8 ms·

IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

135 points by thmslee 7y ago

xenospn 7y ago
To be fair, I did see quite a few people who probably "officially" retired 25 years ago walking around with canes last time I visited an IBM campus. I actually thought it was very cool and really wanted to hear their stories.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Maybe you were lucky enough to spot IBM Master Inventor John Wilson testing his smart cane that gathers data to help doctors and physical therapists understand how well you’re recovering from an injury. https://ibmblr.tumblr.com/post/157117436482/yes-volumes-i-its-national-inventors-day https://ibmblr.tumblr.com/post/157117436482/yes-volumes-i-it... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz9jc5blzRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz9jc5blzRM
vegetablepotpie 7y ago
I doubt IBM lays off its older workers solely to appeal to Millenials. It's more likely that older workers are laid off because they are more expensive due to higher higher pay, have more paid time off, use more healthcare and are more politically calibrated to their organizations than younger workers.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  It feels like something that IBM regularly does, similar to Cisco's revolving lay-off cycles. Microserfs by Douglas Coupland has a part where the protagonist's father is fired from IBM after being there for years.
  - MagnumOpus 7y ago
    Well, Microserfs was written in 1994, just after IBM's 1993 cataclysm where Lou Gerstner was hired to save the company and immediately fired 160,000 people. That was very much a one-off event.
    - ggm 7y ago
      A one off event because of scale. but part of a continuation of downsizing. So only one off in one sense not in others. Cisco's one off downsizing has been threefold.
- onion2k 7y ago
  It's more likely that older workers are laid off because.. This is just a list of rationalizations that you would prefer to believe. That doesn't make them true. If those reasons were actually correct then IBM wouldn't need to fire people. They could solve all of them in other, less (potentially) very expensive ways.
reustle 7y ago
> International Business Machines Corp. has fired as many as 100,000 employees in the last few years in an effort to boost its appeal to millennials > “The company hires 50,000 employees each year.” > The number of IBM employees has fallen to its lowest point in six years, with 350,600 global workers at the end of 2018 -- a 19% reduction since 2013. The fact that a company can have such high turnover and still function says something about how much work each of those people were doing. While an impressive effort at potentially reinvesting the culture, I bet many of those jobs weren't necessary from the beginning.
- Kneecaps07 7y ago
  My ex used to work there. It was an older building where everyone had their own office. There would be hallways and hallways of offices and she had no idea who anyone was or what they did all day. Everyone just sat in their office with the doors closed.
  - lowdose 7y ago
    She should have recorded this with a camera and do some live private office walk-ins saying she is from HR here to do the interview.
jve 7y ago
Firing talent because of age is not so smart I think. Of course I don't know who they fire, etc. But I'm young, yeah, and I want to distance myself from IBM products. Why? I'v been setting IBM Tivoli/Spectrum protect to backup client computers and, ugh, is it ugly, unfriendly and complex piece of software. I'v also touched the server part. Maybe it's just me, the windows guy (but who loves scripting) and it is more appealing to linux-type guys. Then I got feedback from Linux team that they also don't love that product. They should do something about their products or product managers to be more appealing. After 1hr they will present IBM QRadar to us. Perhaps it will be a pretty presentation and so. I just wonder what's it under the hood, when sysadmins put their hands on it - any experiences someone can share?
- pas 7y ago
  The simple fact, that IBM stuff is never used by big sites (fb, spotify, google, etc..) despite their solutions being available for ages should lead anyone to the conclusion that they are salesware. QRadar is a glorified syslog server with a query interface (bought by IBM in 2011, formerly developed by Q1 Labs, est 2001), and ... again the fact that Splunk is available (started 2 years after Q1 Labs), that the ELK stack is even mentioned in SIEM circles, that OSSIM an open source alternative is seen as more usable all just point to the conclusion that QRadar too is just salesware :/
  - klausjensen 7y ago
    What's salesware?
    - tmikaeld 7y ago
      Sales people pitch it to executives, shows some fancy demo and then sign a contract that's "appealing" in cost and "savings".
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ChuckNorris89 7y ago
devoply 7y ago
More like replace 100k workers that expect work life balance for underpaid millennial that you can exploit at submarket wages for long hours.
