IBM, Kyndryl cut jobs even after cutting ties IBM services spinoff Kyndryl has confirmed it's laying off staff while Big Blue is also shedding employees, as part of the industry-wide job cut contagion that has plagued the tech sector over the past few months. Kyndryl told The Register said, "We are eliminating some roles globally – a small percentage – to become more …
Around here, in our experience with service-No, nothing actually does get done. At least not that way.
Using service-No merely feeds the machine and the bureaucracy built around it. Real progress and action happens outside and in spite of service-No, not with it.
Their off-shore kids and "look we don't age discriminate" middle-management dinosaurs aren't going to get them those sweet, sweet government contracts.
Which now state "on-shore with citizenship".
As a result they're forced to scramble for contractors. I've been approached with eye-watering rates for a dev role so they can fill the staffing requirements for a government tender. Even there I suspect they want me as a fig leaf who hands off actual coding work to, well, probably, India. As none of the work is prescribed as having to take place on government agency premises, they think they may be able to pull that off.
And you know what? With what they're waving in my face, for a 3(!) year (1+1+1) contract, I'd probably take it, too, if they land it. Because some govt drone still has "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" in their skull. That's my retirement ticket.
That is, if I trusted them enough to actually extend beyond the year and creepingly replace on-shore with off-shore and not tell the client. <checks up on government whistle-blowing procedures>
Well….
This is not ideal.
Company announces larger profits than does layoffs.
If they did the 3900 layoffs between Jan-April, I did not hear of it.
On the other hand, a week ago IBM laid off many US employees including IT, eng, QA, recruiters, etc.
Some of these were really good, and laid off anyway, so it didn’t have much to do with competency as the completely incompetent are still around.
The phrase “well in that other country, I can get two for one <salary>” has grown tired as the offshoring continues.
And it rarely works well long term. Beyond the economic effects it produces in the US.
And yes, the “exec” staff grows and continues to do little but make getting work done difficult.
I would think that someone or even two people would look at the larger picture.
As I am fond of saying, “In this environment, YOU would not be hired at IBM” since you are in the US.
Oh yeah, profit for the few over everyone else, I guess.
Gah.
Dafuq? 100 Kyndryl employees in Austin TX? Kyndryl cut me loose last June where I was the sole IT staffer working at a marketing client site in Austin. They gave me every impression that I was the only Kyndryl employee in the county other than my boss who lived closer to Houston and rarely came to Austin. "My Team" was about a dozen people based in various cities from coast to coast. We only interacted via Teams and Slack. When I joined the team, I met with and was briefly trained by a guy they flew in from St. Louis because they needed someone to catch up on work at this site so badly. He was nice. He quit a couple weeks later.
I won't go into how difficult it was to get up to date on company processes and knowledge transfer from the others who were always "too busy", or how insane their ticket transfer process was (I had very limited admin powers, but if a ticket originated from someone working at my office, 99% of whom were working from home (and often, out-of-state), they would punt it to me instead of the actual team who had power and visibility with the issue) but I got things inventoried, did a huge pc refresh, and helped provide technical support for a drag show of all things. Their remote-desktop sw, based on what had been called "Tivoli" didn't work from my work site's network (it worked from home, heh) so I couldn't do much if people didn't bring or ship their equipment to the office for me to see.
I had a couple week's advance notice of my demise since Service Now stopped giving me tickets, and all of my work came from "walk ups". The sudden appearance of a mystery "file backup" program in my task tray was also noted. I think they waited for me to finish my big inventory spreadsheet before pulling the trigger. 2 out of 10, would not work for them again.
As they were rolling out that backup software to up to 90,000 people and had performed a pilot beforehand, it has been discussed a bit in some of the internal chat forums.
There had been concern from some quarters that it would be used for user monitoring, as the supplier is listed as a cybersecurity firm.
Kyndryl has been "quietly" laying of employees all of 2024 -- So you help the Company get on it's feet, work towards profitability, achieve 90%+ utilization rate and they let you go soon as you roll off a project. Amazing. It was probably their plan all along, from what I heard typical of a 2 - 21/2 year old spinoff. Of course senior management is lauded with raises and bonus' while they turn peoples lives upside down for their own gain.
"If the roles get backfilled at all, they are backfilled with offshore resources".
That's the IBM I know and hate. Always came down to increasing the profit margin, regardless of quality of service. I am really glad I don't work for them anymore. The largest contributor of stress to my life was never the customer, it was always the way IBM treated their employees (or a certain subset of them).
IBM is in pre-collapse mode already.
facing over $200 billion in lawsuits for open blatant firing of people for the evil sins of "being black without warning" "becoming aged over 40" or "being Gay without a permission from senior management"
They're firing people left right and centre, and bolstering top-end exec "severage" packages so they can make out like kings as IBM finally goes under.
Which lets be honest they should have done in the mid 1940s once we realized they were building machines to help catalog the gold teeth taken from holocaust victims.
I remember a conversation had around 1985 with my then manager .
He held a torch for "efficiency" , claiming that one could ALWAYS achieve more with less . No exception .
I remember telling him that he must have been mightily happy to still have a job since he was so poor at it .
His reponse was a puzzled look .
I explained to him that , indeed , by his view , his job required him to fire 100% of his employees since ,
by his line of thinking , the logical conclusion was this :
** the maximum result is be obtained with the minimum number of employees , i.e. zero . **
I will add he was considered a "high-flyer" having NEVER past the mark of 12 months in the same job .
I can only surmise that the current higher management attended the same basic training ( read indoctrination ) as that poor soul .
We are not witnessing a very great deal of intelligence here .
So what happened, these "high-performers" suddenly starting drinking heavily ?
It's flagrant abuse of procedure when someone who is rated so much better than average can suddenly get negative reviews. Either your review process is shite, or it is worthless, and the company that uses it is worthless as well.
In any case, if ever I am in a position to discuss contracts (not likely) and IBM offers me a staffing contract, I'll be sure to pull out the string of articles on El Reg that concern IBM's firing issues and shove them in its face.
After all, IBM can't pretend it's sending me its high performers anymore, since they get severly degraded on a managerial whim.
What you have to know is this:
- IBM will low-ball the contract price in order to win it. It will be a loss-lead in many cases, because their intention WILL be to charge you for anything they think they can get away with at a later date.
- They WILL try and get you to buy IBM products, even if they are not suitable or, in some cases, relevant. And of course charge you for it.
- IF you are lucky to have access to true experts (and there aren't many left), they will usually be part time, and you can expect them to be moved off at a moment's notice. This is because the contract price will be based on the lowest resource price (which will be offshore and junior).
- You can specify you want onshore or nearshore resource, but it will cost you more. If your account goes into hypercare, then an expert may be temporarily assigned to your account until it comes out of hypercare. It's why they may disappear at a moment's notice - they will be bouncing between accounts in hypercare.
- Even offshore junior resource is shared, may be pulled onto other accounts, and will not have the level of expertise you think they have, are entitled to, and believe you have paid for.
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