IBM Fired as Many as 100,000 in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows (bloomberg.com) 117
International Business Machines (IBM) has fired as many as 100,000 employees in the last few years in an effort to boost its appeal to millennials and make it appear to be as "cool" and "trendy" as Amazon and Google, according to a deposition from a former vice president in an ongoing age discrimination lawsuit. From a report: The technology company is facing several lawsuits accusing it of firing older workers, including a class-action case in Manhattan and individual civil suits filed in California, Pennsylvania and Texas last year. "We have reinvented IBM in the past five years to target higher value opportunities for our clients," IBM said in a statement. "The company hires 50,000 employees each year." Big Blue has struggled with almost seven straight years of shrinking revenue. In the last decade, the company has fired thousands of people in the U.S., Canada and other high-wage jurisdictions in an effort to cut costs and retool its workforce after coming late to the cloud-computing and mobile-tech revolutions. 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.
Actually fired or laid off? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Both. As I understand they do firing creatively: transfer the position to some remote worksite and offer you relocation, effective immediately.
Re:Actually fired or laid off? (Score:5, Insightful)
TFS is terrible...
Firing people to "look cool and trendy to millenials"? How about the simplest explanation... that IBM has been in financial trouble and cut staff back to compensate?
HTF does firing people make you look "cool and trendy"?
Yeah, IBM is a dinosaur, but TFS makes no sense.
Re:Actually fired or laid off? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The younger folk might have been willing to work more and been more open to new tech (which is good), but they didn't have the experience to understand and avoid tech debt...or build for stability...or really think through the way one small change could have unintended consequences way down the line.
Dude. You nailed me perfectly. I'm a pretty good devops guy but I don't touch important code if there is dev capacity. I'm slowly getting the hang of programming carefully, with tests and all that jazz.
We had an emergency where we needed something now and it seemed impossible to get that fast. I did maybe 2 weeks of work in 2 days but you should have seen their faces when they saw the code. We had 2 generations of cleanup before it looked normal but everyone tells me it is awesome powerful and easy to
Isn't that stupendously illegal? (Score:3)
I used to laugh at that joke about the lion eating an IBM manager every day and nobody noticed until I found out the mass firings in the 80s and 90s were them trimming fat but getting rid of older, better paid employees and replacing them with young, cheap ones. And no, that didn't bite them in the ass. They're plenty profitable. So much so they just hauled off and bought Red Hat.
Opps, that was supposed to read (Score:2)
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You're a delusional whack pack. The only one running is you. Or did you forget about pleading for arstechnica to delete your spam posts for your shitty attempts to sell your crap for $25 a pop? [archive.li]
So, Alexander Peter Kowalski, How do you justify your not working these last 25 years? Your plan to make money selling shareware was DOA by 2000, you haven't produced a link to the mandatory business registration that you claim to have been running the last decade or so, you've been a sponger and a spammer for a qu
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I would recommend from to the young people stay away from that company if you want to build a life.
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IBM calls them "Resource Actions" when they do massive layoffs. But you can also be fired if you don't meet your employment criteria (e.g. quota).
In addition to the RAs, they have also drastically cut severance pay from 2 weeks for every year of employment (e.g. 8 years would get you 4 months pay) to only one months pay. Period. Someone I know that just got RAed worked for IBM for 16 years. Before, they would have gotten 6 months pay (which was the max) as a severance package. Now, he just gets the one
Fired is the right term (Score:2)
I'm not going to say fired for cause because that implies less sales, and IBM is still doing just fine there. They're just mostly a consultancy firm now instead of a hardware one.
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a "Layoff" is when a factory temporarily stops employment and pay.
The historical origin of the term "lay off" was in manufacturing, when workers were temporarily furloughed when there was insufficient work for them, and returned to work when demand recovered.
But that is not what the term means today. "Laid off", means you permanently lose your job for reasons beyond your direct control. "Fired" means you lose your job for cause (dishonesty, incompetence, sleeping with the VP's spouse, etc).
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Make up a cause. If I tell you to do 10 things and you do 9 or 11 things, then you're on a performance improvement plan. If you get upset that's insubordination and I terminate you immediately. If I give a senior team member no meaningful work for 6 months when it comes time to do her performance review I can indicate she is not operating to her level and put her on report.