- AmVess 7y ago
  They won't be replacing anyone in the US, despite what they say. They are in a decades long quest to get rid of jobs in the USA and give them to people elsewhere.
fouc 7y ago
s/Millennials/Generation Z/ at this point. Millennials are all in their 30s and older now.
- meddlepal 7y ago
  It really depends on the definition of millennial that is used. I'm in my early 30s but I have a couple friends that are 24/25/26 and personally they align as millennials rather than Gen Z. Very tail end of course but definitely millennial.
  - martinpw 7y ago
    Makes me sad that anyone chooses to self identify into marketing buckets like this.
    - TacticalTable 7y ago
      Generational groups aren't exclusively marketing buckets. They're a useful (if rough) description of a set of people within an age group, that's more useful than solely marketing.
- flukus 7y ago
  > s/Millennials/Generation Z/ at this point. I don't think that works either, Gen Z are either really early in their career and only making up a tiny fraction of the industry or not in any career at all yet, it's hardly the demographic IBM needs to appeal to. As an older millennial my hair is starting to take on a grayish tinge and ageism in the industry is becoming a direct concern, so this can only lower my opinion of IBM.
  - jnbiche 7y ago
    Ageism in our industry should be a concern to everyone, regardless of the amount of grey hair they have. We all get old, after all. And more importantly, even if we didn't all get old, it's still wrong to discriminate (we don't all become black over time, but it's still wrong to discriminate in the basis of race).
DonHopkins 7y ago
They should freeze them for later, instead! https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39
ekc 7y ago
Haven't they gotten headlines for this almost every year for the past three decades?
- AmVess 7y ago
  Pretty much. They've been scything employees for as long as I've been working. They've also been in court many times over age discrimination...at least for as long as I can remember. They had their own decently sized building where I used to live, now there isn't a single employee in the entire state. IBM is far past the point where they can appeal to younger folks. They have no headspace in anyone under 40, and certainly not with anyone with any talent.
  - lozenge 7y ago
    What large company isn't in court over age discrimination? Google just settled a class action where one job applicant was literally asked to put his graduation year on his CV "so the engineers can see your age".
LoSboccacc 7y ago
earliest millenials are pushing 40s and younger are at least well experienced and aware of the job market shenanigans, I don't think firing older people as a policy would really be attractive to them. unless this was written by some old stooge that thinks everything under 50s is young and hip, I don't see a correlation here.
js8 7y ago
Of course, the explanation is BS, everybody sees that. But I want to comment that as a young mainframer (I started 14 years ago at the age of 26, with a big IBM competitor), I really enjoyed working with older people. They work quite hard (they have survived lots of changes in the organization, and that - in majority of cases - means that their contribution was appreciated somewhere), often are less crazy (they are set in life, don't have to "compete" anymore), don't panic or get overexcited too much (they have seen lot of stuff and that moderates their emotions), have good stories from life (they lived through one already), and you can learn from them a lot (they often have weird experience in areas that you would never expect). And a youngster can complement them nicely - trying out new things, implementing new technology, experiment, bring new viewpoints; often they will appreciate your energy to do that.
- kchamplewski 7y ago
  I'm curious, how many real competitors are there to IBM in the mainframe space? From what I've seen the majority of the products in use are basically IBM only.
  - robbyt 7y ago
    Oracle :-|
  - perbu 7y ago
    There used to be quite a few different mainframes on the market. HP/Tandem had their Non-stop systems which was perhaps the most distinct competitor - but there were quite a few companies competing in the space. However, IBM has dominated this market for as long as I can remember and today I believe they are the only ones making mainframe computers.
    - tyingq 7y ago
      Amdahl was notable for having a clone that could run IBM mainframe code.
  - avar 7y ago
xvector 7y ago
