humans as "resources" in general is creepy to me.
- strongai 11y ago
  Yes it is. I believe the usage comes from the days when calling them 'personnel' was deemed creepy!

PierreRochard 11y ago

When I worked at Deloitte they made a similar decision to outsource to India instead of training staff to learn Python and automate the time consuming, low value work. That's when I decided to leave, best move of my career.

SandB0x 11y ago
How was the quality of the outsourced work? Did they find an existing software house in India and send them specs a deadlines? Did they hire individuals?
- tomashertus 11y ago
  This is one example of outsourced work(CSS code) to Asia: .scanResultsTable th:first-child+th+th+th{padding-right: 30px; text-align: right; width: 35%;} Don't do it guys, really don't....
  - pavanky 11y ago
    That's not generalizing anything at all.
  - gizmodo59 11y ago
    Its hard to digest this level of logic at a site like HN.
- PierreRochard 11y ago
  They weren't outsourcing software development work, they were outsourcing the manual task of checking PDFs against XLS files. The quality wasn't the problem, the throughput and cost are. I wrote an app that parsed the PDFs but no manager wanted to learn Python to review the code, so they told me to move on :(
alexandrerond 11y ago
I heard Deloitte and such consulting firms barely reach 1.5 year of retention (as in, in average people leave in that time). So you're best move is also the most common.
- johnward 11y ago
  I too have heard that those consulting firms "churn and burn" young talent. I'm a consultant at IBM so I don't know if it's actually much different though. I've seen decent turnover in my org.

shepardrtc 11y ago

I currently work at a multi-national corporation that has offshored a vast majority of its development and infrastructure. Any savings in cost of payroll is absolutely outpaced by a massive increase in expenditure required for project overruns and failures due to lower quality of work, terrible communication, lack of real SME's, and worthless organization. The upper management's reaction to this was to bring in consultants who are considerably more expensive than local talent and are often laughably ineffective. Especially since they have to fly back home every single Thursday. The sense of impending failure among the local employees for every single project is palpable.

EvanPlaice 11y ago
In the bigger picture of things 'expensive' is a highly relative. You have to also factor in risk and the other secondary costs. Not sure if this applies to your company but I have some prior experience as one of those SME/consultant/contractor guys. For one particular multi-national company whom we did a lot of work, they had an entire dedicated team of (underutilized) engineers/technologists that should have been more than capable of doing the work we provided. Aside from the hour or two of daily PM work, the entire staff would disappear for the rest of their shift and reappear just in time to check out. To this day, I still have no clue where everybody would go. I'm not talking about an isolated incident, I saw the same pattern take place over the course of months. Why was this allowed? Why was the company willing to pay us a premium to do work that could have been handled internally? It was a non-union shop. The company had established a very firm and well defined scope of work. Adding additional responsibilities could screw up the balance and put the company and it's daily operations at risk. In the bigger picture of things, paying contractors/consultants a premium + expenses to do the extra work is an order of magnitude less expensive than the possibility of unionization. Just the cost savings on HR overhead (ex managing disgruntled workers, hiring new people) alone probably made up for what we charged. You should've seen the amount of hell raised when the coffee provided was downgraded from Starbucks to a cheaper blend. The whole work environment felt a lot like some sort of bizarre Mexican standoff between worker and company interests. The company would have a very difficult time maintaining operations and hiring replacements if their workers were pissed off enough to leave. Meanwhile, as much as their workers liked to complain, they had been working under such limited responsibilities for so many years that -- in terms of engineering and/or raw technical skills -- most of them would be useless elsewhere. This may in part explain why many large corporations show a strong preference for H1-B workers. Not only are they incapable of unionization but they keep the senior staff motivated by fear of their jobs being replaced/outsourced. Whatever the overhead cost/complexity, it pales in comparison to disrupting operations and/or being bent over a barrel on union/compensation negotiations. It also explains the preference for hiring millenials. Millenials have been screwed since day one. Starting from ridiculous education loans/costs. Extending to being forced to work unpaid/underpaid internships to make up for lack of unrealistic industry experience requirements. The idea of a company/union providing any form of protection is so far from our reality that we don't even consider it as an option. Tired of being screwed by your company? Pack up and move on to another company. Resume shows lots of movement? Too much ambition is bad for business. Can't deal with the stress/complexity of regularly changing jobs? Better learn to enjoy being screwed. Engineering for many industries is a cost center and hell hath no fury like a team of bored senior engineers with an over-inflated sense of entitlement. Outsourcing can be used to reduce risk, avoid management complications, and shift CapEx (ie permanent employees) to OpEx (ie disposable contractors). Offshoring sucks but there's virtually no legal risk involved with firing overseas workers en masse. H1-Bs cost the same as local workers but have so many legal limitations that they're essentially the modern equivalent of indentured servants.