Laid off means the position is no longer available. Fired means I'd rather have someone else working the same role.
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Demographic transition or DEATH TO CAREERS (Score:2)
Even for Slashdot, this was a depressingly vacuous discussion. At least based on all of my searches and checking all the positively moderated comments.
What IBM is doing is transitioning from a company where most of the employees are career employees to a company where a tiny fraction are the career people and everyone else is short term. Yes, the deliberate attrition at the high end is being accelerated, but there is also increased attrition AND hiring at the low end of the age range.
Fortunately I don't rem
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The firings and layoffs are dwarfed (Score:3, Interesting)
What I don't get is why people aren't angrier about this. Especially the cuts to education. We laugh 'cause this is a nerd forum but statistically the majority reading this post have kids.
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Honestly he was so weak I barely heard him (Score:3)
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Enjoy your crime. (Score:2)
There is no way I could have gone to college without help from the government.
I got tired of slow advancement and went to college but it would have been much easier for me to steal money through a computer. If I had no other choice except to kowtow to pricks like you it's easy to see how things would have ended up eventually.
Millenials? (Score:2)
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Lawyers see illegal company policies as damage and find ways to route around the damage.
If you can't do business... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me explain...
IBM has the highest ceiling I've ever encountered of "getting permission to use their products".
Let's take Cisco as an alternative. You don't sign 20 contracts with Cisco and sit in 10+ hours of meetings with Cisco to start using a Cisco switch. Instead, you go to CDW, Amazon, whatever and buy a switch. Then you install it and it works like shit. But at least you have a Cisco switch and you're willing to hire someone from a partner to come in and configure it so it doesn't suck. Then you buy another switch and you sign a support contract and before you know it, your $1000 purchase has turned into a $60,000 a year contract for Cisco.
IBM is more like "Let's have a meeting, and then another meeting and then another meeting. And let's talk with your manager and his manager and his managers manager" and by the time you're done, the CEO of your company hired IBM to deliver all kinds of weird ass systems which do all kinds of businessy whatevers and you all you wanted was a single computer or piece of software which isn't actually supported under the deal your CEO signed and you still don't have what you need and it took 6 months.
It used to be that IBM would sell a company a REALLY BIG computer and hire a staff of 10-10,000 people to operate it and develop for it. And this was great in 1981.
In 2019, the boss wants you to develop something and show them it works before they even consider having a meeting with a vendor.
I work at one of the 400 biggest companies in the world and I needed a database. I chose Couchbase because it appeared to meet all my needs. The problem is, Couchbase wanted to have meetings and more meetings and all that crap. All I wanted was to pay $15,000, buy some licenses, install them and be done. But to buy the $15,000 of licenses, I had to first show the boss that the product would work. But because we had to have meetings and more meetings and shit like that, I ended up ditching them and going with an open source product which didn't really do everything I wanted, but saved me the hassle.
The $15,000 for the installation I did would have probably turned into $100,000 a year for Couchbase, but they got all IBM on us and made it a pain in the ass to do business with them.
IBM will probably never be able to transform to a new model which works with the modern computing environment. We don't develop products on IBM technology because we can't get started with them. It's not like the old days where IBM was the answer to everything. Almost no one in 2019 has any idea what IBM actually offers as a competitive advantage. These days, I expect by the time IBM gets a grasp on the Redhat purchase, OpenShift will be OpenShit and Rancher will have more or less taken their entire position... which seems to be where they are going already.
If Rancher figures manages to get a full solution with Kubedb integration and can manage to get etcd working in K3OS, I don't see OpenShift holding on for too long. OpenShift is IBM style in the sense that you you can't learn OpenShift unless you have OpenShift and you won't buy OpenShift unless you know how to you use.
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That is because IBM decided to be a "services" company instead of a company that actually made stuff. There is a continuation of this with their "AI" efforts, which is just snakeoil you buy as a service. I would imagine the Federal Government is giving them a ton of money to stay afloat.