When I went to the multi-day IBM recruiting event for new grads about 2 years ago, there were red flags ALL OVER the place. It was frankly ridiculous. Talking with some employees they were basically saying "don't work here" as plainly as they could while being watched over by IBM recruiters. You just knew you were walking into a failing company defined solely by bureaucracy and politics with employees that don't really want to be there. On top of this the total compensation was downright insulting even at the upper end of the range. Nope'd out of there pretty quickly, even though I was rather desperate for a position at the time. Edit: Did I mention how horrible the interview process was? You needed to install software with admin permissions on your computer alongside having your webcam active the whole time. Throughout the interview you needed to record 2-minute skits with random prompts given to you. Have you ever tried talking into a webcam with no one on the other end, unprepared? What nonsense. Not sure what anyone at IBM was thinking with this.
- deleted 7y ago
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- 2sk21 7y ago
  I just left IBM recently myself. I was involved in a lot of recruiting work and I know exactly what you mean. I too found the whole process completely cringeworthy. Suitable for the FellowKids subreddit:-)
masklinn 7y ago
Why do people still up-vote bloomberg's clickbait garbage exactly?
MegaButts 7y ago
I was curious what IBM still makes that people use since they sold their Thinkpad division to Lenovo years ago, so I googled it: > IBM produces and sells computer hardware, middleware and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a major research organization, holding the record for most U.S. patents generated by a business (as of 2019) for 26 consecutive years. What on Earth are all of those patents for?
- rxhernandez 7y ago
  I had someone from IBM service my Lenovo P50 Thinkpad last week so they still do that apparently.
  - atkbrah 7y ago
    I was also recently surprised when I made a service call for one of our lenovos and the replies to it came from an ibm.com address.
- riffraff 7y ago
  they have patents on a ton of stuff, I'm sure some of those make sense. As they say, "9,100 patents granted in 2018" [0] [0] https://www.research.ibm.com/patents/ https://www.research.ibm.com/patents/
- blihp 7y ago
  Something that can be listed as (intangible) assets on their balance sheet as well as for use as defensive/offensive weapons against other companies. The majority of them likely have very little actual value.
- 2sk21 7y ago
  As an ex-IBMer with a few dozen patents, I can explain this. The company offer a big cash bonus for filing patents. But I do have to mention that it's not very easy to get an a patent idea through the internal review process. These patents are mostly for enabling horse trading with other big tech companies. For example, Google bought a big batch of patents from IBM when they got hit by the first wave of lawsuits about 9 years ago.
trilila 7y ago
I live in east Europe, and there is an IBM branch here, and this may sound harsh, but most of their staff complain about support from their indian colleagues (low quality support and poor communication skills). They are hiring "young" staff here as well, which frankly wouldn't pass a junior level interview - wouldn't be an issue if they wouldn't advertise them as experienced. My take is that IBM is a dying company, cutting costs, and dealing mostly with clients in a similar position. I'd stay away from working there.
negamax 7y ago
When companies can't invent because they lost their graymatter to bureaucracy they go into an even more self destructing spiral. By cutting costs and squeezing themselves. With open source, patent regime in end game i.e. rent seeking. How a company like IBM can remain relevant? Their AI offering was a major marketing campaign. Just sad but some great lessons
atoav 7y ago
As a youngish person this would rather scare me away..
raxxorrax 7y ago
Good for all those immortal millenials... Seriously, if that isn't just a specious ground to justify firings, I think management at IBM is just completely incompetent. > [...] much more innovative and receptive to technology than baby boomers. Not sure whose head has accumulated chalk, but I doubt they will find anyone creative that doesn't immediately recognize the downsides of these perspectives. I don't think IBM is badly positioned in general, but their lacking competition to bigger tech corps are due to strategic failings, which should be attributed to management. If that cannot take responsibility, I don't know why I should want to work for them.
fybe 7y ago
I did a 6 month internship in IBM 2 years ago and I'm glad I didn't get an offer at the end of it. The culture, the politics and the fear was too much for me. Every week there would be some sort of a "commotion" or "going away" party as people were let go. It mostly DBA's and Unix Support guys that were clearly over 40 years old. My manager was straight up implying "if you don't get the work done, you won't get a good reference for me and you'll be on the next list". I'm in my 20s and that was the first time someone in a professional setting threatened me in such manner. I needed a reference after I left, but from my team the manager was let go, 3 out 5 team members were let go and the others and the remaining 2 left. The manager of the manager was forced to a sabbatical and just like that poof, my old team was gone. I will never go back to IBM, no matter how cool and hip they make it for my generation.
