How considerate to not even give a timetable. I have a spring in my step every day going to work and expecting it to be the last. Workplace is also full of good vibes. My team is achieving all-time highs. Lovely times all around.
25 replies (most recent on top)
Don't count on it because nothing lasts forever, not even "those fellows from my native country". Pride goes before a fall, and it will happen to Alvind and his Pipmunks.
AK said: “Dinosaurs that I have replaced with the fellows from my native country will end up working at minimum wage jobs, if they are lucky”
The market is grossly overvalued (fake Wall Street valuation) and the main "product" is "stocks" or "shares", e.g. eating up people's pension funds and tying to them to the value of companies grossly overvalued. INTC/Intel anyone? It's not the first to fall down to Earth. The debt keeps soaring; that's where many salaries come from: DEBT, not value.
Let's set aside the noise about AK, India and IBM's employment policies for a moment. They are certainly important to the employees, but at this point they are arguably irrelevant to the OP.
What IS important is that after several decades of effort, IBM has been unable to grow or even maintain its enterprise to the point where it can retain large numbers of employees. At present, it is dominant in a shrinking market segment (enterprise hardware and legacy enterprise software). New development appears to have stagnated, and current efforts appear to be focused more on maintenance than improvements and new features.
The current growth in the world is in cloud services, a market that IBM was unable and/or unwilling to monetize. There is lots of talk about AI and QC, but that's all it is so far. In either case, IBM does not yet have a compelling, marketable offering. It is unclear whether or not they will ever have one.
So yeah...IBM is reducing its staff...an inevitable and predictable outcome given its situation.
Lest he forget, AK is a dinosaur too whose days are numbered.
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
Cost and AI technology are just a cover, the real purpose is only one, to drive up the stock price, and then cash out
IBM is the next Nortel
what an eye opener for a posting about Alvind and his future plans in the dirtiest business he involves himself in. If you have the time and inclination can you please elaborate which companies would be buying IBM when Alvind and his Pipmunks have bled it dry ? Will it be HCL (which hired inexperienced programmers in India to crash Boeing jets ? It was Boeing management greed that did this, not HCL's ) . Or will be TCS (Tata) ? or some other Indian company that Alvind has friends in ? I doubt any US company would buy IBM in it's current form, certainly not if they know all these interesting revelations about IBM's business and it's inner workings. The current IBM stock price is around $220 or thereabouts on the US stock market ....and some folks are enthusiastic about it getting to even $250 ! Only $30 to go, eh ? It's only business.
Since you mentioned it why does it make business sense to keep retired dinosaurs like Granger and Kelly III on the payroll ? They are history when they retire and should not be paid any retainers or fees except if they are working at IBM. No business keeps senior executives after they have left the business . The company can and on without them - why can't Alvind cut the cord to these executives ? The same also for Palmisano and Rometty who left years ago - once they have retired and left the building like Elvis, why do they need IBM offices ? How much revenue do these dinosaurs generate that they need to have offices dedicated to them at IBM ? Traditions go away and this is a total waste of money that Alvind needs to cut also. Apart from the fact that he is a psycho, he is also pennywise, pound foolish as they say. If he is so desperate for cash, he needs to cut these perks off for ex-executives. Same he does for IBM employees who he is axing.
After all, the show must go on. It's business after all and needs to be better managed than the psycho CEO Alvind is doing.
It’s about running a business and making/saving money; CEO works for Wall Street investors, stock performance and the board, and for trying to keep his high compensation package.
He is in here for himself and doesn’t care “if he has blood in his hands”; it’s just business.
He knows his days are counted at the helm too.
He is not going to have second thoughts for axing the employees who might have been at the company for decades. Hefty dividends payments to shareholders also put final pressure on to the management team. He must find ways to find money .
IBM is a sinking ship ( who knows how long before it gets acquired) that requires necessary drastic restructuring in an industry that is driven by speed of innovation; previous CEOs have kicked the can down the road by not making these changes in the past that created current crisis; in the rest of the industry, IBM isn’t alone outsourcing jobs to India but also to wherever it makes business sense.
In the rest of the industry, leading companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Broadcom etc.. don’t like to keep aging employees like IBM does.
To answer your ridiculous assertion, a US employee might cost 4 times as much as an Indian one but look at the work turnout and efficiency also. It has been pointed out several times in this column of IBM layoffs, that a single US engineer does the work of at least 6 engineers in India. Indian employees are grossly inefficient , especially when it comes down to the number of holidays they get and corresponding their work turnout. Being cheap does not result in quality work. If AI can be used to eliminate jobs, why do the eliminated jobs have to be transferred to India anyway ? That is a hypocritical way of working because if the job is eliminated the company saves money and should not be rehiring for the same role ? If you re-hire someone in India for an eliminated role, you are back to paying someone again and how is that a cost savings to IBM ? It's just plain hypocrisy and stupidity from the IBM Psycho CEO.
