Massive Layoff Underway At IBM 331
Tekla Perry writes: Project Chrome, a massive layoff that IBM is pretending is not a massive layoff, is underway. At more than 100,000 people, it is projected to be the largest mass layoff by any U.S. corporation in at least 20 years. Alliance@IBM, the IBM employees' union, says it has so far collected reports of 5000 jobs eliminated, but those are just numbers of those getting official layoff notices. According to anecdotal reports, IBM appears to be abusing the performance appraisal system to cut additional employees without officially laying them off.
Odd blog post (Score:4, Insightful)
Somehow, I don't think the blog post quoted in the Forbes article is the official stance of IBM corporate PR:
Response from IBM (via its Hong Kong office’s blog):
IBM does not comment on rumors or speculation. However, we’ll make an exception when the speculation is stupid. That’s the case here, where an industry gadfly is trying to make noise about how IBM is about to lay off 26 percent of its workforce. That’s over 100,000 people, which is totally ludicrous.
Despite claiming to be an "official" IBM blog, I don't believe a corporate PR person would say that speculation is stupid or refer to an industry gadfly making noise.
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Despite claiming to be an "official" IBM blog, I don't believe a corporate PR person would say that speculation is stupid or refer to an industry gadfly making noise.
I wish more companies PR people were like this one.
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well yeah, but why doesn't the blog then give a real number to work with? it would be normal procedure for a company to tell, especially a publicly traded company (THEY FUCKING HAVE A REQUIREMENT TO TELL SUCH THINGS).
they're not even denying. maybe the entire hong kong office is getting the axe and don't even know it.
also, laying off for "performance reasons" or whatever... is still laying off, a terminated work contract is a terminated work contract. I guess we wont know until the next quarterly though be
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Re:Odd blog post (Score:4, Informative)
On the topic of not commenting on rumors, this one was even more fun:
When reached, IBM sent the following response: “We do not comment on rumors, even ridiculous or baseless ones. If anyone had checked information readily available from our public earnings statements, or had simply asked us, they would know that IBM has already announced the company has just taken a $600 million charge for workforce rebalancing. This equates to several thousand people, a mere fraction of what’s been reported. Last year, IBM hired 45,000 people, and the company currently has about 15,000 job openings around the world for new skills in growth areas such as cloud, analytics, security, and social and mobile technologies. This is evidence that IBM continues to remix its skills to match where we see the best opportunities in the marketplace.”
Wow, 5 sentences of non comments. I'm thinking IBM PR doesn't understand what "no comment" really means.
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Good news! He's probably available for hire now, if you have an opening!
But We Need More H1-Bs! (Score:5, Insightful)
We just can't find enough tech workers here in the USA! Honest!
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IBM has lost some pretty big business customers due to the inability to compete with people who prefer to "insource" (lingo for ship the jobs out of the country by opening IT shops in low cost regions)
While competing on that level, they lost complete touch with their end-customers and I wouldn't be surprised if these jobs will be available somewhere else under the IBM brand pretty soon.
As a brand, I don't think that such a massive lay-off will be as easy to hide under the rug as their support of the Nazi ta
Re:But We Need More H1-Bs! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, we should greet H1-Bs with open arms . . . if they were for executive management positions.
There is no problem with regular IBM employees.
They are just extremely poorly managed.
That is IBM's problem.
Don't they have a Board of Directors, or something like that . . . ?
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Wouldn't it be interesting if every time there was a bunch if layoffs like this of tech workers the number of H1B visas were automatically lowered by the same amount (since clearly there are a large number of tech workers in America now available to fill those jobs).
I think it would be fascinating to see the effects of such a rule on corporate decisions regarding these type of actions.
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Maybe it's your company culture or interview techniques or HR filtering for silly reasons. Perhaps you should find a way to get more open advice about your hiring process or work environment.
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You can't ever find enough good people. That's because good people create opportunities. Generally speaking in tech more good people you have, the more good people you can use.
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Amen to that. I've interviewed far too many people that I don't consider qualified..... Finding GOOD tech workers is hard.