thecosas 11y ago

Ouch

veeragoni 11y ago

I wonder Watson might have helped them to take such steps. Basically putting HR/Finance data into Watson hands and figure out optimum way of doing things with algorithms/forecasting etc.. Could be an interesting AI application.

fermuch 11y ago
It would be so funny if you're part of the group that trained him, and he ends up kicking you in the butt.
samstave 11y ago
God, that sounds dystopian as all hell. Just like in the movie Brazil - they ruin that guys life because a bug got in the type-machine which was putting out the papers for whom to go after, and it made the machine spell the wrong name. However, if you have not seen this documentary, I highly recommend you watch it, called "Human Resources": http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/human-resources/ http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/human-resources/ EDIT: What they SHOULD use watson for is to determine of those being laid off from the current position, how suitable they would be to internally apply for the one of 25,000 openings. They should limit Watson to tell them who should be RA'd to a new job - not who should be let go. Obviously those NOT scored to stay by watson are in the set of pink-slips implicitly.
- ar0 11y ago
  Although I would guess this happens in a more "low tech" way all the time: It's so easy to switch some lines in an Excel spreadsheet or mess up the formulas (hey, it happens even to Nobel prize winners) that I bet there are management decisions (including lay-offs) being made based on wrong / "buggy" data all the time... It just takes one overworked consultant and in many cases no one will question the numbers on the PowerPoint graph. While clearly lazy / incompetent people who deserve to be laid off exist, I think one should stay humble and realize that a lot of how one's life works out is pure luck (or a lack of it), after all.
amptorn 11y ago
Watson is a red herring.

_delirium 11y ago

Sounds along the lines of what many people here were speculating last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220800

slantedview 11y ago

IBM rule #1: Do not ever work for IBM. IBM rule #2: See IBM rule #1.

samstave 11y ago
IBM rule #3: This rule intentionally left blank.
- erbo 11y ago
  IBM rule #4: All rules shall be composed of series of nonblank characters, separated by blanks.
  - Retra 11y ago
    Encoded in EBCDIC.
iaw 11y ago
They supplied the Nazi's with computers to track the Jews which is one justification for rule #1
- talles 11y ago
  For anyone wondering about this comment: http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corporation-Expanded/dp/0914153277 http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corpo...

jonawesomegreen 11y ago

Does anyone have any information on what sort of teams they are moving? The image in the article references Watson, but I would be willing to bet teams working on that sort of research are staying in the US. I would bet its the sort of "maintenance" teams that are moving offshore, as they are seen as cost centers.

johnward 11y ago
Probably not watson. r/ibm has mentioned Global Technical Services.

arafa 11y ago

It's surprising they mention regulatory work (around data privacy) going offshore. I saw that happen at another company I worked for and it didn't go well. When the feds realized there's no one in person they can talk to and hold responsible, those jobs all came right back less than a year later.

planetjones 11y ago

Sad, but it's happening everywhere. I have nothing against the best people being employed irrespective of their country of origin. But I really feel ill at ease when companies like IBM say quality does not matter at all and let's just cut costs as recklessly as possible.

