8 ms·

I don't want to seem insensitive but ... The quote at the beginning of the article describes pretty much every layoff I've ever seen (or been through). The pe

• arethuza 13y ago
  "Severance package was on an average 3 months basic component of salary, which is like 6 weeks full pay." That's not bad - probably more than most people would get here in the UK.
  • vidarh 13y ago
    For redundancy, 3 months is fairly common in the UK, and if certain conditions are met you can receive those 3 months pay free of tax.
    • arethuza 13y ago
      It's common amongst professionals or senior managers (sometimes even 6 months) - but the vast majority of people will be on statutory redundancy pay: https://www.gov.uk/redundant-your-rights/redundancy-pay https://www.gov.uk/redundant-your-rights/redundancy-pay
    • qwerta 13y ago
      It could be actually 3 months notice. Kind of problem in Europe if you want to change job.
      • walshemj 13y ago
        Not normally you normally get PILON (your notice period paid in one lump sum) which is taxed normally then the tax free redundancy payments.
  • pekru 13y ago
    >> That's not bad - probably more than most people would get here in the UK. It isn't a huge chunk of money in India, just decent enough to get by barely for a month, considering that much of these folks might be having loans/EMIs to pay for. If the news (that thousands of Indian IBMers from STG losing a job) is for real, they would have a hard time indeed; since there isn't much of IBM-STG kinda stuff happening around (except for shops like redhat/intel/VMWare which might be interested in few folks with sysprog background). People who had entire careers built on and around AIX (not programming, but maintenance/config/admin etc) probably will have a really tough time. Managers, well, guess they just had it coming.
  • CGudapati 13y ago
    Just to give a idea of how the salary structure works here. Suppose you are earning 50,000 per month, only 11,000 will be your basic, some 5000 will be your house rent. and another 5000 for some expenses and additional perks can be up to some 30000. So, they will earn only 11,000 pm instead of the 50,000. which won't even be sufficient to pay rent.
    • pekru 13y ago
      Just elaborating. The 'basic pay' part of the salary paid by tech companies in India is usually very less. (And it isn't due to sinister motives but rather to maximize the non-taxable chunk in salary). This 'basic pay' will usually be 1/5 or 1/7 of monthly net/gross pay. So, for an average worker (say 3+ yrs) in IBM India, the monthly gross would be around INR60K => severance would be around INR20K, which is really a paltry sum.
• prof_hobart 13y ago
  I've been on the receiving end of a layoff like that,but I've also seen it done vastly differently. Our place has been through a couple of rounds of layoffs (as the result of outsourcing). Both went through lengthy - I'm talking months - periods of "consultation" where the company worked with employee reps to try to make sure the correct people were retained (both in terms of looking for opportunities for voluntary redundancy and seeing whether affected people could be reallocated to other areas), and for those who were going to be let go there was a lot of help in terms of career advice, working with external companies looking for new recruits etc, to try to make the process as pain-free as possible. Unsurprisingly, the effects of those two approaches are vastly different both for those who are made redundant and for those who stay. I get the impression that many of the smarter companies, at least in the UK, are beginning to recognise this.
  • arethuza 13y ago
    The law in the UK actually specifies that consultation has to happen during redundancy: https://www.gov.uk/redundant-your-rights/consultation https://www.gov.uk/redundant-your-rights/consultation
  • gutnor 13y ago
    The most painless I have seen is the one my it colleague got at a bank: "Hi, you are fired, if you go sign the paper at HR today and you are out of here before 9:30 AM, we give you 6 months salary and an added 10K compensation for the June bonus, quite better than the legal package of 4 weeks pay you are entitled to. What do you say ?" Consultation periods are just draining the moral of the unaffected team. Good luck if you have any work to do with the affected team.
    • rch 13y ago
      Agreed - a friend of mine who was part of an internal audit team at a large financial company was let go with similarly generous terms. We went on vacation for a couple of weeks, and she found another fantastic job a short while after we came back. While it I have no idea if it would apply elsewhere in the world, I feel like giving people a window (doesn't have to be 6 months) where they truly don't have to worry can have a profound impact on their ability to move along with their career, even under these circumstances.
