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IBM confirms layoffs are happening, but won’t provide details
- CydeWeys 6y agoAren't there supposed to be reporting requirements for mass layoffs?
- verdverm 6y agoYes, and they will come out, this sounds more like an inside info leak
- gtirloni 6y agoEvery other month, IBM is laying off a lot of people. Is this still news?
- stakkur 6y agoMany years ago, I worked at Intel. Layoffs/restructuring/reorging were...common. Often affecting thousands of people. It's brutal.
- era86 6y agoI feel like this is true with ANY size company, small or large. It's a business deal, you're not "joining a family".
- CydeWeys 6y agoIt's definitely much more true of some companies than others.
- nojito 6y agoThis isn't unique to mega-corps.
- bluetwo 6y agoDidn't intel also have a "lay off the bottom 2% yearly" culture? I recall reading about that years back.
- stakkur 6y agoWithout risking some random Intel lawyer reprisal, it was often worse than that. At one point, Intel had the 'ranking and rating' that was once used at Microsoft. I think this is called 'forced ranking' today. My god.
- Exmoor 6y agoAt least at Microsoft it was called "stack ranking." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
- qdog 6y agoI think it was more like the bottom 5%. The theory is by cutting the bottom and always hiring you constantly improve your workforce. The reality is then you will always fill reqs, sometimes as quickly as possible, to make sure there is a sacrifice for the gods. Perversely, a team of high-performers is actually punished, as everyone is also ranked against each other, so even if you have the top 10 performers in the company, one or more of them may be fired and will often have their compensation effected (less/no RSUs etc.). Certainly that was how it felt about 5 years ago, not sure about today.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoTo be honest, I've been on both sides of the fence for this one, and it's a tough call: 1. The "periodically cull the bottom" way of doing things invariably leads to a toxic culture with people looking over their shoulder. 2. Conversely, I've been in tech companies where it was EXTREMELY difficult to fire anyone who wasn't outright awful. Over time that can really erode your culture because people who are on the poor side of mediocre hang around and weigh everything down. The best solution is to always have high standards, but evaluate people against those actual standards, and don't be afraid to take action if necessary, but don't have arbitrary X% cutoffs.
- hckr_news 6y agoI worked at UHG’s tech arm called Optum and layoffs/churns were very common. Entire teams can just disappear off the floor without a moment’s notice. They’ve offshored most of their work to other countries and most of the offices stateside are ghost buildings. UHG execs are just focused on its stock ticker.
- trekrich 6y agoProb more senior engineers again.
- sunstone 6y agoIt's a business decision. With the economy tanking they'll be able to hire better grads and a recent grads than they normally could, work them like dogs for twenty five years and then wait for a convenient recession for a big layoff. This has been going on since the '80's at least. Rinse and repeat.
- trekrich 6y agotrue, does not make it right though.
- halfastack 6y agoHow does that make sense? Can the "grad" do good enough job compared to a senior? I've seen my fair share of "senior" developers, who had insanely high salaries for some strange reason yet their output was mediocre at best. Laying off these people I can understand. That said, management is notoriously bad at spotting these people. Chances are they lay off the only person who knows how some crucial piece of SW works...
- azinman2 6y agoIt’s unclear to me what IBM is even about these days. Feels like they’ve led themselves off a cliff.
- xyst 6y agoLegacy main frame technology, homie. Banks, hospitals, aerospace industry, retail operations, states and governments mostly run on IBM main frames. These entities refuse to upgrade because “it just works”. IBM charges an arm and a leg to these companies because they know they can’t migrate off. I happened to come across an invoice from IBM to our company and each server/appliance cost $250K or more. I believe the total cost for the order was a few million dollars. This doesn’t even include the support contracts.
- curiousllama 6y agoActual quote from a major insurance company CIO to me: "We've tried to migrate off the mainframe every few years for two decades. Every attempt has failed."
- blackrock 6y agoWhy has it failed? Because of technology? Even building your own fault tolerant Linux cloud seems cheaper. Granted, an insurance company does not have the expertise to build massive computer operating systems. Or because of money, and other vendor lock-in’s? Then, with all the proprietary stuff, I can see how a migration can easily fail.
- dahfizz 6y agoMainframe applications are very different from "regular" Linux server applications. Migrating would almost certainly mean a complete redesign and rewrite of existing software. For industries where stability is paramount (banking, hospitals) it just isn't worth it. Keep in mind that the applications running on these mainframes were written in COBOL 30+ years ago, often with poor documentation and specification. It is a tremendous task to port something like that and have the new system behave 100% like the old system.
- madengr 6y ago"Essentially, you lay off some of the people without the skills you need and who can’t be re-educated and you bring in people with certain skill sets". So what's the criteria for who can't be "re-educated"? Too old?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoCould the last one out of IBM please hit the lights?
- godzillabrennus 6y agoThey own red hat. They have mainframes. There will be something left of big blue if those two pillars alone hold the decrepit house up.
- stagger87 6y agoI'm sure they will let the remaining 350,000 employees know that if they are the last one to leave to turn off the lights.
- gentleman11 6y agoA family member of mine has to deal with their Phoenix payroll disaster regularly and directly because they work for the government. The rest of Canadians still had to deal with the price tag in terms of noticeably affecting the national debt.
- ycombonator 6y agoWelcome to on demand remote IT Labor. Pretty much anyone one IT can be replaced with a cheaper offshore resource thanks to the acceleration of remote work.
- dang 6y agoFrom yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268191 Since that thread took for granted that the layoffs were happening, I see no SNI here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- curiousllama 6y agoIt's important to remember that IBM isn't really one entity. They're not just mainframes, or Red Hat, or Watson, or any other one thing. To butcher a TV quote: "IBM is just a convenient name for a group of unrelated corporate interests." So of course they're doing layoffs: at least SOME of the orgs that operate under the brand name have to be struggling. It gets a lot less impactful when the news just bubbles down to: "someone made a bad bet somewhere." It was always coming at a company like this. Now is just the time when these things happen.