dimgl 11y ago
Why? You get what you pay for. Most of the stuff I've reviewed from outsourced companies is pure garbage. These companies are simply shooting themselves in the foot by doing this.
- planetjones 11y ago
  Some companies e.g. banks have no choice but to keep using IBM products as their whole infrastructure relies on IBM mainframes and tools. Companies like IBM just want to milk cash cows like this and 'maximise shareholder value'. So they try and get everything done as cheap as possible. On a PowerPoint and in an investment prospectus it looks great. Truly a race to the bottom.
- cobookman 11y ago
  Short term gains and long term destruction. And totally agree that most of it is garbage.
cortesoft 11y ago
If it is happening everywhere, then how come it is still so easy to get a tech job and why is it so hard to find good developers here in the United States?
EvanPlaice 11y ago
Corporations have to answer to the board. The board acts in the interests of investors/stakeholders and will eventually have to deal with 'extracting value' from the company to meet short-term investor demands at the expense of long-term sustainability. To make matters worse, the CEO/board can justify higher levels of compensation if they greatly expand the size/scope of the company. Whether or not the growth matches the market trends. Just look to all the comments of employees complaining how their job is to warm a seat and/or maintain excess/unnecessary administration overhead. The exception are companies like Facebook that refuse to cede decision making to the board. It pisses off investors when the company fails to extract value at a rate matching investor expectations but I bet FB will fare much better in the long-term. Unlike companies like Yahoo/IBM that morphed into pump-and-dump chop shops of underutilized talent.

thenewwazoo 11y ago

IBM has literally no disincentive to do this, either de jure or de facto. The threat of H1-B applications being denied is either laughable or [there aren't enough of them anyway] depending on who you ask. And IBM employees, like most tech workers, don't think they need to act (read: bargain) collectively and thus have no recourse. Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor, companies will continue to treat their employees as fungible, on an increasingly global scale.

parfe 11y ago
>Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor Never going to happen. The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing they're above the simple garbage man or postal worker. After all they create such value. Admitting a union would help acknowledges they're not special.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  When you feel like you can sum up a few million opinions as the result of a stupidity that you personally do not suffer, the odds that you are correct in your assessment approach zero.
  - draw_down 11y ago
    On the other hand, anti-vaxxers exist. Many of them.
  - parfe 11y ago
    Programmers eagerly work in EA style sweatshops producing games and other software with massive unpaid overtime, or count themselves lucky that IBM kept them for just a few extra months to train their replacements. IT workers could demand protection from the same abuses that custodians and delivery drivers fought for and earned decades ago. But then the industry might need to admit their collars aren't as white as they pretend.
    - 11y ago

danso 11y ago

Are there many/any companies that take the "automate yourself out of a job" credo seriously? That is, realizing the benefits of designed automation, produced by experienced developers who want to ascend from their initial roles by delegating that work to a well engineered system? I guess it's possible to outsource jobs while rewarding employees who are able to raise the tide for everyone, but it kind of sounds like IBM and most big tech companies see it as a zero sum game that is winnable by driving down labor costs.

accountatwork 11y ago
IBM is particularly dysfunctional in this regard. I keep in touch with a lot of friends at IBM and a common story is that they'll cut headcount by one on a local team and hire two or three people overseas. The overseas people will require so much handholding to produce correct work that it consumes in entire person's time locally, negating any potential cost advantage and causing massive delays, as simple work items require corrections taking multiple round trips between people in different time zones. I don't have anything against overseas labor and I've worked at companies where the overseas dev teams are first class citizens and produce work that's comparable to the work produced here, but IBM is not one of those companies.