• ElDiablo666 13y ago
  You do seem insensitive. Fuck their missed projections. Let all the managers quit for their failure. Did you look at the financials? Why are you pretending that you have the slightest clue what's going on in their business? If the employees were in charge like they ought to be, they could deal with their business properly and almost certainly avoid this fucking travesty. Tens of thousands of people losing their jobs is fucking bullshit.
  • bifftannen 13y ago
    This is exactly it. The people that are responsible never pay the price.
    • fennecfoxen 13y ago
      The people responsible for selling the business to Lenovo?
  • smoyer 13y ago
    Did you ever notice that when someone says "I don't want to seem/sound/look XXXXX", they follow it with a statement that can be perceived that way. You do seem full of hatred. If the employees had started IBM, bought out their division or otherwise owned the business, I'd agree with everything you say. In this case, management should also be sacked - On the other hand, maybe part of management's failure was hiring too many employees?
    • razzmataz 13y ago
      You never know, maybe they will be sacked after these layoffs are taken care of. One place I worked at, two managers were each told to select one of their underlings for layoffs. After they made their selections, the managers were then laid off.
      • smoyer 13y ago
        IBM is selling, consolidating and closing whole lines of business ... there's nothing that says anyone has to be employed when they're done. I saw a layoff similar to what you described once ... a few of the managers laid off everyone in their groups, then the next day, HR came in from corporate, laid them off and closed the building down.
• Cthulhu_ 13y ago
  I don't want to seem insensitive, but... Hi I'm your boss, you're fired, give me your laptop, pick up your shit, security is going to escort you out the building. Cause no trouble. Just an interpretation to what's going on there.
  • smoyer 13y ago
    For me (as that boss), it's been much easier to fire people who deserve it than to lay off people who are working earnestly (not necessarily profitably) for the business. So I'd never tell an employee who's part of a RIF that they're fired. The rest of what you describe is exactly how HR trained us to handle the matter.
• mjn 13y ago
  > the severance and extended benefits are far more generous than any layoff I've been through here in the states Interesting. Are big tech companies less generous than big engineering firms in other fields? When companies like BP, Boeing, etc. have had layoff rounds, 3 months is just about the minimum package for an involuntary termination, and it's common to first offer much higher voluntary packages to reduce headcount without having to actually fire (sorry, "terminate") people, especially longtime employees. My dad accepted a voluntary severance package equal to 18 months' salary some years ago (something like "1 month per year of service up to a cap" is a common formula for voluntary offers). I think this is in part due to what you mention: the morale of the existing employees can be significantly impacted by how their former colleagues were treated. Many people know each other out of work, so escorting the employees out of the building by security with no warning is not going to successfully keep them from talking, and if anything will probably just make them more resentful when they meet up for a beer after work to discuss how the layoff was handled. The former employees may also turn up in other situations (college recruiting, industry organizations, consulting/sales, etc.) where it's not to your company's advantage for there to be a lot of people floating around who hold a grudge about the manner in which they were abruptly laid off.
  • PakG1 13y ago
    When IBM did their layoff action in 2013, people in Australia received 2 weeks pay for every year they had worked at IBM. I was there, saw those people leave, saw what they got offered. Was really sad about it because one guy in particular was possibly the best project manager for our department in all of the Asia Pacific region. They gave the most critical projects to this guy. He worked hellish hours to get a severely important project done, as well as managing the network program (project portfolio). Email was sent out that he'd go on a well-deserved extended vacation, and when he came back, he'd be reassigned to another critical role now that everything in Network and other stuff are under control. When he came back, he got his 2 weeks pay per year worked. That really pissed me off. If you're going to fire people, fire the worst guy, not the best guy. He was capable of doing the work of 3 project managers.
    • a3n 13y ago
• sspiff 13y ago
  I was thinking something similar. 3 months partial pay also seems better than I would have expected in India. This makes me wonder, is this the first significant downsizing they experience in Bangalore? Did they think they were invulnerable to these kind of things?
  • navman 13y ago
    Layoffs are not that common in Indian tech industry like here. So it is bound to affect the perception.
    • walshemj 13y ago
      yes India's tech industry been in growth mode for decades - now they are facing what those in the developed world have been dealing with.
