Posts by TheOneTrueBobster

IBM is trying to throttle my age-discrimination lawsuit – axed ace cloud salesman

I gave Big Blue a single digit salute when they started making it clear that pitching up in a noisy open plan office was way more important than actually serving their customers. If the 'co-location' policy was aimed at getting older employees to leave then in my case it worked. But I could care less - I got the hell out and have since doubled my salary, work mostly at home and every new signing we get is a permanently lost customer for IBM. I sleep well.

Missed opportunity bingo: IBM's wasted years and the $92bn cash splurge

Re: Don't blame Ginny

When you see a "business strategy" that targets $20 earnings per share you just know that such "management" as there is practices financial smoke and mirrors and no-one is even trying to actually run the business. A cynic might suspect that Palmisano picked this arbitrary (and rather high) number not to benefit the business in any way but because it would make him even richer when he retired/cashed-out (which it did).

Sure, Rometty finally abandoned Roadmap 2015 - in 2015 when it was totally bleeding obvious the game was up. But the senior "management" is still addicted to financial manipulation with unfortunate consequences for the business, it's employees, customers and ultimately shareholders.

Maintaining profits levels and a target EPS is not rocket science - as your earnings decline you reduce your costs (employees) accordingly and also reduce the number of shares (buy backs). But plot a timeline for this "strategy" on a graph and the slope inexorably heads downwards.

I was with IBM for 15 years and it was great to work with colleagues who were by and large intelligent, diligent and committed to customers. But I grew weary of miserly or non-existent pay rises and the ever present threat of capricious "resource actions" decided by some spread-sheet psycho. All the while seeing executive salaries and bonuses grow ever more lavish.