swagtricker 11y ago

This sort of stuff simply reinforces my own bias in the form of my two rules of professional IT work: 1.) If at all possible, don't take a full time job in a technical org who's membership is greater than Dunbar's number (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number) 2.) If at all possible, don't take a full time job in a technical org that is viewed as a cost center (e.g. the code you write/systems you maintain don't generate revenue). These are no guarantee of job stability, but the violation of rule #1 (e.g. big honkin' tech == dumb decisions & middle mgmt morons) or rule #2 (e.g. you are a cost to be managed & cut) are far more likely to lead to job instability. Jut my personal experience & $0.02USD.

cortesoft 11y ago
I assume for your first rule, it is only for a new job? I wasn't going to leave my startup job with the options right when we started to really grow and be successful.
- swagtricker 11y ago
  It's a ballpark feel for the org. An admitted problem with my theory is that I've only seen behemoths (massive, nasty publicly traded beasties) and start-up to mid/small orgs with only 1-200 ppl having access to source control and/or servers. If an org can grow beyond the tribal size & still maintain trust & agility - please share! I've got a good theory about how Spotify operates (see https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/ https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-cult...) but I don't know if they've effectively crossed or exceeded this scope of personal trust & relationships.
freehunter 11y ago
The problem with that is there are certain parts of IT where you would never, ever, ever have a job if you adhered to that. Security, for example. If the company is under 150 employees, they probably don't have a security team. They probably aren't developing security applications or products. If they aren, they're probably not very successful (or are about to be bought out by a big company). And I would wager that 80% of all IT employment is done at companies where IT is not their main source of income. At that point, you're automatically a cost center. Your second rule is saying "never work anywhere that doesn't produce technology as their main business", which forces everyone to live in San Fransisco. Besides, IT is not a cost center for IBM, it's part of their core business. And they still lay people off.

at-fates-hands 11y ago

TBH, I've seen a lot of companies doing this recently. Cargill has been going through the same thing and they've been actively culling people who are close to be fully vested (20 year mark I believe). One friend who got their job "moved to the India office" said she lost over 400K in pension money because she was let go 6 months prior to her 20 year mark. After she started talking to other employees, she found close to a dozen mid-level managers who were all within 2-5 years of hitting the same mark. Also, I've seen a LOT of companies to do this and it never ends well. This is usually a harbinger of metrics slipping, profit goals missed and shaky investors getting out. Which in turn means the company is in a slide. Moving their stuff overseas is a way to show investors they're trying to cut costs. It never works. I can name a half-dozen companies off the top of my head that did this and it actually made the situation worse not better. Some of those companies are still struggling to make it back. Here are some off the top of my head: 1 - IBM 2 - Honeywell 3 - Cargill 4 - Thomson Reuters 5 - Best Buy 6 - Wells Fargo

ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
Ford and Chrysler too. I'm actually somewhat surprised by this move by IBM. Most companies I know of wised up to the fact that the total cost of ownership of the system goes up with outsourcing and you get a sub par product and as a result stopped outsourcing any kind of core development en masse. I myself have seen a few of the outsourced projects fail as well with a couple of exceptions where the core team was not outsourced but some of the "busy work" type development - CRUD etc - was outsourced and then integrated into the core product. Still was painful logistically and savings weren't all that great at the end of the day.

junto 11y ago

True story about IBM Global Services. I was working with a client that was integrating web services with another third party. IBM GS were responsible for managing third party's network. Our client gave IBM the IP addresses to be white listed. They filled in a lengthy time consuming form that got sent through layers of IBM management till some ops team in India finally implemented the change one week later. We started testing. It didn't work. We went back and forth for weeks. Finally we put a conference call together with all parties. Live on the phone we sent a series of SOAP requests over the wire. "Yes, we can see the requests", came the answer. We saw no response. Finally whilst on the phone call, one of the IBM Tech's piped up. "Did you want this traffic to go in AND out?", he asked. "Well, HTTP traffic isn't going to be of much use if we don't get a response to our request you idiots", was the answer I wanted to give. They pulled out the initial firewall request form. The request was to "allow traffic from our IP addresses in through the firewall to reach the client". They took that absolutely literally, and nobody thought to question it. They also absolved themselves of any blame. I detested IBM from that day on.