undoware 7y ago
As an older millennial, staring down the barrel of my late thirties, I can't think of a move that would appeal to me less.
syshum 7y ago
I am so glad they own RedHat now... IBM will not destroy everything good about RedHat, no no /s
dang 7y ago
The submitted title was "IBM fired 100,000 employees to be more appealing to Millenials". Unless that was Bloomberg's original title and subsequently changed, this was a case of editorializing and making a title more baity, which breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We take away submission privileges from accounts who do that, so please don't do that.
znpy 7y ago
I was fond of IBM (I still have their centennial book, which I find very interesting). I was fond of IBM... Until I had the change of being interviewed by one of their HR people in the local branch (nothern Italy). That was the worst interview experience ever. This woman called me as soon as I emailed her some details about me, including my phone number, without any kind of prior agreement or scheduling, and puth me through an enormous amount of questions, all while being extremely rude, until we reached the compensation topic, to which she replied that they were looking for someone with double my experience but for less money. Ugh.
- deleted 7y ago
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scarejunba 7y ago
It's IBM. They're retarded enough to think this will work.
bubble_talk 7y ago
Isn't this simply suppy-demand economics? Have you ever seen a comment on HN to the effect of "yeah, if you are in the US and not already working for one of the big tech companies, at this point that just means you are not good enough to be working for them" (implying they should have been interviewing there as frequently as possible until they land in one of them, and also that every other software job falls well short in terms of compensation - implying some kind of additional stupidity on your part if you don't aspire to work for big tech). Today it is IBM - tomorrow, it is going to be every other company whose coolness falls short of the big tech companies. I wonder what alternative IBM really had?
- deleted 7y ago
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angarg12 7y ago
I'm an early millennial and ex IBMer. We know this is bullcrap. What sets IBM apart from Google isn't older workers, but things that don't appeal to millennial sensibilities: deep management hierarchies, focus in sales and marketing instead of tech, a hellscape cubicled office out of the 50s... IBM convinced me that Office Space is a documentary. I would be hard pressed to find anything cool I did on my time there; quite the opposite, everything was 'uncool': uncool offices, uncool projects, uncool tech, uncool processes. And to add to all that, they offer salaries and perks below market rate compared to their direct competitors. Remember when recently IBM rescinded all remote work arrangement for employees? Good luck attracting talent like that. I don't think IBM is doomed just yet. Their sheer size and inertia will keep them moving for quite a while. But if they want to keep up with the competition they will need to pivot really really hard. Also they should we aware of their strengths and weaknesses and not compete with Google. Just don't.
- MperorM 7y ago
  From all the horror stories I hear about IBM it makes me wonder whether we are talking about the same company. I work at IBM in europe. We have open office spaces, I will work remotely for the entirety of next year. I guess the work I'm doing would be considered 'uncool' by most people my age (Internal Devops engineering). I'm always surprised whenever I read just how bad it's supposed to be as it doesn't remotely match my experience.
kmlx 7y ago
"The number of IBM employees has fallen to its lowest point in six years, with 350,600 global workers at the end of 2018 -- a 19% reduction since 2013." Why do they still have such huge numbers? Can't they make the company work with just 10% of those?
lunias 7y ago
I interned at IBM a decade ago. I was studying computer science in Tucson, AZ and was super excited to get picked up by such a well-known company. I never wrote a line of code for them. I decommissioned assets. That is, I scoured massive labs for ancient pieces of hardware, traversed the rat's nest of fiber optic cabling holding them in place, extricated them from their racks, and ultimately placed them in storage closets. The campus was massive, but largely deserted. Senior people that I interacted with indicated that it was a cool place in the late eighties and into the nineties. It's a boneyard now. That being said, I was glad to get to work with some experienced people. All of the other college-aged people that I knew there were stuck mindlessly writing tests.
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- hollerith 7y ago
  Parent is spam.
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135 points by thmslee 7y ago

