Kyndryl follows in IBM's footsteps with rolling layoffs likely affecting thousands Kyndryl, the IT services biz spun out of IBM in late 2021, has been following in the footsteps of its parent by discreetly shedding hundreds of workers, largely in the US. The reason, we're told, is that the firm has not been winning new IT services contracts. In the wake of our report in mid-September about IBM's quiet …
The higher-ups will use alternative words and phrases to cover "unpleasant" situations and decisions. Whatever helps them sleep at night, I guess.
But it's a bit creepy to hear the people having it done to them using the exact same terminology.
You're being laid off. Let go. Made redundant.
Surely there's a point when it's OK to stop singing the company song?
In IBM that was stage 1.
Stage 2 was receiving a 5 on your annual review (because you're on the bench and not hitting utilisation targets)
Stage 3 was being put on a PIP because you got a low grade, the performance improvement being getting high utilisation
Stage 4 was being offered voluntary redundancy
Stage 5...
If you were good at your job you missed out stages 1-3 and then didn’t qualify for their (increasingly less generous) bribe to leave, but at least it wasn’t too hard to find another job and you left on your terms rather than theirs.
Not me, but a friend, was told he couldn’t leave when he submitted his resignation. The mentality seems to be that they own you!
Think of benching as a new name for purgatory.
As the article clearly says, while "benched" you are still employed, and have a certain time (a few weeks) to find a project where a significant # of your hours are billable. Failure to do so means Redundancy/firing/pink-slip.
So, benching is the start of the process, and also the name of the specific way Kyndryl is doing it.
Also, Kyndryl will probably offshore (to places like India and the Philiphines), but also nearshore to places like Mexico, costa rica and other places in LatAm.
> "You used to have to have highly skilled people to do things before the cloud," explained Brooks. "You don't need highly skilled people. You can manage your daily environment through a web browser."
"You used to be able to drive before FSD was invented", explained Elon. "You don't need to drive, FSD can manage your drivi*beepbeepscrEEEEEE*CRASHBANG... fire...
I think the OP meant "great" in the sense of achievements, and did not mean "great" in the sense of moral values.
Sometimes it scares me what techno-nerds dream up and implement, with zero thought or care about how what they're doing could be mal-used.
(Icon for an example of this.)
There were plenty of officers, great engineers, scientists, technicians in Germany between 1933 and 1945. They invented many things that we use to the current day, including the computer using binary signals and fully programmability. Most of them had no connection to the Nazi ideology.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Fellgiebel
In addition to modern computers, Fellgiebel also made large-scale carrier frequency telephony happen.
Too many folks have a false sense of loyalty to IBM and its offsprings. Their business models are low-value, which means they are easy to outsource to the Third World.
High-value business models entail consulting with the customer, writing requirements documents, designing, testing systems from that. And then continue that circle with enhancements...
The idea that this is no longer needed because of "cloud" is nonsense, too. Low level sysadmin work might be redundant now, but extremely advanced sysadmin work has been created inside AWS, Azure etc. IBM, HP too sleepy to get into the cloud business just displays how calcified their leaders are.
Why spend time with losers ?
"IBM, HP too sleepy to get into the cloud business just displays how calcified their leaders are"
I don't disagree with your post, but IBM is in the cloud business, it's just a niche player.
Pre-split HP also had their own cloud business offering a decade ago, Helios. Too little, too late.
I can remember Joel Birnbaum (then VP of R+D) writing about the future "utility computing", as soon as the cheap fiber based networks would enable fast+cheap access to servers in very remote data centers. HP was then a leader in CPUs, multiprocessor servers of several flavors but also some of the most advanced optical fiber engineering devices such as OTDRs, tunable laser sources etc. Birnbaum essentiall predicted the coming of what we now call Cloud Computing already in 1995 or so.
Guess what ? HP failed to execute on Mr Birnbaum's observations, and the upstart Amazon made the killing cloud business happen. Cloud ate lots of HP, IBM, Unisys, Fujitsu business and they resisted the model for a very long time, despite "consulting" their customers about the virtues of "change management".
So the moral of the story is - do not stick to these calcified behemoths. They are run by aging beancounters without any useful business and technology fantasy (unlike Amazon in this case).
Almost the same story can be told about Smart Phones. HP labs(corporate Research )also knew they were coming in 1995 already, but the MBA beancounters fired all the engineers who could make them happen for HP in the early 2000s.
In fact, for HP and IBM, the cloud eat their lunch in two ways.
Firstly their server divisions lost market share as companies moved from onperm Unix to the cloud.
But also because cloud computing is built on Linux, HP and IBM servers had no role in the cloud expansion so they were hit with a double whammy.
AIX/P-Series was (and still is) the leading Unix offering after HP lost its way with Itanium and Oracle purchased Sun and AIX/P-Serietis (like Z-series) still has a role for those mission critical apps that cant be moved to the cloud/linux but sales will be small and based on upgrade cycles and not organic growth.
Bluck
The demise of HP started with the arrival of Carly Fiorina that made off with the cash after destroying the HP way that made the company to build innovative stuff. After 1999 the people with useful business and technology fantasies were laid off.
Put an MBA as CEO of at techology and manufacturing company, see the stocks rise, and then see the company tank slowly.