jlarocco 11y ago
Haha, that's pretty similar to my experience with Indian tech workers in general. Very literal interpretation of English phrases like that. Maybe it's a language barrier?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  Agreed, this sounds like an Indian outsource tech center problem that is universal rather than an ibm specific problem. Cultural differences rather than language?
  - maxxxxx 11y ago
    My experience is with Infosys. They definitely stream information from architect->tech lead->coder one-way. There is no channel back if something doesn't make sense.

outside1234 11y ago

This is why Trump is so popular. If you expand this to include blue collar workers that have been savaged over the last twenty years, you can see the vein of anger that he is tapping into.

gaius 11y ago
Indeed, Trump is the only candidate who believes manufacturing should happen onshore, as far as I can tell.
- kough 11y ago
  Sanders seems to agree: [1]: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/reversing-the-slide-in-manufacturing http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/reversing-t... [2]: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/agenda/#step7 http://www.sanders.senate.gov/agenda/#step7
- paulddraper 11y ago
  I hope so.
pasquinelli 11y ago
tapping into, and directing against the vulnerable.
MikeTLive 11y ago
trumps appeal is many faceted. He draws those with the bully mentality - people who would attempt to make themselves better by beating down those who might be above them. he promises things he knows he can not deliver, but that fit the needs of the people that would vote for him. they can't risk that he might actually be able to deliver and no one else is making those promises, and so they take a chance. like buying lottery tickets with your last dollar.
- ams6110 11y ago
  You really need to read Trump's book to interpret him. His extreme statements are the opening positions for negotiating a deal. Start out asking for 3x what you want, then you can give up stuff you don't really care about and make the other side feel like they have "won" something.

padseeker 11y ago

IBM doesn't make much of their own software. They bought lotus notes, they made rational clear case a massive product by buying other companies and cobbling it together. There is literally not a single company that is adding lotus notes or rational to their enterprise development suite. Their dwindling profits are accumulated from older companies who cannot or will not put up the cost to transition to latest tools. However every month another one of those companies finally bites the bullet and replaces those outdated tools. Aside from Watson when was the last time IBM MADE SOMETHING? Maybe they have but I haven't heard of it. I feel bad for anyone losing their job but if your company does not make anything and is this large what hope is there?

paulmd 11y ago
IBM is fairly active in the hardware space - Blue Gene supercomputers and POWER processors have a pretty solid presence in the HPC space. To produce those products they do quite a lot of basic science in semiconductor and nanotech research. I agree with you in general though - IBM is all about the lock-in. zSystem, for example, is basically a product for mainframe users (i.e. banks) who are petrified of updating their software and will pay whatever it takes to get an incrementally faster replacement. It literally lets you run your System/360 programs that you wrote 50 years ago, and System/360 was designed to directly replace physical tabulator machines. So your program logic may be the best part of a century old. It's basically the IBM-est product.
- padseeker 11y ago
  I was not aware of that. Thanks for informing me. If they had no value they would collapse and that has not happened. But I have wondered about their sub par products that are not growing and this does seem to be finally coming back to haunt them.
- hindsightbias 11y ago
  z has supported Linux for a long time, they sell Linux-only models now.
stoicform 11y ago

