Hands up if you want to volunteer for layoffs, IBM tells staff IBM is asking staff who want to take voluntary redundancy to raise their hand as it embarks on a new round of global job cuts, though roles in Europe and within a handful of departments are expected to shoulder the brunt. The Resource Action, as Big Blue likes to euphemistically refer to layoffs, shouldn't be a massive …
A close contact at IBM UK has had more than half of their Indian based team laid off. Needless to say times have blown out, and they think that some stuff will not be delivered. Maybe India is looking expensive? I might have stuffed up the currency conversion, but it looks as though a senior IBM engineer in India is paid roughly twice that of a similar position in Thailand...
When I took my package over a decade ago it was 15% reduction per year by geography, division and band.
When I joined a quarter of a century ago IBM was changing but it was still a company that developed technology, now it's just another Oracle, harvesting licenses.
Technically it is only specific roles rather than the function or the role-holder that becomes redundant, but there's nothing stopping the employer from allowing people to trade places. In my (considerable) UK experience of working through such downsizings, most large employers offer generous terms, and there's often more people wanting to take the money and run than they wish to get rid of. Whether that's the case in Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria I can't say, do we have any readers who can ?
There's a certain irony to all this, because these near-shore locations were chosen as a great place to transfer West European roles to. These near shore countries were also used by IBM consultants as role models for low cost support functions on account of the wage arbitrage. I was paid a very decent sum to leave when my employers set up a captive service centre in Rumania.
Either IBM have lost customers so need less staff there, or alternatively local wages have risen so the IBM are moving the roles to somewhere cheaper still, like Syria, Gaza or Yemen.
Stick a fork in IBM; they're done. They've tried to cripple everyone who made the mistake of depending on their "open source" platform, they've butchered Linux with that boot-management abortion of theirs, they've culled virtually all of their experienced staff across the board except the management dweebs, and the cuts continue.
Why anyone would still invest their hard earned dollars in IBM stock is beyond me.
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"Why anyone would still invest their hard earned dollars in IBM stock is beyond me."
Because it continues to grow in value , plus chances of higher dividends in future thanks to a scheme to increase profits.
Just dont be holding onto those shares when IBM's bubble pops... and judging by the way they're happy to throw away knowledge, that could be sooner rather than later......
>Why anyone would still invest their hard earned dollars in IBM stock is beyond me.
Individual investors are on the whole not at all interesting. They're after big funds, usually funds investing pension contributions. These not only represent huge amounts of hard money but also work purely by the numbers (so if IBM could do away with physical product and just make numbers then that's be fantastic). (My theory of business is that "All corporations tend towards the IRS (HMRC -- UK) business model. All collections, no product.....")
That's one thing that never makes sense to me (except from a company looting perspective)
Stock buybacks should only be allowed if management compensation is *not* tied to the performance of the stock, neither directly nor by explicit bonus metrics.
Otherwise you create an absolutely massive moral hazard. For a long term investor, it seems to me that any benefits pale in comparison to the hollowing out that clearly results over time because of this.
... four things to be long-term viable: a healthy tech R&D department, solid products (or services, but that's a shakier foundation) they can effectively sell, the ability to translate what R&D comes up with into products they can effectively sell, and the luck to create-and-keep a good board of directors. "Good" in this case meaning, "is looking beyond quarterly numbers, and refuses to take actions to prop up those numbers at the expense of the company's well-being."
"circa 50 percent of IBM’s reduction goal will impact staffing levels across the European continent" looks like corporate PR's way of saying "about half the layoffs will occur in Europe."
And when IBM says "corporate rebalancing", I imagine employees walking blanks to port and starboard both.
Not wishing to be disingenuous to anyone at IBM - I have worked with quite a few of you - but if the offer on the table is right, take it.
I'm far more interested in the abilities of the individuals than the parent corporation they happen to have an employment contract with. I would also be inclined to suggest that an offer now is probably better than an offer later, when the company gets into further trouble?
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