Sad but true.
Re:But We Need More H1-Bs! (Score:4, Insightful)
If you only consider "good people" as the ones who are pre-trained with previous experience on cutting-edge software, then yeah, you will have a hard time finding them. Those are not the people looking for jobs.
It used to be that companies expected to train everyone, even experienced and senior people, for several months after hire. Now you are expected to start on the first day with a year of experience on new products in order to be considered a good worker.
It is unrealistic to expect that new hires, even experienced new hires, have 100% of the skills you need. Get someone who is smart, then train and educate them on the details.
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If you only consider "good people" as the ones who are pre-trained with previous experience on cutting-edge software,
I don't.
It is unrealistic to expect that new hires, even experienced new hires, have 100% of the skills you need.
I've never worked for a company that expected new hires to have 100% percent the skills needed. I don't know what companies you're looking at.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
let's not beat around the bush (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Cynical,
Please refrain from discussion on a personal level regarding my recent purchase of another yacht. I would not ask you to give back the single dollar menu hamburger you are feeding your three children, that just wouldn't be ethical on my part. So I ask you please give the same respect back to your 1% overlords.
Thank you for your time in this matter,
Make it a great day!
Ironic (Score:2)
you're firing a city the size of boulder Colorado
A ironic comparison as the city of Boulder is firing themselves every day, if you know what I mean.
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No, no - the official slogan is 'Between the mountains and reality'.
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Meanwhile Lenovo is doing well (Score:4, Informative)
Meanwhile Lenovo, the PC business they sold off that moved into tablets and smartphones is doing really well. All of the same chinese factories and technologies are available to IBM that were available to Lenovo, only the management was different. One decided it couldn't make money on making actual computer stuff, the other went ahead and made actual computer stuff.
One went a route of selling vague data mining services at high prices, a bit of patent trolling, and slow expensive lock-in mainframes. The other made stuff people want without the hard selling to dumb middle managers.
Speculated at for over a year (Score:5, Informative)
The speculation is that IBM is trying to push the dividend to a record level. In the process they may very well destroy the company. Because the only way to get the dividend to that level is to basically wipe out long term profits for a short term boost.
That's probably the goal, the new MBA generation from the baby boomers is taking the point of view of taking every dime out of the company and giving it to the insiders even if it guts a major American corporation and hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost to China.
It's funny but the CEO from the Movie Dick and Jane reminds me so much of these CEO's that are only out for themselves, yet he was supposed to be fictional.
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Re:Speculated at for over a year (Score:5, Funny)
IBM used to stand for International Business Machines. Now it apparently stands for "It's Been MBA'd."
I've Been Married and I've Being Managed but It's Better Manually now It's Broken Mate. I Believe Magic yet I'm Being Micromanaged Into Becoming Mediocre.
It Broke Me.
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Dividends go to people who own the stock. All your talk of insiders here doesn't really make any sense. If they decide IBM will no longer be profitable and it makes sense just to liquidate the company and have every last cent go into dividends, it still wouldn't benefit insiders, it would benefit stockholders, the owners of the company (and of course IBM is widely held). Bully for them.
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Not insiders per se, but a (the?) primary compensation for senior executives is stock options, and there is a significant benefit for them if the stock prices does well, even at the expense of the company over the long term. Over the past few years IBM has been spending one billion dollars a month buying back shares. It would be interesting to see if the number of outstanding shares was reduced, or just redistributed as stock options (when I checked in 2012 it certainly appeared as if that was what was h
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Officers of the company (i.e. insiders) would naturally want to exercise their options at the highest price possible. Increasing dividends makes the stock appear more attractive to institutional investors.
When institutions buy, that increases the pressure for the price to go up (retail investors don't move a market cap like this, only the big boys do). When the price per share goes up then that's more money that the officers can collect when they exercise their free options; in this case it looks like all
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That's probably the goal, the new MBA generation from the baby boomers....
Sun Microsystems was madly hiring MBA's after the dot-com-bust to save the company.
