I think this needs to be noted - we did hire like crazy recently, many people came in a very high compensation levels. Everyone overhired, IBM overhired, so this is unsustainable. This resulted in all large companies dealing with Data and AI having layoffs. Everyone overhired, everyone overpaid and they are trying to make things more leveled now.
That's my assessment, I am just a third year manager in Consulting but I am working quite a bith with our Data & AI group.
Just my observation. I’ve been around the block a few times and I’ve seen this before. I saw it in the 90s and again in the early oughts in the US economy. I think this layoff is driven more by external factors than internal ones. IBM is doing well. There’s no need for a mass across the board lay-off. When all the other companies are laying people off, investors expect IBM to the same. My guess is that the leadership fears not laying people off will hurt the stock price. It’s stupid really. Good people are hurting today so that a bunch of rich a--holes can get richer. Meanwhile ibm leadership will spend millions telling the world how “ethical” their company is. It’s just stupid.
IBM has been on hiring freeze or pseudo hiring freeze before the pandemic, at least on the software division, including Data and AI. I have not seen any wave of highly paid new faces, quite the contrary, lots of attritions. Perhaps the original poster works on another division (research? Consulting?), I can see the case of meta or Google, when they say they increased their staff a lot during the pandemic (many colleagues were hired by them), but ibm? Who has the last top shelf engineer that left, let’s say, Apple to join ibm? The current layoffs are not a case of overhiring.
Consulting always hires aggressively because their revenue is mostly based around billing for person-hours. If you want to make more money, you need more people.
Development is always trying to do more with less, shuffle people around to different sub-projects to put out fires, etc. I can't remember hearing anyone in development not complain about being understaffed in years.....like when you're on one of the 'hot strategic' products that the CEO loves to talk about and you can't even backfill people who leave.
I thought it was an over-hire issue as well, but then 2 interns-turned-employee who joined my team this year get to stay and take over my job while I got laid off after being here for 4 years. If there's a hiring freeze, how were they hired? (we're in software development). They let go of 4 junior/mid-level devs and kept the newly-hired. I just don't understand. And we are all in our 20s/30s so it's not an age thing. Just confusing.
IBM did not "over hire". There has been a freeze in many BUs for quite some time, with the expectation that attrition would thin the ranks. Boy, it sure did! We lost so many of the best and brightest.
Now IBM is laying off people that have been through so many rounds of this thinning. Arvind publicly promised to stop all of the rolling layoffs we've been living for decades. He lied through his teeth.