freehunter 11y ago

Disclaimer: I am a (US) IBM employee, but my opinions are 100% my own Shipping jobs overseas sucks. I live in the Midwest where most cities were hit by manufacturing going overseas, and my own family was impacted hard by it, like most people's were. I work in IT, so of course I know how much offshoring sucks. And I know what I'm about to say is going to be controversial. I'm not saying it to be glib or to downplay the pain that losing your job inflicts upon the whole family. What I'm saying is a warning. Because this kind of stuff isn't new. It's not like this is the first time anyone has ever heard of sending jobs to other countries. And in terms of layoffs in general, IBM has 500,000 employees and is constantly restructuring itself to stay competitive in the ever-changing tech market. When mainframe and storage had a big layoff last year, my response as an IBMer was "we still have mainframe and storage people?" We spun off (or spun down) those parts of the business a long time ago, you had to have realized that your days were numbered. I work for a hot part of IBM. A part of IBM that makes the company a lot of money. My job is fairly secure. But I know it won't be like that forever. Hell, it won't be like that for more than a handful of years. Because things change constantly. Right now I'm working on a project that will automate quite a bit of my work. And I'm hoping to take the skills from I've learned from that and using them to launch into the next hot thing. Yes, when it's my turn to be laid off I will complain so loudly that they will hear me in whatever offshore country happens to take my job. But to be honest, by then I will be working somewhere else, doing something else. Because this isn't a new thing. Everyone knows that companies offshore and outsource and lay off employees they don't need anymore. And if you read the article, it seems like these people knew it was coming, but stayed until the end anyway. Layoffs suck. Offshoring sucks. But have you seen IBM stock lately? I've never gotten a bonus and I've never gotten a raise, because those two things only happen when we're making money. There is no way in any universe that you could look at your job at IBM and think "yeah, this will hold me until retirement". That's not a reality in today's job market. My grandpa worked at the same factory his whole life from the day he graduated high school to the day the factory moved to Mexico. Between that and the five more years he worked until he retired, he had five different jobs. That's the reality of today's job market. It sucks, but you have to just accept it. Two years, maybe three. If you're still at the same job after that, you're probably cheating yourself.

borvo 11y ago

cognivore 11y ago

I can't think of two many companies that are more irrelevant to the future of computing. What does IBM actually do anymore? Seems to me they just need legions of consultants and cheap developers to bleed their customers under the guise of offering "solutions."

dominotw 11y ago
They seem to do bunch of smaller startups like these https://www.compose.io/ https://www.compose.io/
- mooreds 11y ago
  Here's the wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_IBM#Acquisitions_since_2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
paulddraper 11y ago
I don't think Softlayer and Bluemix are irrelevant. That's my prediction.
- mkohlmyr 11y ago
  I think IBM Marketing Cloud might have a future if they don't screw it up. It's really 50/50 at this point. Some of the products (UBX) are good, but the architecture / API design / quality seems suspect at times. They've improved on Silverpop massively since the purchase and re-brand, but it still leaves plenty to be desired. If they gave the team that built UBX free range to re-build Silverpop from the ground instead of skinning it better they would have a serious competitive product on their hands. Between that and Softlayer / Bluemix / Compose / Cloudant they have a serious cloud offering if they do some consolidation.

guelo 11y ago

Establishment Republicans and Democrats agree that this is good, this is the way things should work in the globalized world. This kind of thing explains the rise of both Trump and Sanders.

hackuser 11y ago
This suddenly hit home today, reading this IBM article. I wish I'd seen your comment before I posted mine to another subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263317

randyrand 11y ago

Why do Americans think they are entitled to higher pay for the same work?

johnward 11y ago
Cost of living?
- paulddraper 11y ago
  Which pays other people, and begs the same question.
stonogo 11y ago
We expect higher pay for the same job because we do not do the same work.
Retra 11y ago
Are we just supposed to accept living in a world where we don't get what we want from it? What kind of cynical hell do you live in?

martin_bech 11y ago

Why anyone in this position, would be willing to train his replacement, is beyond me.

jmcgough 11y ago
A friend of mine was in this position. It was a requirement for her to get severance, as degrading and awful as it was.
- johnward 11y ago
  Yeah it's either train and get severance or leave now. However, IBM just reduced the severance from 2 weeks per year of tenure to a standard 1 month. At that point I'm not sure it even matters.
jtbigwoo 11y ago
When this happened at a company I worked at, the line from management was, "Stay for two months and train this person and your severance is 6 months' salary. Don't train them and you leave in five minutes with 6 weeks' severance."