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Re:If you can't do business... (Score:5, Insightful)
by the time you're done, the CEO of your company hired IBM to deliver all kinds of weird ass systems which do all kinds of businessy whatevers
That's their business model. They don't want to make nickle and dime sales, they want million dollar sales. Get a foot in the door, then work their way up the food chain until they get to an executive who can write the big checks. I've seen it happen - I can't say for sure but I got the impression that the dumb ass VP who finally bought their worthless software thought he might get an IBM VP job out of it.
IBM is mostly doing consultancy (Score:3)
What do IBM even do? (Score:1)
in an effort to boost its appeal to millennials and make it appear to be as "cool" and "trendy" as Amazon and Google
I do not know what IBM does. If I have touched an IBM product in the past 10 years I am not aware of it (recent acquisition excluded).
How do you appear to be cool or trendy when people don't know what you do and you aren't visibly innovating on any product?
Re:What do IBM even do? (Score:5, Informative)
I do not know what IBM does.
Their adding machines and typewriters have always been pretty solid.
Re:What do IBM even do? (Score:5, Informative)
Their "legacy" mainframe systems handles billions of financial transactions every day.
Using Intel/Linux/Windows is very cool, and companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter build out huge data centers using commodity hardware. It's all quite inexpensive and trendy.
The problem is that an individual Google or Facebook transaction has a value of approximately $0.00. If a transaction is lost, the user hits refresh.
On the other hand, transactions involving credit cards and ATMs have real value. That's where systems with redundant power supplies, self-checking processors (if an error is detected a processor will take itself offline and transfer its work to another process), distributed data bases (DB2), hardware based encryption (all data at rest and in motion is encrypted, even memory contents are encrypted), hot-pluggable hard drives (and power supplies and processor cards), and rigid security protocols (good old RACF) come in. They cost millions of dollars, but as an exec once said in a meeting (referring to an IBM mainframe at a major bank) "you practically have to take a fire hose to one of those systems get it to crash."
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in an effort to boost its appeal to millennials and make it appear to be as "cool" and "trendy" as Amazon and Google
I do not know what IBM does. If I have touched an IBM product in the past 10 years I am not aware of it (recent acquisition excluded).
How do you appear to be cool or trendy when people don't know what you do and you aren't visibly innovating on any product?
Hint - Google and Amazon are decidedly NOT cool.
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I always hated cherry-picked stats like these (Score:2)
If you look at the IBM's long-term historical employee count [statista.com], you see that 2013 was a peak. The long-term trend from 2000-2018 is an increase of 11% (and could be argued to be higher since it's only dipped the last two years). For comparison, the U.S population increased by 16% over the same time frame. The journalist just cherry-picked 2013 as the start y
They're dicks (Score:1)
A buddy of mine, who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, was been working for a mid-sized business that was acquired by IBM. Overnight, the place became a nightmare to work for. They're doing every they can to get rid of older workers - make them voluntarily quit. One of the strategies is to have them work practically 7 days a week with no extra compensation.
I pride myself in being able to tolerate a lot more crap that most would put up with - but based on some stories said buddy has related..
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Fear IBM - Never work for them (Score:1)
I've been working in the field for a large variety of companies for over 25 years now. I can say with some confidence that they are the best in the world at firing people. They are brutally efficient at finding every possible method they can to get rid of people in expensive places and replacing them with people from cheap places. It is what they do best. There are quite possibly millions of IBM horror stories floating out there.
They have replaced all of their other skills with the skill of firing, laying o
I'm disappointed you can't figure it out (Score:5, Insightful)
"Cool and trendy to millennials" means, "ditch the experienced people who insist on testing before deploying, who insist on ensuring widget X integrates correctly, who generally don't give a rat's ass that discussing serious engineering flaws in a plan creates a non-positive emotional experience for high velocity code creators,"
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A handful of experienced people can lead an army of inexperienced people to success. And it is a lot cheaper that way.
Best comment so far. People who are 'old' and get laid off have taken all the raises but failed to see the ones who are good leaders and can create a happy and productive team are the ones that are kept.
You keep one or two of those guys around (Score:2)
Know someone laid off by IBM recently? (Score:2)
Normally, when seeing a headline like this, I'd ignore the posting. However a close friend of mine, who's in his mid-50s, got 18 month garden leave from big blue a few weeks ago.