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No vacation days, just take time off as needed (Score:3)
Nobody will abuse a time off policy where there are no vacation days and time is taken as needed. If it is abused it can be addressed by the performance review process.
I always understood how that will stop employees from abusing the "as needed" vacation policy.
I never understood what will stop the employer from abusing it. Until now.
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That's a terrible policy. There will always be a percentage that takes NO vacation that everyone else will be compared to. Giving generous vacation and forcing employees to take it is much better.
my prayers go out to my fellow nerds at IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure many Slashdot readers will be directly affected by this, either being laid off themselves, surviving the layoffs only to go work in turmoil every day, or have their spouse or other loved one laid off. That's hard to deal with. Times will get better, of course, but it sure may not seem like it right now. Our hearts go out to you.
Re:my prayers go out to my fellow nerds at IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you for some perspective. I've been reading the other posts and I've been just a little disgusted by the entitlement attitude throughout. I've worked for a company that went under, worked for a division that was eliminated, worked for a company that couldn't pay me for a while and been fired for problems that weren't my fault (that's four different employers.) It sucks, but none of them owed me a job. I'm not owed a job even now when I feel I'm doing great work for the company that employs me.
I was very close to writing a snarky post.
Your comment reminded me how much it sucks to wonder how you're going to get by, what you're going to do to take care of your children and if you'll ever get back to where you were. IBM may need to do this; they've been slowly building to an implosion for decades. I'd love to have IBM come back. I root for companies that can come back from the brink of oblivion, like Yahoo is, like Microsoft is trying to and like Radio Shack has failed to manage. I hope that in ten years, when my children are telling me about how cool IBM is, I'll be able to say that there was a time it looked like they were doomed before they turned it around however painfully.
To those who have to find new jobs, I add my heart goes out to you and I hope I get to work with you some day when we can both look back on this as a point when things started to get better.
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Well, when Big Blue laid me off in the big 2007 round, after 6 years in Global Services, and "training" my replacements in Brazil for my last 2 months, my reaction was "Free at last!" I went back, as a contractor, to the multinational UK-based company I left to go to IBM, and it has gone well since, right up to their current layoff round that I "volunteered" for to get a better severance package than I got from IBM as a segue to retirement - no games with a bad performance rating to screw me out of the se
Source??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where is this 100,000 number coming from? The linked article says 5,000 are documented, and then asserts without proof that the full number is/will be 100,000.
Until there's more evidence, I don't believe the 100,000 number.
What ever happened to skepticism (in the original, benign sense of the word) or critical thinking skills?
(This is NOT an assertion that there will be substantially less than 100,000 layoffs. So please, no one claim I'm saying that.)
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Contract workers who were (historically) converted into permanent workers (that's how I got in, there was never any question about being an eventual permanent hire, I just had to pay my dues first) are now not getting their contracts renewed. A colleague of mine, same job as me, same hiring process as me, city about 5 hours away from me. His last day was last Friday. This won't show up as a layoff, but within the context of IBM culture, that's exactly what it is.
Temps (that weren't really temps, unt
It's rebalancing, not layoffs (Score:4, Funny)
IBM is just leveraging growth opportunities in the cloud to core competencies and strategic initiatives. They are executing a bold plan that will address urgent customer needs through CAMSS (Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social and Security). It is an exciting and prescient vision and a great time to be at IBM!
They used to say ... (Score:3)
Sour grapes or sexism? (Score:3, Insightful)
“I was included in the resource action in spite of consistently high performance numbers. I am the only woman in the work group and one of only a handful in the whole region. The male partners that were retained have crucial chummy drinking buddy relationships with their customers. The treatment and support of professional women, in spite of the window dressing at the top layers is appalling.”
if the drinking buddy relationship is crucial and you haven't maintained said relationships, then don't you think that's why you're being fired? If you are unwilling to maintain this crucial customer relationship, why should you be retained? Is there some reason why women can't be good drinking buddies too?
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Ask the AT&T sales guys they know where every strip club that takes amax is.