• smackfu 13y ago
  >the severance and extended benefits are far more generous than any layoff I've been through here in the states. IBM is pretty generous with the severance in the US too. Something like a week's pay per 6 months worked, capped at 26 weeks. If you've been working there a while, that's a half year of salary. Plus there is generally a month notice, in theory so you can find another job internally.
  • iends 13y ago
    > Plus there is generally a month notice, in theory so you can find another job internally. This is not really the case, it seems there is usually a hiring freeze for the month between when people were notified and when people are let go.
    • smackfu 13y ago
      Right, that's why I said "in theory." I've never heard of it working for anyone, but it is one more month of pay.
  • jmsduran 13y ago
    Former IBM'er here. The reason IBM gives severance and extended benefits is not to look good, it's to prevent their employees from filing unlawful termination suits. Second, there is a rumor in IBM that once an employee is marked as an RA (layoff), they are placed on an HR blacklist preventing them from finding another job internally. Departments that hire an employee placed on the RA blacklist are believed to have to layoff another employee to take their place.
    • booruguru 13y ago
      > Departments that hire an employee placed on the RA blacklist are believed to have to layoff another employee to take their place. I don't understand. Why is it so important to prevent laid off workers from being rehired/transferred? What's the rationale?
      • 13y ago
• mathattack 13y ago
  IBM has come a long way from "Employment for Life" which was one policy that almost killed it. A couple things jump out on this article: 1 - One analyst has estimated that IBM will cut 13,000 of its more than 434,000 workers, based on the amount of money set aside for the rebalancing This is actually very few. Cutting 3% is hardly a rebalancing. Many companies cut double that every year as part of annual performance management. 2 - "Just heard from a colleague in Bangalore that job cuts there have begun. Workers asked to leave on the spot. He claims 6 out of 23 people in his department." If that's the biggest you can find, again it's hardly notable. If you're in a division that's being sold off because it's low margin, expect a lot more. 3 - The one thing that did surprise me is that they're cutting first in India. Is that because of political pressure? Cutting 3% of your headcount in India won't cut 3% of your payroll costs, because the resources are so much cheaper there. My heart is out to anyone who gets surprised with a cut. It's painful, especially if you are early in your career and don't have a lot of money tucked away. In the medium term it can be very empowering. In the long term, I don't know of anyone who was laid off who didn't say, "Good riddance!"
  • smackfu 13y ago
    >Cutting 3% is hardly a rebalancing. Many companies cut double that every year as part of annual performance management. Depends on whether there is a hiring freeze or not.
    • mathattack 13y ago
      True. Though I find corporate hiring freezes to be a reaction to organizational disfunction. If you starve your growing areas because you haven't found a way to keep your stagnant divisions from increasing headcount, then you have bigger problems. Apple used to be guilty of this. They would do hiring freezes, then when they'd lift them, managers would hire everyone in sight. There was no concept of internal transfers because you could never get a backfill. Terrible way to run a business.
      • JoeAltmaier 13y ago
        Agreed! Iowa's genius governor did a hiring freeze for the state universities. Which mean researchers could not spend their grants in Iowa; they fled. Brilliant move.
• cwaniak 13y ago
  I think you nailed it yourself. Here is the message you get every day for years while working for big-corpo like IBM: > YOU'RE PART OF A BUSINESS And here is your "thank you": > You don't get notice (on purpose), you have to turn in company-owned property and they want you out the door Why you IBM would or any other big-corpo follows this scheme of laying people off is beyond me.
• kamaal 13y ago
  >>the severance and extended benefits are far more generous than any layoff I've been through here in the states. May be true in the US. In India its peanuts. In fact its more like alms. >> I'm not sure why employees in struggling business units don't recognize that THEY'RE PART OF A BUSINESS. If that was true, lay off's would be top bottom hitting the leadership positions first. That rarely happens. Layoffs are just a way to immediately turn the revenue equation in the positive trend buy cutting costs. That works for the next 2 months or so. By the third month every one knows cheap tricks like that create no difference at all.
• auctiontheory 13y ago
  the severance and extended benefits are far more generous than any layoff I've been through here in the states Six weeks full salary is generous? You have worked for some very small or very cheap companies.