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Layoff Underway at IBM
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- bhouston 12y agoStill no real confirmation of figures but I guess there is purposeful obfuscation here.
- AlisdairO 12y agoEven so, if IBM loses 100,000 employees in the course of a month it's going to be pretty damn obvious. I'm still betting that the numbers are wildly exaggerated.
- johnward 12y agoIt seems to me that to get rid of that many people they would sell an entire business unit (like the size of GBS) instead of laying all those people off and paying severance.
- bsder 12y agoI'm not. If it were just a couple thousand, they wouldn't be doing all the shenanigans with review numbers. This is a test to see what they can get away with before class action lawsuits start flying. If they dumped all 100,000 at once, they'd get smashed with lawsuits. So,they're going to try to pull it off with 10,000 and see how many lawyers appear.
- smackfu 12y agoReminder that Cringeley's original claim from Jan 22nd was: To fix its business problems and speed up its “transformation,” next week about 26 percent of IBM’s employees will be getting phone calls from their managers. A few hours later a package will appear on their doorsteps with all the paperwork. Project Chrome will hit many of the worldwide services operations. The USA will be hit hard, but so will other locations. IBM’s contractors can expect regular furloughs in 2015. One in four IBMers reading this column will probably start looking for a new job next week. Those employees will all be gone by the end of February. Now he's trying to spin that he never said "layoffs". Not sure why the IEEE is still trusting him.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoWait. I'm confused: was cringeley right or wrong?
- smackfu 12y agoAs far as anyone can tell, dead wrong, but then there are still headlines about "massive worldwide layoffs." Not that 5000 is a small number, but IBM is a large company.
- x0x0 12y agoWell, here's what we know: Cringely claims 100k people IBM claims low thousands (at a cost of $0.6B, which seems quite high) [1] ieee says Alliance@IBM, an ibm union, claims they know of 5k jobs eliminated; they further say they're seeing a flood of backdoor layoffs, ie sudden bad reviews My guess is in 6 months, Cringely was more right than wrong. Or at least we see an employment reduction of tens of thousands. [1] http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0KZ1WF20150126?irpc=932 http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0KZ1WF20150126?irpc...
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- smackfu 12y ago>IBM claims low thousands (at a cost of $0.6B, which seems quite high) If you pay 6 months severance, it adds up quickly. A million dollars covers only 20 $100k employees.
- rodgerd 12y agoSo maybe not uncritically accepting IBM's press releases would be a good idea?
- Jgrubb 12y ago> Of course, the appearance of the situation, in the eyes of employees and the public, is not being helped by the fact amid IBM’s actions comes the board’s announcement on Friday of a big raise for CEO Ginni Rometty.
- spacemanmatt 12y agoI'm sure that there is a perfectly good explanation for that.
- smackfu 12y agoIt's easy to forget that IBM still made $5.5B profit in the most recent quarter.
- jordan0day 12y agoA naive person might then ask, "$5.5 in profit? So why lay off all those people?"
- vertex-four 12y agoBecause if they lay off all those people, they might make even more profit. A public company with outside shareholders can't generally say "oh, we're making enough money, we'll leave it there" - it's got to constantly grow and constantly make more and more profit to please the shareholders which expect it to do so. If you care about your employees, you don't let random people have a say in how your company is run for their own profit.
- hyperliner 12y agoWhy not? Don't you spend less on things when you want to save more? Do you spend all of your savings?
- jordan0day 12y agoSo you're telling me that when I buy the store brand toilet paper, I'm wreaking sudden havoc with the lives of thousands of families, all for the sake of saving some money? I guess I better start buying Charmin. The $0.37 of savings totally isn't worth that! I mean, who could possibly have a clear conscience about leaving thousands of people in the lurch over a little bit of money?
- obtino 12y agoBefore the IBM apologists start commenting: I was an IBM employee a few years ago and I would never recommend it as a good place to work. You were constantly worried about your job and there were cuts to basic resources all the time. It's not at all surprising to see this happen. IBM only cares about its shareholders and not its employees or customers.
- wil421 12y agoI'm pretty sure this is not unique to IBM most mega corporations have the same philosophies. It's not about the employees or even the product at times it's about the numbers and the shareholders.
- johnward 12y agoWorked for other megacorps including IBM. Can confirm.
