Management rule of thumb: For every % you cut from the bottom, you lose from the top. Cut 10% of workforce, and 10% of your best people say "yes" to the next headhunter trying to poach them.
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Nice of you to suggest this "10% rule", but what in the world is the basis for your statement. I don't think it's necessarily the case. I'm sure other factors besides the cuts go into determining whether your top performers plan on leaving after a layoff. If the top performers are being treated very well, I doubt they're leaving. And where are you going to leave to go to, and is "life" so much better over there. In my view, the comment is an irresponsible, overly simplistic statement.
10% is an easy overall number that masks the specific, or individual, individual surgical actions - I am quite sure there are several job roles (eg Client Executive in Sales, and associated exec chain) that have 50-90% reductions.. historically a complete department (eg Websphere support) could be moved to a different geo in order to reduce a local h/c to 0.
Is there still an A-Team in IBM at this stage ? I'm thinking poaching is done on the D-Team and E-Team.
"cut from the bottom" implies that you're assuming cuts are based on PERFORMANCE. Not true. I've seen _many_ of IBMers get RA'd over the years. It's clearly not based on performance. Your name ends up on a list that gets approved several levels of management above you. Your FLM is just the mouthpiece and messenger, and often has little to no say in who gets let go. I've even heard one round when a manager was given two names and had to pick one. Sometimes managers are simply TOLD, "these two", etc. The question is, HOW is that list assembled. You better believe the algorithm involves age. The rest is anybody's guess.
Now that IBM is basically 100% remote, they can RA all of the useless on-site only jobs.
You know, the 9-5 types that did nothing but hold meetings to discuss IBM fluff BS.
bye
Problem is "bottom 10%" is determined arbitrarily by manager liking you or not and those who work hard without politics or connections get cut.
2nd problem is ibm is stuck in continuous retraining of clg grads coz only those will accept the "minimum pay in tech".
It's actually more complex than that, when a big company wants to reduce workforce they will fire the bottom and offer retirement packages to their oldest employees which are above or near retirement age, sometime as much as a full year of salary.
The intuition is that older employees cost more and by cutting them you can reduce your payroll more significantly while doing what looks like smaller employee cuts from the outside. This is often viewed favourably by investors because on paper it doesn't seem as the company is stalling (head count is still high, costs are down). The obvious issue is that these older employees are not easily replaceable and you end up losing more velocity in the long run than originally anticipated.