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Ask the AT&T sales guys they know where every strip club that takes amax is.
Are you serious? I signed a $60K/year contract with AT&T and all I got was lunch - what do you have to do to get the strip club treatment?
So, hat solves the lack of qualified techs, right? (Score:2)
right?
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While I am sure there are some good techs available because of this, IBM had a massive glut of crap people that you wouldn't want unless you were absolutely desperate, the last set of layoffs saw a heap of them turn up on our door looking for jobs and we turned away every single one of them as unqualified. Maybe they got rid of all the crap in the last round of layoffs, but somehow I doubt it.
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment" (Score:3)
100,000? (Score:2)
The article says only 5,000 have been laid off, but "the rest are being laid off without being laid off." That sounds like hand-waving to me. I suspect the truth is somewhere in between the two numbers.
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"the rest are being laid off without being laid off."
Basically being fired, which doesn't count in their "Resource Action" numbers and doesn't cost them anything against their writeoff for it.
From reading the IBM Endicott Alliance postings, they also get a 30 day notice but as a "PIP" Performance Improvement Plan notification which in 30 days results in termination. I don't know that there are as many of that as the actual layoffs but there were plenty of posts of people who got that notice. There was also
well (Score:2, Interesting)
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That said; IBM has made itself largely irrelevant now for at least the past 5 years, if not longer - especially after they sold their desktop and laptop business to Lenovo. They gambled on a core part of their business that was already dead, and sold off their best assets.
Part of this was that. They didn't catch the wave of mobile computing.
The other part of this is that; believe it or not, this economy is headed for a steep nose-dive. Again. I know most of us have felt that it never came out of the last
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"You CAN compute a billion transactions in a day and then not use the hardware used for those calculations for the rest of the day now."
I program large IBM midranges running multi-billion dollar companies for 25 years now and I've never seen this burst of calculations and then you're done for the day thing. We have lots of work going on all the time that keeps large computers busy.
"Oh, and all the legacy code which is presumably irreplacable because no one understands it..."
I understand it. So do thousands
Not 110,000, not by 2/28 as Cringely predicts. (Score:2)
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rival IBM? (Score:2)
Check the dates (Score:2)
S
Other companies are asking... (Score:3)
If you work at a large tech or services company, rest assured that your top execs are scrambling right now to figure out how to emulate IBM's exploitation of the loophole that lets them lay off employees with the performance management system without technically laying them off.
This is bad news for all US salaried job holders, but especially those in large enterprises with a lot of low-profit business. Even if the job you work is profitable in essence, these companies would gladly dump you in exchange for an H1-B or just replace you with higher-margin work. Even profitable, high-performance employees are on the chopping block nowadays in the quest for ever-increasing profits.
Re:Tsk. And they wonder where employee loyalty wen (Score:5, Informative)
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The guy who lied about having a PhD from Stanford, and of being an early Apple employee? Who 20 years ago had a humor column in a now-defunct magazine, before John Dvorak took it over?
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Re:Tsk. And they wonder where employee loyalty wen (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, same cat.
He basically says that since IBM is going downhill and losing market share, they should just continue to do what they are doing now, with the same people.
I bought absolutely nothing from IBM in the last 10 years. I plan to buy nothing from them in the next 10 years. I use none of their services. So it makes sense to me for them to become a smaller company.
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Yep, same cat.
He basically says that since IBM is going downhill and losing market share, they should just continue to do what they are doing now, with the same people.
I bought absolutely nothing from IBM in the last 10 years. I plan to buy nothing from them in the next 10 years. I use none of their services. So it makes sense to me for them to become a smaller company.
If you aren't a big company they probably don't make anything you can possibly buy anyway. They have sold off their printer division, their PC division, hell even their server division!
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"hell even their server division!"
just their x86 "commodity" server division. They still make IBM big boxes which I program on (and have a smaller one at home - an iseries 520).
You are the 1% (Score:4, Insightful)
If you have a 401(k) or any kind of mutual fund investment, you are part of Wall Street. That's how the system works, it's not spinning in a vacuum. That 6% return you got last year did not fall from the sky, it ended up in your pockets because institutional shareholders put pressure on companies like IBM to help the stock price and/or pay more dividends.
