I've Been Moved: IBMers in same division slapped with 2nd redundo scheme in 2 months IBM UK appears to have fired the starting gun on a 2.0 redundancy programme for the Infrastructure Services Delivery division – before the first one has even concluded. Employees were given around an hour’s notice yesterday to join a mandatory call hosted by Deathly Debbie Hallows, veep of ISD for the UK and Ireland in which …
Let's say someone near the top earns £1M/year. A good infrastructure person will earn say £100k, so we get to save 10 of those thousands for each exec. We're now left with 10 people who have no work since they are in a declining market, and no management to steer them towards something else. They will be redundant in a couple of months regardless...
You've obviously not worked for IBM. I can assure you, they don't pay techies that much. In addition, the sheer layers of management are insane. And if you read the article, you can see that the management have no idea at all - just swing the axe as fast as possible. No chance to even see the results of the axe swing. Does that sound like effective management?
Hint - that's not what a good management team does.
But sure, go on believing that those execs are worth those kind of salaries. BTW, you did know that Ginni has missed her target for 20 straight quarters in a row but still keeps picking up her bonus and massive fat pay packet? She definitely would not be missed (especially by a sniper).
"Please direct me to where a typical 'good infrastructure person' earns £100k!!!"
California, USA. Be seeing you. Although we don't pay in shillings, you'll have to settle for what passes for money in the US. What is the damn exchange rate anyway... £1 == $.84? Even in Queeny Quids, you can easily make £110k/year, or close to £95k if we are talking about a metric year. :P
" Please direct me to where a typical 'good infrastructure person' earns £100k!!! "
Finance. Hedge funds and investment banks will pay around that much. With 13 years infra experience I am on £95k base (not including bonus and benefits). Bonus ranges from 0% to 20% of total salary depending on how good a year we had (and personal performance).
One Unix greybeard with 35 years experience is on £150k+ base (not sure how much exactly).
Outside of that industry it is relatively slim pickings. Oil companies will offer you around 70k, while most everyone else seems to top out round 55-60k.
Places like Google/Amazon/Facebook also match the Finance industry in total compensation, if your skills are desirable to them (they had an issue of smart techies running to Finance, so had to up their offers to stop the brain drain).
@Lusty
How about we just fire all the workers, then manglement will be out of work or at the coalface.... that would be funny to see. With nobodies to manage what do the managers get to do??
Seriously, management steering? Right, into the tree no doubt...
yes, my coat... I'll Be Moving along now...
"Let's say someone near the top earns £1M/year. A good infrastructure person will earn say £100k, so we get to save 10 of those thousands for each exec. "
No. A good infrastructure person whose efforts are being put to good use (which kind of implies being managed effectively) is actually generating more income for the company than they are earning.
I feel bad for these people, and IBM definitely seem to have turned into asshats, but realistically infrastructure jobs are going across the board so this is expected. If they weren't expecting this then perhaps moving from IT isn't a bad thing. Cloud based services are so clearly the future and have been for some time, with most application owners at least investigating how to architect for platform services based systems. Anyone who didn't see this coming needs to read the news a bit more often!
Ever hear the adage that "The Cloud" is just someone else's computer? Yeah. This is IBM, when we run stuff "in the cloud", at best, that means Softlayer... which we own. If IBM is cutting infrastructure jobs, it's cutting our nose off to spite our face.
And Ginni fiddled while Rome burned...
"Cloud based services are so clearly the future"
And as the outages become more frequent their vendors will be able to say they were the future once upon a time. Anybody who can't see that coming needs to read the news and to have been around long enough to realise that IT is a fashion industry.
"Staff now jokingly refer to the company as I’ve Been Moved"
*Now*? Staff have called it that for a *long* time. Like, you know, decades.
In the early part of the 1980s, I lived in Endicott NY, home of IBM. The centre of the village (despite its substantial land area, it is incorporated as a "village") seemed to be composed entirely of IBM buildings, IBM staff car parks, and roads.
As a result, I got to hear *all* the dumb jokes about IBM, and "I've Been Moved" was one of them.
" IBM could reassign you to a new location, and would pay for all expenses."
They even had a business entity of some sort (I don't remember the precise relationship) that would buy the to-be-moved employee's house if the market was slow. You'd see houses in the realtor's listings that were noted as being sold by this entity - it meant they had been empty for some amount of time, among other things.
It could happen. IBM could take part ownership in Trump branded resort properties, and run them. Now, they hire 40,000 low-end service workers at sub-US$10/hr, and you have 40k new jobs! America is saved! Trump be praised! Get your golf clubs, or your broom, depending on how incorporated you are, of course. Would not want any of these 40k riff-raff mixing with the paying customers!
Unfortunately this is just an example of management who are brought in just to hack and slash, in a short sighted way to reduce costs. They walk away with huge bonuses, but it ends up costing the business more.
I worked for a global company (3rd largest in their sector). Whilst I was there it had grown, via mergers and acquisitions, from a UK business to a organisation with offices in over 120 countries, I worked for the Global IT team located in the UK head office and my responsibility was the global network and security.
The business brought in a new Global IT Directory with a view to reduce costs, but we had previous experience of him as a hatchet man.