- yuhong 12y agoPersonally, I want to focus on fixing the problems. That is why I mentioned the idea of making capital gain and income tax equal for example.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoI've done a couple of internships for IBM in the last and work for Microsoft today. IBM felt much more corporate during my brief stints there, even in the research labs. Keep in mind IBM is an east coast company, not a more laid back west coast company. That might have something to do with it (or I'm just very biased).
- artsrc 12y agoSome say other things: > If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/03/tim-cook-climate-change-sceptics-ditch-apple-shares http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/03/tim-cook-...
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- mkozlows 12y ago"IBM said there would be thousands of layoffs. We believe there have been 5,000 layoffs. Clearly IBM was lying." Um.
- xeromal 12y agoClickbait bullshit.
- differentView 12y agoWhat are you quoting?
- cjensen 12y agoThose 5K layoffs are just the ones the Union knows about, and they are direct layoffs. It's not the full extent of the direct layoffs, and it does not include the scummy "you're a bad employee so we might have to fire you soon" tactics.
- Elrac 12y agoA goodly chunk of the company I work at was recently sold to IBM. Not my chunk, but still - color me deeply un-reassured!
- TeMPOraL 12y agoWait what... does that mean that management at IBM suddenly realized they don't need 1/4 of the company? Since they rather won't be hiring new people in place of all laid off, I wonder what is going on there? Did they recently have an extremely successful merger with a very similar company? Did 1/4 of the company provide zero output? Or did Watson get so good it can actually replace engineers and sales people?
- johnward 12y agoFrom what I understand; They are getting rid of employees in low performing areas and hiring in growth areas like CAMMS (cloud, analytics, mobile, social, and security) and Watson.
- _almosnow 12y agoCAMMSW
- trhway 12y ago>CAMMS (cloud, analytics, mobile, social, and security) and Watson. CAMSS&W (1 x 'M', 2 x 'S')
- q2 12y agoBetter may be SCAMS (Social, cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Security). Easy to remember.
- johnward 12y agoI am going to remember this acronym
- runT1ME 12y agoWhy would anyone in the top (let's say, 5%) of tech be interested in working for IBM when it seems this is how it treats its employees?
- TheCondor 12y ago
- Someone1234 12y agoBut nobody will admit that there is a massive ageism problem in technology..? It is nice that some countries have moved to protect against ageism, it is an extremely common problem that few wish to address or take seriously.
- bsder 12y ago> But nobody will admit that there is a massive ageism problem in technology..? It ain't just technology, boss. Welcome to the reason for all those "seniority" rules that everybody on here rails against.
- oldmanjay 12y agoDo you feel like being old would entitle you to a job? And if so, why?
- agumonkey 12y agoBeing young entitles someone to a job more than being old ?
- Crito 12y agoBeing old of course does not entitle you to a job. However people being fired because they are old is something that should bother you. One day, you will be old. Walk into the office of an accounting firm, engineering firm, bank, architects office, whatever. Count the number of employees that you see with gray hair. Now walk around your (software company's) office and do the same. Chances are (_particularly_ on the west coast in my experience), there is a big discrepancy. There are several possible explanations. Maybe the old people get fired. Maybe old people get the hell out of the industry on their own terms. Maybe young people are just hired at an absurd rate, which is suppressing the proportions of old people. Some people suggest that it is because this industry is young, but it isn't that young. Your standard 20-something dev might think he is entering an exciting new industry, but the reality is that the industry is several decades old already; more than enough time to accumulate lots of gray-headed programmers.
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- sciurus 12y agoOuch. I lived in Columbia, Missouri for a couple years starting in 2012. The IBM office had just opened in 2010 and was a big deal. The city and state gave them large tax incentives to open it there. If IBM really laid of 150 people in it, that's a huge cut. http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/local/ibm-layoffs-hit-columbia-service-center/ http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/local/ibm-layoffs-hit-co... http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/local/department-of-economic-development-to-review-ibm-incentives-after-columbia/ http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/local/department-of-econ...
- eevo 12y agoNative Iowan, same goes for Dubuque Iowa.
- e0m 12y agoWhat a remarkable collapse from the "Big Blue" of the 1960s. Is there really anything sexier then then thought of brand new IBM 360 getting loading into a PanAm jet-powered aircraft.