Re:You are the 1% (Score:5, Informative)
If you have a 401(k) or any kind of mutual fund investment, you are part of Wall Street. That's how the system works, it's not spinning in a vacuum. That 6% return you got last year did not fall from the sky, it ended up in your pockets because institutional shareholders put pressure on companies like IBM to help the stock price and/or pay more dividends.
Clearly you doesn't understand what "the 1%" refers to. Here's the information you need. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org]
Re:You are the 1% (Score:5, Interesting)
Your math doesn't work out. The global population is roughly 7 billion, 1% of that is 70 million. There are more than 70 million people with flushing toilets, computers, and homes in the US alone, and there are other places where our standard of living, or better, is just as common (i.e. Canada, Japan, a surprising amount of the Mideast, most of Europe, ect.) At best what you describe is the global 1% is now the global 10%, and is probably more like the global 25%. Why do I bring this up? Because the old "you don't know how good you have it" is getting really old. Americans have been told that for fifty years now, as other countries have steadily overtaken us in quality of life, and as more and more of our income flows to fewer and fewer of our citizens. It's nothing more than a distraction, a rhetorical trick to try and avoid conversation about what's really been going on.
Re:You are the 1% (Score:5, Insightful)
I would mod this up if I wasn't boycotting the mod system.
About 15-20 years ago, a gig in the US was a great opportunity for a Canadian IT worker. Now the big US companies bring in cheap Indian and Chinese workers, and it's the few American IT workers who find a gig in Canada that are lucky.
I'm not saying that Indian or Chinese workers are less qualified (it doesn't take a PhD to figure out how to configure Exchange anyways) but the fact is that money is bleeding out of the country instead of pouring in.
Re:You are the 1% (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're an American with your own computer, a place to plug it in, and a toilet that flushes, you may goddamn well rest assured that you are among the 1% of global citizens.
Actually it's more like somewhere 8-11%.
You have a lot more to lose from a class war than you could ever have to gain.
Well, no. That's a stupid thing to say, and you are a stupid coward for saying it. I gain a great deal if my neighbor isn't starving and either turning to cooking meth or theft
that happens, but 11 failing quarters in a row (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes some management forgets that employees are stakeholders just like the people who have invested their savings are. In this case, IBM has had 11 consecutive quarters (three years) of falling sales. If they don't take decisive action to turn things around, the company will be gone and everyone will be out of a job. They haven't been able to keep brining in the money selling the old products and services, cloud services are keeping them alive for now but Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple dominate cloud, so there is no guarantee that IBM will be able to exist on cloud revenue five years from now. It sucks, but the truth is, IBM hasn't kept their customers happy, and with the customers leaving there isn't money to pay workers. On the other hand, Apple is opening a huge new data center where some ex-IBM staff might work, and several companies are expanding operations in Texas.
Re:that happens, but 11 failing quarters in a row (Score:5, Insightful)
The management responsible for these layoffs don't care that much if they're out of a job. Every C-level manager only has to work 1 year after which they could afford never to have to work a day in their life.
People below that... not so much.
When Carly was CEO at HP, she had a 4 million dollar salary and at some point she gave herself a 16 million dollar bonus for saving lots of money (almost all HP employees waived 1 day's worth of salary at Carly's request just a few month's before she gave herself that bonus).
The current HP CEO on the other hand already has a 16 million dollar salary package. If HP goes tits up tomorrow, she's really not going to lose any sleep over it.
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"cloud services are keeping them alive for now"
Their cloud services is essentially SoftLayer which they recently acquired. With what IBM paid for them, I doubt they are even making money on cloud services yet, much less cloud services keeping them alive. Also SoftLayer's CEO Lance Crosby just resigned in the midst of this latest purge, so whatever IBM does ging forward with cloud will be without most of SoftLayer's founders. I wouldn't look for keeping them alive any time soon.