To be fair, I did see quite a few people who probably "officially" retired 25 years ago walking around with canes last time I visited an IBM campus. I actually thought it was very cool and really wanted to hear their stories.

DonHopkins 7y ago
Maybe you were lucky enough to spot IBM Master Inventor John Wilson testing his smart cane that gathers data to help doctors and physical therapists understand how well you’re recovering from an injury. https://ibmblr.tumblr.com/post/157117436482/yes-volumes-i-its-national-inventors-day https://ibmblr.tumblr.com/post/157117436482/yes-volumes-i-it... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz9jc5blzRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz9jc5blzRM

vegetablepotpie 7y ago

I doubt IBM lays off its older workers solely to appeal to Millenials. It's more likely that older workers are laid off because they are more expensive due to higher higher pay, have more paid time off, use more healthcare and are more politically calibrated to their organizations than younger workers.

Apocryphon 7y ago
It feels like something that IBM regularly does, similar to Cisco's revolving lay-off cycles. Microserfs by Douglas Coupland has a part where the protagonist's father is fired from IBM after being there for years.
- MagnumOpus 7y ago
  Well, Microserfs was written in 1994, just after IBM's 1993 cataclysm where Lou Gerstner was hired to save the company and immediately fired 160,000 people. That was very much a one-off event.
  - ggm 7y ago
    A one off event because of scale. but part of a continuation of downsizing. So only one off in one sense not in others. Cisco's one off downsizing has been threefold.
onion2k 7y ago
It's more likely that older workers are laid off because.. This is just a list of rationalizations that you would prefer to believe. That doesn't make them true. If those reasons were actually correct then IBM wouldn't need to fire people. They could solve all of them in other, less (potentially) very expensive ways.

reustle 7y ago

> International Business Machines Corp. has fired as many as 100,000 employees in the last few years in an effort to boost its appeal to millennials > “The company hires 50,000 employees each year.” > The number of IBM employees has fallen to its lowest point in six years, with 350,600 global workers at the end of 2018 -- a 19% reduction since 2013. The fact that a company can have such high turnover and still function says something about how much work each of those people were doing. While an impressive effort at potentially reinvesting the culture, I bet many of those jobs weren't necessary from the beginning.

Kneecaps07 7y ago
My ex used to work there. It was an older building where everyone had their own office. There would be hallways and hallways of offices and she had no idea who anyone was or what they did all day. Everyone just sat in their office with the doors closed.
- lowdose 7y ago
  She should have recorded this with a camera and do some live private office walk-ins saying she is from HR here to do the interview.

jve 7y ago

Firing talent because of age is not so smart I think. Of course I don't know who they fire, etc. But I'm young, yeah, and I want to distance myself from IBM products. Why? I'v been setting IBM Tivoli/Spectrum protect to backup client computers and, ugh, is it ugly, unfriendly and complex piece of software. I'v also touched the server part. Maybe it's just me, the windows guy (but who loves scripting) and it is more appealing to linux-type guys. Then I got feedback from Linux team that they also don't love that product. They should do something about their products or product managers to be more appealing. After 1hr they will present IBM QRadar to us. Perhaps it will be a pretty presentation and so. I just wonder what's it under the hood, when sysadmins put their hands on it - any experiences someone can share?

pas 7y ago
The simple fact, that IBM stuff is never used by big sites (fb, spotify, google, etc..) despite their solutions being available for ages should lead anyone to the conclusion that they are salesware. QRadar is a glorified syslog server with a query interface (bought by IBM in 2011, formerly developed by Q1 Labs, est 2001), and ... again the fact that Splunk is available (started 2 years after Q1 Labs), that the ELK stack is even mentioned in SIEM circles, that OSSIM an open source alternative is seen as more usable all just point to the conclusion that QRadar too is just salesware :/
- klausjensen 7y ago
  What's salesware?
  - tmikaeld 7y ago
    Sales people pitch it to executives, shows some fancy demo and then sign a contract that's "appealing" in cost and "savings".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago

devoply 7y ago

More like replace 100k workers that expect work life balance for underpaid millennial that you can exploit at submarket wages for long hours.