- q2 12y agoRecently, Apple announced highest quarterly income in corporate history and now, IBM is going through biggest layoffs in corporate history. It seems to be the season of superlatives in corporate history. But what a contrast between Apple and IBM!!!
- dredmorbius 12y agoTech has a very powerful tendency to winner-takes-all dynamics. IBM's had an unbelievably long run (formed in 1911 though through the merger of two existing firms), and has taken on and disposed of other competitors (most recent Sun, though there were the Seven Dwarfs in the 1960s / 1970s). Which is to say, the shifts are likely not unrelated, though Apple doesn't directly compete significantly in business.
- anonbanker 12y agoNobody ever got fired for choosing IBM. Except as an employer.
- orionblastar 12y agoIBM didn't take the microcomputer seriously, until it saw how well Apple did and then made an IBM PC to compete with it. They made a deal with Microsoft for DOS, but didn't make the deal exclusive so Microsoft sold their own version of DOS to the PC Cloners. IBM made the PS/2 series with Microchannel as Clone Killers. VGA was a better video, and Creative Labs had the Sound Blaster for better audio. IBM's Microchannel flopped because people wanted to still use their ISA cards. IBM had OS/2 and Microsoft had their own version of OS/2 and Windows, and Microsoft took their OS/2 NT 3.0 and made Windows NT 3.1 out of it and stabbed IBM in the back for a second time. IBM sold their printer line to Lexmark, and their PC X86/X64 line to Lenovo, IBM didn't know how to turn a profit on them. When IBM couldn't supply the PowerPC chips to Apple for their Macintosh line, because IBM was making PowerPC chips for video game consoles as a priority, Apple switched to Intel chips. Then later video game consoles switched to Intel or AMD chips. IBM open sourced their PowerPC chips eventually. IBM bought out Lotus and basically ran it into the ground and let Excel replace Lotus 123, and Lotus Smartsuite was never updated to compete with Microsoft Office and for modern Windows systems so it fell away and IBM forked OpenOffice.Org to make Lotus Symphony. That also went nowhere. IBM still earns money from mainframes and contract support. I think IBM got into Linux and Java contracting as well. But IBM has changed over the decades and it is not the same company it once was. It fell into a trap of maximizing shareholder values rather than making the customer experience a better one like Apple did. Microsoft also suffers from the same sort of thing that IBM does which explains why Microsoft Surface sales tanked. IBM needs a big reboot, and to focus on making the customer experience better. Mobile apps is an area they could focus on, make the IBM Cloud and then make IBM Lotus Symphony for iOS and Android and store the documents on the IBM Cloud and offer subscriptions for more storage. They should also make Lotus Domino and Lotus Notes for mobile devices, and make a set of developer tools to make Android and iOS apps easier to program.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- aceperry 12y agoIt would be nice to hear from honest IBM managers, who are doing the firing and downgrading of employees, what is really going on. Though I'm pretty sure most people know what the score is.
- drawkbox 12y agoIBM seems like it would be a terrifying place to work, Initech level. With the 1,2,3 system there is also probably tons of project protectionism going on, and you probably have to wear a tie.
- kjs3 12y agoWe don't wear ties.
- bronson 12y agoWhy is the tone of the comments on this story so different from those of just last week? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8948778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8948778 One hypothesis... some of the IBM managers who were commenting on that story now realize Cringely was at least partly right?
- brymaster 12y agoThis is a tech board where anyone can post anonymously, so sockpuppeting and astroturfing are quite common, especially as employees of these companies post here. In every thread about Apple/Amazon/Google/Facebook/IBM/Microsoft/etc you'll always have to wonder who's behind that post or who clicked the upvote and downvote arrows.
- akurilin 12y agoDoes this impact SoftLayer in any way?
- kjs3 12y agoCringly said in his article that a quarter of the IBM workforce would "get their paperwork" to be laid off in the last week of January or so. He was very specific and he's not even close. At some point, the layoffs may total a quarter of the workforce, but that's not what his histrionic diatribe said. If he now gets to backpedal and "restate" what he said and be right in his predictions, then so were the forecasters who said New York was going to be buried in snow and yet only got dusted. People have been predicting the imminent death of IBM, with detailed litanies of the myriad of ways it's unrecoverable failures, pretty much every day of the 30 years I've been in IT. The thing about predicting the end of the world, is that if you do it long enough and lack the humility to be ashamed of all the times you were wrong, you'll eventually get to be right.