No consulting jobs==layoff management consultants (Score:3)
> you observe that IBM's problem is that their existing business is not generating new revenue. OK, but how does firing your employees help? It seems to me that by firing their work force, IBM is closing any doors for new revenue opportunities.
The revenue from those units have been falling for quite some time, and there's no reason to think that trend will reverse. To pick a random example, one division of IBM is Global Services, which has two arms, one called IBM Global Business Services (GBS), which
Different responsibilities to each group (Score:4, Interesting)
I understand what you're saying, and honestly they have legal (and other) responsibilities to each group. For example, the #1 legal responsibility they have to employees is to pay them. Shareholders don't have to get paid. The primary responsibility to shareholders is that executives may not enrich themselves at the expense of shareholders, such as by making a sweetheart deal with their brother to be a supplier, or just simply taking corporate (investor) money and spending it on themselves. (Salaries and benefits approved by the board are of course the exception, execs can and do get paid, obviously).
There are thousands of pages of laws and regulations covering the company's responsibilities to it's customers. Just yesterday, I think it was, we had a story on Slashdot about the New York Attorney General going after some companies who didn't fulfill their responsibility of fair dealing with their customers.
Outside of legally enforced responsibilities, there are others too. A company has a responsibility to treat employees with dignity and respect. A tech company which fails to treat employees with dignity and respect will lose their good employees and suffer by it. Several specific types of "treat employees with dignity and respect" are of course legal requirements too, such as sexual harassment and all the stuff the EEOC deals with. Companies that don't have sound policies in place in this regard find themselves on the wrong end of wrongful termination law suits and such as well.
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It is disgusting really, and it's all about satisfying Wall Street. Read Cringely for more info, he's being blogging about this IBM situation for a couple of years. :-/
It's been happening for years. During record profit times in the 90s instead of investing in the company they issues record shareholder returns. In leaner times the shareholders demanded the same returns so that is when the chopping began.
The performance system has long been used as a justification for things, especially why you would not be getting a pay rise. I'm sorry, even though your 'individual' performance was a 1 your entire business group only achieved a 3 so you are not eligible for a pay rise,
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Re:Tsk. And they wonder where employee loyalty wen (Score:5, Informative)
I know a company has to be profitable to keep people employed...
IBM's net profit [marketwatch.com] in FY2014 was $15.75B (down from $16.48B in FY2013).
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They didn't need to do this to stay profitable. They're running 20% gross margin and a profit margin of 12.9%.
Re:Tsk. And they wonder where employee loyalty wen (Score:5, Informative)
They didn't need to do this to stay profitable.
Companies exist to produce profits, not to provide employment. If an employee is not providing net value, then it is better for the company, and the overall economy, for that employee to go somewhere else. In the long run, it is better for the employee as well.
Re:Tsk. And they wonder where employee loyalty wen (Score:5, Insightful)
They didn't need to do this to stay profitable.
Companies exist to produce profits, not to provide employment. If an employee is not providing net value, then it is better for the company, and the overall economy, for that employee to go somewhere else. In the long run, it is better for the employee as well.
You do know that layoffs lead to your most experienced productive staff leaving, because it's easy for them to get employment elsewhere right? So while a big corp thinks layoffs are a way of losing the chaff, it's more effective at losing the wheat. Slowly hiring if you want to grow and slowly losing staff through attrition if you want to get smaller is the right way. If your business sucks, get your staff to start new ones internally. If they're competent, they'll have plenty of ideas.
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You do know that layoffs lead to your most experienced productive staff leaving, because it's easy for them to get employment elsewhere right?
No. IBM is not asking for volunteers. They are cutting their under-performers. Employees usually know which of their coworkers are deadwood, and if done right, some pruning can lead to a morale boost. The big risk is if you don't cut deep enough and have to come back for another round.
