Thread regarding IBM layoffs

Red Hat people believe they bought IBM, not the other way around. What IBM lets them get away with is stunning. Many IBMers wonder when we will all be "red washed".

@5viy wow so I am not the only one who has had the unpleasant experience of working with Red Hat “solution architects.” They have embarrassed me in front of my clients so many times with their arrogance and dismissive behavior. Try to cooperate with them even behind closed doors and they refuse to help us, instead they just try to use us for client face time during which they come across so unprofessional. I refuse to recommend any Red Hat solutions to my clients after how many times they have been unpleasant to deal with. But you try to raise that internally to IBM and you are told that it is you who is the problem. Go figure.

@5viy I saw a quote from the CEO of VMWare (sure, biased source) the other day that 80% of Red Hat's revenue comes from RHEL, almost all of the remaining 20% is from JBoss and OpenStack, and that OpenShift barely registers a blip. If that's true then it's no surprise sales aren't happening with the OpenShift everywhere strategy regardless of any bad-mouthing taking place.

@5kqi+ Glad to see my team isn't the only one dealing with this. Myself and my NA team have all had situations where we're hearing about the Red Hat people talking with the customers, claiming "we're completely separate from IBM, we have nothing to do with them, we are a completely independent company from them, we're nothing like them". Do you (referring to anyone) realize how hard it is to get a sale through when your "asset" that you're trying to use to help the customer is trash talking you and distancing itself from you in every way? In the end, many of the sales don't happen and not only IBM but Red Hat feels the effects of the no sale. It's insane to imagine that we paid over 30bn only to have something block you, all while cutting off their own nose to spite their face.

They spent $34 billion on red hat who does its best to distance itself from IBM at all client facing meetings I’ve had with apologetic and dismissive comments. IBM could have gone for the enterprise cloud workloads but bet on soft layer and failed, has now bought a company that is dead by association and is based on open source, has gutted the organisation of anyone technical that earned some kind of respect with the client and claws desperately to the mainframe to generate revenue and their sales people are from a bygone era with little to no understanding of cloud native.

Hope they reap what they sow, I’m sure that all the people they retrench will remember their treatment at the hands of IBM and pay them back in spades when IBM comes knocking for their business in future

Unless IBM decides to change course, and exit some businesses and redundant service offerings that GTS currently serves, nothing will change. To date RA’s have been nothing more than a cost vs revenue decline model with no targeting of what GTS wants to Strategically be. As such, you have seen the results of one RA after the next. Running in place trying to service the same amount of work with less heads. Guess what, every other services competitor knows that play and can execute it just as well. Until GTS decides to focus their RA actions on making GTS more efficient (eliminate redundant service offerings, exit low margin non-strategic businesses, eliminate management overhead, focus on strategic offerings that bring customers value for money), we all know the end result. More of the same. (Declining revenue chasing a declining headcount, chasing a decline revenue, chasing a declining headcount, etc etc etc). GTS needs to decide what it wants to be strategically, and relentlessly pursue it. GTS also needs to decide what it doesn’t want to be, and ruthlessly dump it. That’s the only way this changes for the better. Given IBM’s inherent 30% premium to the other competitors in the services business, this restructuring can’t happen soon enough, BUT it has to be focused on what GTS needs to be vs “GTS being all things to all customers”. AK you know this has to be done. Get on with it. Time is not your friend

In Canada, the volunteering retirement option was given to us for the last 2 years.
The packages were based on an employee grade, but years of services were NOT a factor.
So someone who was employed for only 2 years with the same grade was given the same offer as someone
who was working for 33 years. I do not think it is right.
I am ready to take a voluntary retirement option but I would like to see IBM's appreciation of my long service.

Why would anyone ‘volunteer’ when there’s no difference to the so called deal which is just government / legal minimum anyway?
IBM have been screwing every last drop from the ‘assets’ (people) for years so now rely on people leaving by hoping they can’t stand the stress anymore. They have no moral scruples whatsoever.
Can’t get any lower than that!
As others have said, life is much better on the outside from a life-work balance if you are lucky enough to get a job in current climate.

2ykt. Can you let us know what divisions were hit (services, servers, or cognitive) and the details of the RA if available

It’s started in Australia, RA’s started being dished out today

They didn’t get enough volunteers because there isn’t anybody left in the US and Europe except executives!

UK and parts of Europe are just too costly and bloated. IBM has enough bloat, they cant add more.

IBM is doomed...

There must be something in the water at Armonk. Who in their right mind would voluntarily leave for another job during this pandemic? Especially since many tech organizations have put a hold on hiring at this time. Aside from the fact that many of these current IBMers should have left long ago; this company is slowly restructuring itself to be smaller and more profitable (we'll see). That means people in low margin areas (like services) have a target on their head. A target that existed well before the pandemic. I'm a former IBMer and I can tell you work, work-life balance is far superior on the outside. I hope for those about to be released that you find meaningful work soon. You all deserve better.

I think it was earlier. About 1994 when an outsider CEO came in who did not understand mainframe business model and merely saw a chance for a big one of bonus. management droid bonuses seem to be the motivating force for very short term decision making. To regenerate industries bonuses should be sc-apped. One should not need institutional bribery to do the job one is paid for.

for what it is worth Cringely has done many articles on IBMs slow death

The root cause of this issue started for IBM some years ago.. back in 2010-2012
In this period senior executive level decisions were made to invest IBM’s profits in share repurchases (also driving Executive bonuses) and the infamous 2015 EPS (Earnings Per Share) Roadmap. This has subsequently been shown to be in stark contrast with Amazon, Microsoft and Google (GCP) who were investing hard in Public Cloud capabilities and capacity. IBM should and could have been a leader in Hybrid Cloud capabilities (linking together public and private cloud abilities and needs) but decided not to prioritise the required people, process, automation and DC capacity investments .. the rest is now history and like watching a car crash in slow motion over and over again, best ask where Is SJP now, retired to the Hamptons maybe ?