AmVess 7y ago
They won't be replacing anyone in the US, despite what they say. They are in a decades long quest to get rid of jobs in the USA and give them to people elsewhere.

fouc 7y ago

s/Millennials/Generation Z/ at this point. Millennials are all in their 30s and older now.

meddlepal 7y ago
It really depends on the definition of millennial that is used. I'm in my early 30s but I have a couple friends that are 24/25/26 and personally they align as millennials rather than Gen Z. Very tail end of course but definitely millennial.
- martinpw 7y ago
  Makes me sad that anyone chooses to self identify into marketing buckets like this.
  - TacticalTable 7y ago
    Generational groups aren't exclusively marketing buckets. They're a useful (if rough) description of a set of people within an age group, that's more useful than solely marketing.
flukus 7y ago
> s/Millennials/Generation Z/ at this point. I don't think that works either, Gen Z are either really early in their career and only making up a tiny fraction of the industry or not in any career at all yet, it's hardly the demographic IBM needs to appeal to. As an older millennial my hair is starting to take on a grayish tinge and ageism in the industry is becoming a direct concern, so this can only lower my opinion of IBM.
- jnbiche 7y ago
  Ageism in our industry should be a concern to everyone, regardless of the amount of grey hair they have. We all get old, after all. And more importantly, even if we didn't all get old, it's still wrong to discriminate (we don't all become black over time, but it's still wrong to discriminate in the basis of race).

DonHopkins 7y ago

They should freeze them for later, instead! https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39

ekc 7y ago

Haven't they gotten headlines for this almost every year for the past three decades?

AmVess 7y ago
Pretty much. They've been scything employees for as long as I've been working. They've also been in court many times over age discrimination...at least for as long as I can remember. They had their own decently sized building where I used to live, now there isn't a single employee in the entire state. IBM is far past the point where they can appeal to younger folks. They have no headspace in anyone under 40, and certainly not with anyone with any talent.
- lozenge 7y ago
  What large company isn't in court over age discrimination? Google just settled a class action where one job applicant was literally asked to put his graduation year on his CV "so the engineers can see your age".

LoSboccacc 7y ago

earliest millenials are pushing 40s and younger are at least well experienced and aware of the job market shenanigans, I don't think firing older people as a policy would really be attractive to them. unless this was written by some old stooge that thinks everything under 50s is young and hip, I don't see a correlation here.

js8 7y ago

Of course, the explanation is BS, everybody sees that. But I want to comment that as a young mainframer (I started 14 years ago at the age of 26, with a big IBM competitor), I really enjoyed working with older people. They work quite hard (they have survived lots of changes in the organization, and that - in majority of cases - means that their contribution was appreciated somewhere), often are less crazy (they are set in life, don't have to "compete" anymore), don't panic or get overexcited too much (they have seen lot of stuff and that moderates their emotions), have good stories from life (they lived through one already), and you can learn from them a lot (they often have weird experience in areas that you would never expect). And a youngster can complement them nicely - trying out new things, implementing new technology, experiment, bring new viewpoints; often they will appreciate your energy to do that.

kchamplewski 7y ago
I'm curious, how many real competitors are there to IBM in the mainframe space? From what I've seen the majority of the products in use are basically IBM only.
- robbyt 7y ago
  Oracle :-|
- perbu 7y ago
  There used to be quite a few different mainframes on the market. HP/Tandem had their Non-stop systems which was perhaps the most distinct competitor - but there were quite a few companies competing in the space. However, IBM has dominated this market for as long as I can remember and today I believe they are the only ones making mainframe computers.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Amdahl was notable for having a clone that could run IBM mainframe code.
- avar 7y ago