Re:Tsk. And they wonder where employee loyalty wen (Score:5, Interesting)
Right, but if you are the top 10% performance rating and you see layoffs, you start looking. Regardless of how much profit they are making, you see that they are going to grow their profit by downsizing and that says a lot right there to someone with a long career ahead of them: 1) it may one day be you, 2) They're probably going to "core competancy" themselves into stagnation, your skills will degrade and you will get bored, 3) If you were upwardly mobile, your chances of promotion are going to shrink, 4) New projects, new development, etc. are all going to be shelved in place of band-aids for what exists, not good for you personally, 5) They'll use this as an excuse to reduce bonuses and give fewer RSUs/stock options, you probably can get a better deal elsewhere.
In a nutshell there's never a good reason to stay around a company that is laying off like this. The only reason is comfort.
Re:Tsk. And they wonder where employee loyalty wen (Score:5, Insightful)
No. IBM is not asking for volunteers. They are cutting their under-performers. Employees usually know which of their coworkers are deadwood, and if done right, some pruning can lead to a morale boost. The big risk is if you don't cut deep enough and have to come back for another round.
This certainly was false in my area during the last big round of layoffs. (No word yet on whether we'll be seeing layoffs this time round or not.) High performers were cut as well as low performers. You're right that we know who falls into which category -- and it is very obvious that they're not just cutting underperformers.
In addition, whenever there are ill-conceived layoffs in process, there are always some employees that decide that they have had enough of taking on extra work while waiting for the axe to fall on themselves, and jump ship of their own accord. We've seen a couple of those already, and they tend to be high performers themselves -- since they're the ones who are confident of being able to find another job.
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Re:Tsk. And they wonder where employee loyalty wen (Score:5, Insightful)
"They are cutting their under-performers"
They are cutting top performers who are in their 50's and 60's and closing in on the longevity needed for certain insurance and pension benefits.
And being top performers they are relatively well paid.
Has nothing to do with under performance, although IBM instructed their management to give an underperformance review along with the termination date so they could cut the severance in half to 13 weeks or nothing when they put them on "performance improvement needed in 30 days" plan.
Looks to me from the outside like they choose the least costly way based on management's take on need from each "resource" for transition help.
Re:Tsk. And they wonder where employee loyalty wen (Score:4, Insightful)
They are cutting top performers who are in their 50's and 60's and closing in on the longevity needed for certain insurance and pension benefits.
IBM eliminated their pension plans 20 years ago. Older employees may be more expensive because they've gotten lots of raises throughout their careers, but pensions aren't an issue; IBM's retirement plans are all 401K-based now. IBM actually did what you describe about 10 years ago. The used it to get rid of the people who had been grandfathered into the old pension plan. My former manager got nailed by that as did several other middle managers and execs I knew. I was in the transitional group. They dumped our pensions and instead gave us a one-time payout into a 401K (I got like $80K), plus set up a reasonably-generous 401K matching program, which they later made less generous (though still not bad, honestly).
I suppose older workers may use medical insurance more heavily (like most big companies, IBM is self-insured), but I'd think by their 60's that's actually declining since their kids are no longer on the insurance.
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Last time I worked at IBM, there appeared to be no rhyme or reason as to why someone was picked to depart. It appeared to be a game of duck duck goose. I was sitting at my desk and someone I didn't recognize (not our manager) came in and told the guy across from me he was to be out by Wednesday. Much of our group was outsourced to India and I was given an opportunity to move from being a Unix admin to being a Web site programmer, a data center builder, or another Unix admin contract working on different sys
Re:Tsk. And they wonder where employee loyalty wen (Score:5, Insightful)
That's one example. I don't work for IBM, never did, and after they pull this, they'll have trouble convincing anyone who has another option to work for them. They've screwed themselves for years, any agreement they make is clearly not worth the paper it's written on.
I think IBM's management must know the company is in its death throes, they're just slowly shedding people to minimize chaos.
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Yea, I had to take a 3 week furlough about 8 months after I started contracting for them. And it took 6 months before I could log in to the servers due to security checks.
[John]
Re:Tsk. And they wonder where employee loyalty wen (Score:5, Interesting)
Companies exist to produce profits
Nope. Companies exist for the benefit of society. There is no natural limit of liability and there is no natural corporate personhood. These are all artifices of law because it is believed that it is to the benefit of the country with those laws that such things exist.
