Stop us if you've heard this one: Job cuts at IBM IBM is undertaking another significant round of job cuts, according to multiple sources. The enterprise giant on Thursday is reportedly notifying a number employees they will be made redundant in the coming months, and offering some the chance to move to different positions. This after talk earlier in the week of an impending …
When your company is floundering and not enough people are buying your products, it's always a good move to sack the sales staff.......
Cutting investment in R+D and engineering would also be a good idea.
Both moves will make next years figures look really, really good, but try not to think 2-3 years into the future. You can always cross that bridge when you come to it.
Ginni doesn't burn bridges... She builds them
And I Quote:- "note to The Register that it had just announced a plan with French president Emmanuel Macron to open a new AI research center in France that will create 400 new jobs".
Sacre (big) bleu.
When you sell off most of your hardware manufacturing capabilities, what is left to sell?
"fluff" like Watson that costs nothing, but inversely is also worth nothing, unless you believe IBM's hype. Most people aren't fooled, or realise they have been duped after a while.
This is never a good idea, especially for a tech company.
IBM maintain an annual R&D budget of circa $6bn and is probably the sole reason for it's 100-year plus existence.
The only figures that ever look good are growing revenues and healthy margins, notwithingstanding those of voluptuous women!
This is never a good idea, especially for a tech company.
It's a very good idea. Cut R&D to zero. Buy a company with a good product. Strip them bare a year later. Rinse. Repeat.
HP has pioneered this process to a fine art.
"HP has pioneered this process to a fine art".
LOL!
IBM has placed it's big bet on Cloud & Cognitive, nobody's got a clue as to where HP is placing it's big bets?
HP's acquisition strategy was the straw that eventually broke the camels back which is why you've got two HPs instead of one ;-)
Serious question; if you eliminated all the C-level execs, who would actually run the company?
You need SOME management at the very top, and some at the coalface. It's the layers in the middle that where it's unclear what they actually DO where the eliminations and big savings could be made.
"Serious question; if you eliminated all the C-level execs, who would actually run the company?"
It is an interesting question. One of the roles of management consultants (not the slash and burn McKinsey type, the ones who actually look at how organisations work) should be to find out who really runs the company, and facilitate them.
In one of Tom Sharpe's books (warning: not safe for 21st century), Wilt having brought utter chaos to a US airbase, <spoiler>the CIA man sadly rises to his feet and remarks that he has got to tell the general notionally in charge who really runs the place</spoiler>. So in many organisations.
One of the functions of the C-suite and senior managers is to deflect attention from who really runs things so they can get on with it. Unfortunately celebrity culture means that people like Rometty start to think they are actually there to make decisions, with predictably disastrous results.
"...and offering some the chance to move to different positions."
When I got RA'd I found another internal position almost immediately - they needed a skill set I covered perfectly, and as a fairly new acquisition also saw the benefit in "having an old hand at the IBM way of things on the team."
When the offer went to HR it suddenly disappeared, and I couldn't get an email or phone call acknowledged or responded to from the hiring manager or anyone else I had talked to about the position.
A few months later I ran into that manager in the grocery store. After telling him things had worked out very well for me he said that had been contacted by someone "very senior, but out of band" who told him to cut all communications with me, and to tell his team the same thing.
In my casual research on the topic I haven't heard of anyone who got hired into another position after they were put on the RA list. So sadly you can look internally all you want, but you're just spending time not finding your next job.
If you're on the RA list, it would take an act of god to save you. Really two senior VPs have to sign off on it... from what I'm told...
Your managers know when an RA is coming. If they can't protect you... they give you a heads up and recommend you for another job that would be safe.
You're right, you become persona non gratta ?sp?
As someone who left the borg long ago, the grass is greener on the outside.
Don't blame Ginny. She had the vision but could never succeed on the execution. Her senior staff that were heritage IBMers were her downfall. Not to mention they had no clue how to succeed in their new space.
OP here - 2 SVPs? In other words "Don't ask so we don't have to laugh at you."
My manager was running our team one person short (3 SEs covering 4 HC of territory) to protect against a cut. After I left they had to bring an above-region guy in to take up the slack. That couldn't have been cheap, as he lived outside the sales region, plus he already had a full-time role. But it made sense on a spreadsheet somewhere, and turned out a great move for me.
Actually its possible.
The issue is that it will either take one SVP to call in a favor, or you have a skill that they really want. I mean desparately want....
I've heard about it with someone I know... but its very rare. And it was a mistake for them to let him go in the first place.
Most friends who got RA'd ended up back within the borg because of an acquisition.
I still have some friends left on the inside, although over time, its getting fewer and fewer. Many retiring or being RA'd For most, the grass is greener away from the borg.
I had to downvote you. Yes, there is a lot of blatant lying in sales. This is a product of paying salesmen commission and their not being accountable when they have mis-sold something. It's the dirty world of IT, and capitalism in general, to be frank.
It's the job of the pre-sales guy to keep the salesman in check, and stop him if he's making promises that can't be kept. This happened to me a lot in my short stint in pre-sales at IBM. You would architect a solution and the salesman would change it to make the price more attractive (reduce CPUs, RAM, # of servers; replace 15K HDDs with NL-SAS, that kind of thing). In those instances I always made sure there was an email trail with me stating there would be issues and it would come back to bite. When it inevitably did, I kept my distance.
However, I do need to state that not all salesmen are like this. Yes, this was the norm at IBM, due to lack of accountability, but plenty were honest and genuinely worked for the customers' benefit. You shouldn't tar everyone with the same brush.
I should also point out if you're going to buy something you should do some research and make sure what you're getting is right for you. Anyone who doesn't do this deserves what they get.
I worked on the Services side and after due diligence and internal approvals the customer would agree the solution and go into a closed room with the sales team and legal and come out with a lower price and a lot of client dependencies left out making it impossible to deliver successfully which the project management would recognise and move to change controlling details to recover cost and that would lose goodwill with the customer and it would go down the drain in the usual spiral.
"Things one can do... Make the EEOC in the USA force IBM to release its layoff data as required by law- AEDA, OWBPA acts. Contact the EEOC. Contact your congressional representative and senator."
Pointless things you can do, I think you'll find....
In the real world, there's plenty of jobs :) I was RA'd in IBM and was the best move in my career, the pittance of redundancy money was covered by my new employer to get in the their company faster :)
Its always about the bottom line in these companies, there probably needs to be a golden rule that middle management gets cut every 2 years and 30% of managers get canned, that way they'd actually be profitable. There's so much politics in brand vs in country management that you may end up with multiple managers but never actually have anything to do with the one who decides if your RA'd from their team. Just something to look out for if your still inside the borg.
I was at IBM for a number of years in 1990/2000 in Austin and saw massive cuts after they scrapped the retirement plan; They laid off scores of non-exempt employees to save vacation and benefits costs and offered them the same positions as contractors. This shit runs rampant ; "hi tech" careers are really becoming sweat shop type of work environments; Hurry , hurry hurry , we always have time to do it oiver as long as it is on time the 1st time. Oracle; Dell; HP all do the same shit.
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