xvector 7y ago

When I went to the multi-day IBM recruiting event for new grads about 2 years ago, there were red flags ALL OVER the place. It was frankly ridiculous. Talking with some employees they were basically saying "don't work here" as plainly as they could while being watched over by IBM recruiters. You just knew you were walking into a failing company defined solely by bureaucracy and politics with employees that don't really want to be there. On top of this the total compensation was downright insulting even at the upper end of the range. Nope'd out of there pretty quickly, even though I was rather desperate for a position at the time. Edit: Did I mention how horrible the interview process was? You needed to install software with admin permissions on your computer alongside having your webcam active the whole time. Throughout the interview you needed to record 2-minute skits with random prompts given to you. Have you ever tried talking into a webcam with no one on the other end, unprepared? What nonsense. Not sure what anyone at IBM was thinking with this.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
2sk21 7y ago
I just left IBM recently myself. I was involved in a lot of recruiting work and I know exactly what you mean. I too found the whole process completely cringeworthy. Suitable for the FellowKids subreddit:-)

masklinn 7y ago

Why do people still up-vote bloomberg's clickbait garbage exactly?

MegaButts 7y ago

I was curious what IBM still makes that people use since they sold their Thinkpad division to Lenovo years ago, so I googled it: > IBM produces and sells computer hardware, middleware and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a major research organization, holding the record for most U.S. patents generated by a business (as of 2019) for 26 consecutive years. What on Earth are all of those patents for?

rxhernandez 7y ago
I had someone from IBM service my Lenovo P50 Thinkpad last week so they still do that apparently.
- atkbrah 7y ago
  I was also recently surprised when I made a service call for one of our lenovos and the replies to it came from an ibm.com address.
riffraff 7y ago
they have patents on a ton of stuff, I'm sure some of those make sense. As they say, "9,100 patents granted in 2018" [0] [0] https://www.research.ibm.com/patents/ https://www.research.ibm.com/patents/
blihp 7y ago
Something that can be listed as (intangible) assets on their balance sheet as well as for use as defensive/offensive weapons against other companies. The majority of them likely have very little actual value.
2sk21 7y ago
As an ex-IBMer with a few dozen patents, I can explain this. The company offer a big cash bonus for filing patents. But I do have to mention that it's not very easy to get an a patent idea through the internal review process. These patents are mostly for enabling horse trading with other big tech companies. For example, Google bought a big batch of patents from IBM when they got hit by the first wave of lawsuits about 9 years ago.

trilila 7y ago

I live in east Europe, and there is an IBM branch here, and this may sound harsh, but most of their staff complain about support from their indian colleagues (low quality support and poor communication skills). They are hiring "young" staff here as well, which frankly wouldn't pass a junior level interview - wouldn't be an issue if they wouldn't advertise them as experienced. My take is that IBM is a dying company, cutting costs, and dealing mostly with clients in a similar position. I'd stay away from working there.

negamax 7y ago

When companies can't invent because they lost their graymatter to bureaucracy they go into an even more self destructing spiral. By cutting costs and squeezing themselves. With open source, patent regime in end game i.e. rent seeking. How a company like IBM can remain relevant? Their AI offering was a major marketing campaign. Just sad but some great lessons

atoav 7y ago

As a youngish person this would rather scare me away..

raxxorrax 7y ago

Good for all those immortal millenials... Seriously, if that isn't just a specious ground to justify firings, I think management at IBM is just completely incompetent. > [...] much more innovative and receptive to technology than baby boomers. Not sure whose head has accumulated chalk, but I doubt they will find anyone creative that doesn't immediately recognize the downsides of these perspectives. I don't think IBM is badly positioned in general, but their lacking competition to bigger tech corps are due to strategic failings, which should be attributed to management. If that cannot take responsibility, I don't know why I should want to work for them.

fybe 7y ago

I did a 6 month internship in IBM 2 years ago and I'm glad I didn't get an offer at the end of it. The culture, the politics and the fear was too much for me. Every week there would be some sort of a "commotion" or "going away" party as people were let go. It mostly DBA's and Unix Support guys that were clearly over 40 years old. My manager was straight up implying "if you don't get the work done, you won't get a good reference for me and you'll be on the next list". I'm in my 20s and that was the first time someone in a professional setting threatened me in such manner. I needed a reference after I left, but from my team the manager was let go, 3 out 5 team members were let go and the others and the remaining 2 left. The manager of the manager was forced to a sabbatical and just like that poof, my old team was gone. I will never go back to IBM, no matter how cool and hip they make it for my generation.