That and only that is why companies exist.
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The question of "why they exist" changes depending on perspective. From the perspective of a company or perhaps it's owner, their primary motivation is profit, and without this, they simply can't exist. People typically start businesses so they can earn a living, not to improve society, despite what their PR departments say.
From a societal or government's perspective, it's generally acknowledged that productive companies are also generally beneficial to society, as they produce goods, provide employment,
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Nope nope.
Corporations exist only at the pleasure of the society: they require laws to exist. Without which they would not exist. There are also corporation types which do not turn a profit. the only thing in common is the incorporation.
As for benefit: it is assumed that allowing people to pursue profit reasonably safely is of benefit to the society, since it creates wealth etc etc. Thus, it is believed that the existence of companies is itself of benefit ot the society.
That is why they exist.
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If corporations want to be people, then corporations are sociopaths.
Corporations take from the environment - did IBM pay for the roads that lead to their businesses? How much of their gear is connected to the Internet, which is a US government/government sponsored university invention. But we're always told "corporations need to take take take only never give".
That is one kind of capitalism, not the only kind. The Japanese practice stakeholder capitalism, which means you think about everyone involved. Yo
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Companies exist to produce profits
That's idiotic. Companies most certainly DO NOT exist "to produce profits".
Companies exist to make products or provide services. Profits are a side-effect that act as an incentive for people to form companies to provide products or services. The raison d'etre of a company is to PRODUCE something - the profits from efficient overproduction are just encouragement for those with the means to produce something of value to the rest of us.
The fact that there are people like you who have lost sight of the real rea
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Is this another case of vitality curve [wikipedia.org] management? GE's Jack Welch was the quintessential example of this policy and is considered one of the most effective company leaders ever.
Unless you worked at GE and were condemned to watch the layoffs year after year until you were finally canned due to being part of the bottom 10% -- or watching the dysfunctional games people played because of the policy
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That's the biggest impact. Even if they do successfully cut the bottom 10% and none of the good people, the whole approach destroys corporate culture and drives negative behaviours - particularly from the people lacking the skills/confidence to get a job elsewhere.
This will cause the great people to be rather more receptive to the approaches they'll already be receiving from competitors, and even if IBM don't ask any top performers to leave, they're going to lose many.
The less effective they are at identify
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These Koch-sucking idiots don't realize that fucking people over will have consequences. 4 or 5 people are getting richer, 100,000 people are getting laid off, and there are psychopaths all over the country who believe that's a good thing. I wish we could dope the water supply with antipsychotics.
I'm pretty sure there are more than 4 or 5 IBM shareholders, if the stock price goes up (or doesn't go down as much) because of these layoffs, many more than 100,000 people will become richer.
Sure, company insiders with lots of stuck benefit more, but it's not true that they are the only ones that benefit.
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I'm pretty sure there are more than 4 or 5 IBM shareholders, if the stock price goes up (or doesn't go down as much) because of these layoffs, many more than 100,000 people will become richer.
But many more than 100,000 people will become poorer, too. Layoffs affect not just the laid off and their dependents but also anyone else who has to foot the bill to pay for their costs of living. And that's going to be all of us. So the IBM shareholders get richer, and everyone in America gets poorer. Doesn't sound like a good deal.
IBM execs are Dems, gave Obama ~million dollars (Score:3, Informative)
These cocksuckers are actually Democrats who gave Obama almost a million dollars to help him get reelected.
http://influenceexplorer.com/o... [influenceexplorer.com]
How has six or seven years of Obama worked out for the workers at IBM?
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1 million is not a lot, it might have very well paid out well enough in terms of fat government contracts. It is the yearly pay of 10 employees (low in the ladder). 6% of the paycheck of the IBM CEO. I am pretty sure IBM's govt contracts would have more than compensated for the million.
There are STILL people @ IBM? (Score:3)
Re:Not A Charity (Score:5, Insightful)