Rather than look at how you could achieve long term savings, his only thought was to slash the group IT costs in 2 year, so he could walk away with a huge bonus. First thing he slashed was the group integration budget. I was left explaining to irate regional business heads that we now expected them to pay for connectivity to central systems, that they were being told by central management (including the Global IT director) that had to use.
Then the group services IT budget disappeared, so the proposed cost saving by doing global deals (100,000+ seats) for such capabilities such a OS, anti-malware, etc were removed, replaced by much more expensive 'local' agreements, which were initially charged to the local IT budget, but appeared on the global balance sheet as an 'global IT Cost'.
Surprise, surprise after the first year of budget cutting, the overall group IT costs had increased, the guy had no idea about the costs savings achieved through tighter integration and global purchasing agreements. At that point I decided to leave the business, because I could see where it was going. I stayed in touch and wasn't surprised to hear that the regional directors (whom I had had a fantastic working relationship with) had started to produce more local solutions and incurring even more expense, because they weren't getting the central support, so the hack and slash Global IT Director got an excel speadsheet of all the wages of all the UK and Group IT staff, drew a line through it of all those above a certain wage (both technical experts and senior IT management) and sacked them. Quite literally the guys who had helped build the business from a small office above a shop to a global international organisation, gone overnight.
Th UK HO was basically left paralysed, with anything more than the simplest IT operations requiring professional support being brought in. Guess how much that saved?? The company was taken over within 18 months.
The hatchet man is just the tool. The direction he is following was set by the Exec of the organisation and Finance.
Don't focus on who swings the blade - look at who is telling him to chop.
The top 1% are functional psychopaths, only interested in filling their pockets with millions and not giving a shit about the people they fuck over and wasteland they leave behind.
"Unfortunately this is just an example of management who are brought in just to hack and slash, in a short sighted way to reduce costs."
I was one of the people made redundant by STC in a frantic bid to cut costs and deal with their tanking share price. Six months later the analysts were complaining that STC had disposed of its R&D engineers and so was no longer competitive.
Did I complain? A lot at the time. But four years later I was engineering director at another company. Sometimes being given the sack quite unreasonably can be motivating.
IBM has always been referred to as "I've Been Moved", at least in the USA. For anyone with any hope of advancement (at least in the 1950s and 1960s), they needed to be prepared to move at the drop of a hat.
I had a former colleague who was asked to move; he replied that he needed to talk to his wife. Next thing that happened was that he was asked to leave, instead.
Over in Germany they say, "Immer besser manuell", roughly "always better by hand" (no comments there in the back row...). Seems Hacksaw Ginny has her hands on everyone's throats now...
Best wishes and condolences both for those leaving and those left. I expect the various shards of HP will follow in suit...
Wasn't that General Electric? (CEO Jack Welsh if google serves aright).
Regardless, it rather pre-supposes you have a means to measure employee "value", which most companies don't. They have lots of metrics on their employees of course, but few of them illustrate anything meaningful.
And as was pointed out above several times: it always hits the snag that if you pay somebody bonuses to fire people (be that directly or in short-term shares where short-term market "valuation" via the clueless share-price rules), then that is exactly what they will do.
You can keep firing the bottom ten percent every year, but at some point you probaby should look at yourself and wonder why your company is not only failing to grow and keep them employed but actually negatively growing shown by the fact you need to keep getting rid of people.
Plus if you keep doing that, don't you end up with a point where you end up sitting looking in the mirror giving yourself notice, since you are the only one left to fire?
"Perhaps more companies need to operate like this."
Uh huh. The annual PBC process is a farce. It's graded on a curve, with a fixed percentage failure rate, so effectively each year the bar is moved up, as people are culled. So if all the workforce perform well, and meet all their targets and SLAs, it doesn't matter, some will still be placed in grade 3 or grade 4, because a certain percentage _have_ to occupy those grades. Remember doing hurdles at school? Imagine your class were running, and jumping hurdles, and everyone cleared every hurdle, only to be told that despite not knocking any over, some of you didn't do it well enough and were getting a 'F'. Way to screw morale, no?
Also, the process is geared towards rewarding salesy bullshitters who love bigging themselves up. The PBC process involves writing up why you are so great, which sales types never tire of. But if you are a backroom tecchie, and fit the stereotype of not being that social, well, the PBC process is rather uncomfortable.
GruntyMcPugh,
Got it in one !!!
The people who spend 50% of their time telling everyone how 'Great' they are and 50% working are the ones who move up the greasy pole.
The people who do all the work and are too busy to 'sell' themselves to all and sundry are the ones who get sacked.
That is how the middle to upper management tend to be the same type of people, who are too busy 'pitching' their greatness to their bosses to really manage. They rely on the people who can just get on with the job but then complain that you are not selling yourself !!!
[Proof of the old adage that people tend to employ people like themselves, so they surround themselves by others that are 'Self obsessed and in constant Sell mode'.]
All I can say is well done IBM, they have done this 'Purge and Pray' on a regular cycle.
Many other US based companies do the same as it is seen as the 'Right way' to engender hard work and company loyalty yadda yadda yadda !!!
Every time they promise to learn from the mistake when it is realised they have dumped people they need.
Then do it again when the 'collective management memory' has confined the promises to the 'round filling container' ..... yet again !!!
I do wonder how IBM survives this cycle but they are still there year after year.
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