undoware 7y ago

As an older millennial, staring down the barrel of my late thirties, I can't think of a move that would appeal to me less.

syshum 7y ago

I am so glad they own RedHat now... IBM will not destroy everything good about RedHat, no no /s

dang 7y ago

The submitted title was "IBM fired 100,000 employees to be more appealing to Millenials". Unless that was Bloomberg's original title and subsequently changed, this was a case of editorializing and making a title more baity, which breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We take away submission privileges from accounts who do that, so please don't do that.

znpy 7y ago

I was fond of IBM (I still have their centennial book, which I find very interesting). I was fond of IBM... Until I had the change of being interviewed by one of their HR people in the local branch (nothern Italy). That was the worst interview experience ever. This woman called me as soon as I emailed her some details about me, including my phone number, without any kind of prior agreement or scheduling, and puth me through an enormous amount of questions, all while being extremely rude, until we reached the compensation topic, to which she replied that they were looking for someone with double my experience but for less money. Ugh.

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scarejunba 7y ago

It's IBM. They're retarded enough to think this will work.

bubble_talk 7y ago

Isn't this simply suppy-demand economics? Have you ever seen a comment on HN to the effect of "yeah, if you are in the US and not already working for one of the big tech companies, at this point that just means you are not good enough to be working for them" (implying they should have been interviewing there as frequently as possible until they land in one of them, and also that every other software job falls well short in terms of compensation - implying some kind of additional stupidity on your part if you don't aspire to work for big tech). Today it is IBM - tomorrow, it is going to be every other company whose coolness falls short of the big tech companies. I wonder what alternative IBM really had?

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angarg12 7y ago

I'm an early millennial and ex IBMer. We know this is bullcrap. What sets IBM apart from Google isn't older workers, but things that don't appeal to millennial sensibilities: deep management hierarchies, focus in sales and marketing instead of tech, a hellscape cubicled office out of the 50s... IBM convinced me that Office Space is a documentary. I would be hard pressed to find anything cool I did on my time there; quite the opposite, everything was 'uncool': uncool offices, uncool projects, uncool tech, uncool processes. And to add to all that, they offer salaries and perks below market rate compared to their direct competitors. Remember when recently IBM rescinded all remote work arrangement for employees? Good luck attracting talent like that. I don't think IBM is doomed just yet. Their sheer size and inertia will keep them moving for quite a while. But if they want to keep up with the competition they will need to pivot really really hard. Also they should we aware of their strengths and weaknesses and not compete with Google. Just don't.

MperorM 7y ago
From all the horror stories I hear about IBM it makes me wonder whether we are talking about the same company. I work at IBM in europe. We have open office spaces, I will work remotely for the entirety of next year. I guess the work I'm doing would be considered 'uncool' by most people my age (Internal Devops engineering). I'm always surprised whenever I read just how bad it's supposed to be as it doesn't remotely match my experience.

kmlx 7y ago

"The number of IBM employees has fallen to its lowest point in six years, with 350,600 global workers at the end of 2018 -- a 19% reduction since 2013." Why do they still have such huge numbers? Can't they make the company work with just 10% of those?

lunias 7y ago

I interned at IBM a decade ago. I was studying computer science in Tucson, AZ and was super excited to get picked up by such a well-known company. I never wrote a line of code for them. I decommissioned assets. That is, I scoured massive labs for ancient pieces of hardware, traversed the rat's nest of fiber optic cabling holding them in place, extricated them from their racks, and ultimately placed them in storage closets. The campus was massive, but largely deserted. Senior people that I interacted with indicated that it was a cool place in the late eighties and into the nineties. It's a boneyard now. That being said, I was glad to get to work with some experienced people. All of the other college-aged people that I knew there were stuck mindlessly writing tests.

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