He'd been with them for some years, joining them when they acquired his previous company. He was a road warrior consultant of sorts.
No smoke without a fire as they say.
Re:Know someone laid off by IBM recently? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of my college friends was acquired by IBM and then laid off. She went to work for another company, and IBM acquired that company and laid her off again. Another was acquired (Rational) and quit when IBM started dictating office sizes and furniture types for various "bands" (the word IBM uses to describe your job level.)
I retired and changed careers after half of my department was laid off and a year later it still wasn't clear what our strategy was going to be.
I worked there over 30 years, knew dozens if not over a hundred people who were laid off. Started in 1992/1993 out of necessity, then it became an addiction. Management seemed not to know how to manage the business any other way.
Pfizer (Score:2)
I preferred established companies (Score:4, Insightful)
When I was younger and just entering the workforce, I always preferred working for companies that had an older, more well established companies. The older workforce gave me new people to learn from, and because they generally had families and other commitments, the work/life balance was better too.
Tiger in the ibm office joke (Score:2)
Theres the joke that in ibm us offices there is tiger that ears all the employees. The managers having doors all survive and think there doing a great job.
I never got a connection to ibm employees and went to a number of ibm events - the product has since been grandfathered and we dont use it anymore.
Ibm is probably great to work for if you have a phd in quantum bits (eg it might work) but if your troubleshooting why java wont work well your doomed.
That's not how that works... (Score:4, Interesting)
International Business Machines (IBM) has fired as many as 100,000 employees in the last few years in an effort to boost its appeal to millennials
If their goal is to attract the best and brightest millennials, they're going about it all backwards. One of the surest ways to get me to write off an apartment complex during my college/grad school years was if they made their own tenants wait as they tried to woo me into signing a contract for the next year. That sort of thing made it pretty clear that I wouldn't be cared for once I signed on the dotted line. Every complex has its issues, and decent management can fix most of them, but bad management creates its own problems.
The same is true of employers. Every company has its problems, and older companies come with their own problems, but good management can get you through that. Want to know the surest way to make yourself unappealing to the best and brightest job candidates? Mistreat your current employees so that it's clear you won't respect that candidate once they've signed on the dotted line. That's a sure sign of bad management and an obvious red flag for smart job seekers. The only people who won't go running for the hills are the clueless ones, and are those really the ones that you want to be hiring?
IBM actually blew its chance to hire this millennial (aside: I preferred it back when most definitions of the cohort left me between Gen X and Millennial). I considered IBM as I was coming out of grad school, but they took a month to get back to me with a request for an interview. By then I had already interviewed at three other places I contacted on the same day as IBM, had been blown away by two them, and ended up accepting an offer at one of them where it was obvious that management really cared about each person individually. And now, nearly a decade later, I'm still at that place because management has consistently demonstrated a care for each person (e.g. our CEO sent me home early today so I could help my wife with the baby), an earnestness about fixing problems as they arise (we've had growing pains as we've gone from 60 to 90 employees), and has afforded me every opportunity to grow my skills, responsibilities, and pay (did I mention we get time-and-a-half for anything over 40 hours, which they've never once required me to go beyond?) in their publicly stated attempt to make it a place that all of their employees can have fulfilling, lifelong careers while also enjoying a life outside of work?
Funny how respecting your current employees can make an employer more appealing to millennial (or really, any other) job candidates...
I'd like the veterans back please. (Score:1)
Having had to endure multiple projects implemented by IBM Canada's K12 Education division over the past 6 years, I miss the veterans that were involved in the first project several years ago. They were replaced with millennials and we've had to replace everything they did--usually within 3 months of project completion.
The veterans that were involved in the first project left us with a working infrastructure and enough knowledge transfer to at least be comfortable with its administration. The last few proj
Let me fix that (Score:2)
International Business Machines (IBM) has fired as many as 100,000 employees in the last few years in an effort to prevent older workers from giving millennials a clue about how not to get screwed over.
FTFY
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Though I suspect you'd prefer a drag queen over a transsexual ... after