Eh, Altavista was good at getting tons of results that you had to sift through, but Google had pagerank, that not only got the results, but ordered them semi-usefully. It was significant in that you didn't have to look through a dozen pages of results, hoping to see what you needed. Pepperidge Farms remembers. Edit: It still took me a while to switch.
The main Altavista indexing box had THIRTY TWO GIGABYTES OF RAM and that really impressed me at the time. Now I have that much in my semi-obsolete desktop.
This is what is known at IBM as a “bench pip” which is a prelude to a pip. IBM has had a bench and pips forever, but this is a very specific, and particularly cruel, hybrid creation of Armand and his goons that they launched in March or April of 2023, under a program called “US Proactive Productivity Management” — a practice that is now apparently being adopted at Kyndryl. It is not one or the other but a hybrid of the two and it’s important to understand the implications for you.
They fully expect well over 90% of you not to make it, Hunger Games style. It also goes on your record, damages your professional reputation, and future hireability, not to mention the psychological stress. By firing you for (a made up) cause (namely, the pipeline, whether you're in sales or not), it’s primarily a way to stiff you on severance and get around the WARN Act. People who are pipped don’t get the standard 3-month severance. In addition, you get the reputational damage. Technically, they don’t need to pay you any severance at all because you’re being fired for poor performance, but they typically give you 1 month to buy your silence so it doesn’t get reported. It honestly shouldn’t be legal but probably is, although barely so. Only because The Register covered this story has IBM started to comply with the WARN Act in California. It would probably take filing and winning a class action lawsuit for there to be any meaningful change, though.
If Kyndryl salesfolks cannot sell Kyndryl services, it has little to nothing to do with the skills of Kyndryl employees. Rather, leaders+sales folks are incompetent and/or the economy is not going well.
Polish your CV and venture out of the calcified corporation !
IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT. Never let them drag you down in their excusive talk !
Of course IBM/Kyndryl/$CalcifiedCorp want to make you feel bad, so that you can be terminated as easy as possible. They want you to think you are at fault. Basic business bullshitting. Never let that close to you !
I worked for Kyndryl in 2021-2022. I'm shocked they're still in business!
First of all, how do you market a company with a name like "Kyndryl"? Say it out loud. Bleh. Imagine the salespeople constantly having to explain it to their sales leads. Nobody had any idea what it meant, but you can google this precious POS:
[kyndryl.com/us/en/about-us] "Kyn" comes from "kin." It represents the strong bonds we form with customers and with each other. Our people are at the heart of our business. "-dryl" is coined from "tendril," evoking new growth and connections. By working together, we are growing." OMG.
Overall, it was a typical situation of a wildly dysfunctional employer. Red flags a-plenty. The Kyndryl technical documentation was wildly out of date and the employees siloed their knowledge. Slack was filled with people asking for help and getting no answers. My team members were cagey and irritable, and I had to "trick" them into giving me information. I had to wait weeks to get my laptop, and months to get access to ServiceNow, AD, a phone number assigned, etc. It seemed like Kyndryl didn't have an on-boarding checklist. They distributed my personal cell phone number far and wide.
I was working alone as the new "on-site" tech in an empty hi-rise office of about 500 seats. The client had planned to cancel WFH but employees weren't having it. A lot of them had moved out-of-state. The client was firing twice as many people as they were hiring. I had to process equipment returns, but they never let me know in advance. I'd get an angry email demanding why I hadn't prepped a PC for a new hire. Or, I would find a big box delivered to the lobby, addressed to the tech i'd replaced over a year previous. Several times a week, I would just suddenly find a sad-looking person standing at my office door, holding some items. I had to walk down to the street and take their access cards as they left the garage. I watched women cry. *sigh*
I gathered that the client gave up on ordering their staff back to office. Eventually, I got a call a Thursday afternoon telling me I was no longer needed. I gathered up all of my things, saluted the surveillance cameras, and biked home.
It's called KenDoll in our team, good looking, but is fake, manipulated easily and has no balls.
Horrible place to work except for remote working. They have very little care for staff outside the corporate office. You can talk to your PM in the morning then not be able to get a response from them, because they've suddenly been benched.
One of my favourite IBM memories is when the last remaining P-Series engineer at a particular site was benched "well subject of an RA" just before we had a major refresh of my customers estate. New P-Series turned up, I asked my boss who was going to build it he replied with the name of the Indian guy now supporting our P-Series, I explained he had better have long arms as by "build" I meant it is a collection of cardboard boxes piled up in the centre of the room.
I understand why this becomes necessary especially in current conditions but corporates tend to do this very bluntly losing good and useful people that either don't fit their scoring system or are in the wrong place. Sometimes it's the result of poor understanding of the market in the past. I recall bean counters putting the brakes on during covid with projects that would clearly become more valuable when people are working from home. But I'm sure there will more "shedding" looking into my crystal ball. We are on the brink of war and carrying massive debt. Something will blow soon. If a conventional world war breaks out I can't see global commerce continuing unabated and I bet sea bed cables get cut.
So much is wrong. Debt climbing exponential, war encouraged, increasing censorship, governments working against national interests, the media aligned with government. Gender or even species can be decided based on what day of the week it is!
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