_jnc 11y ago

Why do they enforce having a referrer set? If you refresh the page it becomes a 404.

chei0aiV 11y ago
If you use the url posted, it does a redirect from http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-offshoring#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c... to http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c... and doesn't work on refresh. But, if you remove the "#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews" fragment, the url works fine... http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-offshoring http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c...

icedtea 11y ago

it is happening on the same way for EMC now. My team,me and lots of people were gone for the deal with Dell. They've been transferring all the work to China. Right now, what i heard from my co-worker, the laid off is still ongoing.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

wehadfun 11y ago

IBM should just relocate to India.

pfarnsworth 11y ago

Aren't there laws that prevent these sort of stealth layoffs? It sounds like they might be violating federal laws by not announcing it properly.

paulddraper 11y ago
What? What are you referencing?

protomyth 11y ago

So, I guess Cringely continues to be right http://www.cringely.com http://www.cringely.com I notice he has an article on IBM on the top and his books is pretty good. I'm not sure I agree about Intel systems, but he at least reasons it out.

TaylorGood 11y ago

This headline from today is rather scary then: "Yoox Net-a-Porter turns to IBM to propel its luxury e-commerce experience" http://digiday.com/brands/yoox-net-porter-turns-ibm-propel-luxury-e-commerce-experience/?curator=TechREDEF http://digiday.com/brands/yoox-net-porter-turns-ibm-propel-l...

tunichtgut 11y ago

please someone send a link of this comment section to warren buffet that he can "figure out" why his IBM shares are down 2 billion dollars...

PhantomGremlin 11y ago
These sorts of comments about IBM have been appearing for years if not decades. The existence of previous comments didn't stop Buffett from buying IBM stock and the existence of the current comments won't influence him either. Nonetheless, he's probably having second thoughts. In the past he's admitted he didn't invest in technology companies because he couldn't understand them. Foolishly he violated his own guidelines here. A number of years ago I owned Burlington Northern stock as it was being acquired by Berkshire. The merger terms allowed choosing cash vs Berkshire stock vs some combination. I chose cash, because I was uncomfortable with owning the giant conglomerate which Berkshire now is.
- tunichtgut 11y ago
  I think cash was the wrong decision. BH resembles the US economy. Nothing wrong with that.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

I wish there was more "onshoring" of jobs to very low cost of living areas in the USA. For example, I live in Arizona and the cost of living is so much less than Silicon Valley and San Diego where I have worked before. Life is good in the country and I wish more companies would consider setting up development offices where low cost housing was very nearby office space. Save money and still be in convenient time zones. I have what is probably an unpopular opinion, but I can't really blame corporations for using foreign development centers. However, I would like to see them penalized via slightly higher tax rates.

paulddraper 11y ago
Or just remove corporate tax.

hackbinary 11y ago

Won't buy IBM/Lenovo stuff ever again. It was too late to stop the purchase of our new VMware cluster and SAN last year, but this year we will not buy replacement IBM/Lenovo backup storage servers. Roughly £20,000 which is not huge, but then again, it is not nothing either.

paulddraper 11y ago

IBM is notable for the exception to Crockford's do-good-not-evil license: "IBM, its customers, partners, and minions may use JSLint for evil "

platform 11y ago

) IBM pension liability approaches 100 billion USD [1] ) IBM has a number of low profit IT services. Cutting the services completely out of their portfolio, for one reason or another, at this point in time -- was not an option My conjecture is the above are the reasons, and will continue to be reasons for layoffs specifically in US or other high-cost locations Another prediction: If you look at the list in [1]. And see an IT company with large generic IT services portfolio, and shrinking product portfolio (software or hardware does not matter) -- they will do similar layoffs until they become 'leaders' again, or declare bankruptcy or get a bailout. [1] http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/05/corporate-pensions-most-underfunded/ http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/05/corporate-pensions-most-und... (this list is from 2013, but my search for more recent data indicates not much has changed)