The offshoring of US jobs is not done by anyone on the IBM board but by Alvind alone. Don't try and justify the layoffs on the board and try to insinuate that Alvind is taking orders from them. He can walk away anytime he wants, no one is stopping this psycho CEO. And he is in an ejectable seat. But he has blood on his hands, and he will try to pin the blame on others to make it look like he is an innocent just following orders. That doesn't hold very well especially with his obscenely huge bonuses. Why couldn't the off-shored jobs go to Mexico or the Philippines ? They have cheap resources and comparable with India.
You need to get your facts straight and provide numbers too.
(1) months pay for every year worked? Are you sure? I got (1) weeks pay for every 6 months I worked, but that was back in 1992 with the ITO-2...
@1gdf+1uMoF9LG AK literally pledged to Modi to help the Indian economy. Has he done that with the head of state of any other nation? Anyone who has spent any time at IBM knows exactly what’s going on. Don’t gaslight people and tell them that Arvind doesn’t play favorites when it comes to nationality and ethnicity.
1psv Last time I looked Martin Schroeder (who isn’t Indian) off shored 90% of GTS when he was an IBM’er to India, then continued the practice when he became CEO of Kyndryl. I don’t think the nationality of any CEO makes them decide where to deploy labor, but rather the “cost” of that labor is the deciding factor.
If AK wasn’t Indian, he would never had been selected by the board to be CEO, because the board needed an Indian to move the jobs to India to save money.
Alvind has been selected by the board to cleanup that mess ; he is in here for himself so he doesn’t care about the US employees who are being axed; he cares about his job and his $$ compensation because he knows is in on an ejectable seat too. This is just business
Why doesn't Alvind forgo his huge and extravagant bonus for a change ?
I'm interested in hearing your reply or is it going to be the deafening silence from India HR Pipmunks ?
Considering all the costs of a US employee( salary, stock, bonus, medical insurance, social security, cost of renting office, etc..) , a US employee may cost at much as 4 employees from India or more. So from Wall Street investors and the board perspective, the math is easy, considering high cost of living, inflation.
Arvind reports to the board and gets paid many $$$ millions to execute these changes.
If he doesn’t make these changes, IBM will go bankrupt
Yes it's shocking, simply shocking how low IBM management culture has sunk under Alvind. But, he had the audacity to give himself a 20 million dollar bonus in 2023 for just warming the chair and providing low grade, ho-hum chit chat during his one way monthly Slack chats to IBMers while initiating layoffs and raising the IBM stock price in defiance to the naysayers.
Steps for the next layoff wave in the US - Alvind going to give 3 days (!) severance to everyone in the US being laid off in the future to avoid public complaints and whining like this, no matter how long US folks worked at IBM. He realizes that this is particularly painful for those non-Indian executives, STSMs and DEs who have been kissing azz for the past 40 years and making the big bucks. So he sends his advance condolences to you in your time of reflection and sorrow. You voted for Alvind when you asked the IBM board of geriatrics to put him into the CEO office, now you pay the price and suffer the consequences.
24 months severance and one month of severance for every year worked at IBM ? It's unheard of in these times of severe cutbacks coming from Alvind's friends in the White House. After all, everyone needs to tighten their belts, except Alvind of course. It's the economy, stoopid.
"Ever onward with the layoffs"
Yes, onward and downward with Alvind's pathetic managment culture @IBM
@mzu+1uMoF9LG "... produced by some half-wit on IBM India's HR team who cannot spell correctly, let alone write a completely correct English sentence."
THIS. This is one of my biggest pet peeves. The English language is a beautiful, living thing that reflects the diversity of the people who speak it, but let’s not kid ourselves, a corporation should meet a high bar for standardization in its communications, and there has been a noticeable degradation of the English lang in official IBM comms, from corporate communications to documentation. I remember the first time I received an official IBM communication that was straight up written in some kind of pidgin Indian English, that was borderline incomprehensible, and it was honestly shocking.
I’ve even witnessed, on more than one occasion, Dinesh correcting the pronunciation and denigrating the accents of native speakers of American English (in, frankly, s-xist and racist ways), while no one can understand HIM on a transatlantic call. I even heard them say that they are right to do so because they speak, “The Queen’s English.”
3 months pay?
My husband got (1) months pay for every year worked.
24 years
And they also axed your 401K
Sad.
Ever onward with the layoffs
Surely you can't be serious - it's an Employee Disengagement survey ! Those are the best kind since they are produced by some half-wit on IBM India's HR team who cannot spell correctly, let alone write a completely correct English sentence.
Nonetheless, they get the message across that it's time to pack your bags and go. (unless of course you are a DE, senior exec or even CEO who has been with the company for more than 40 years and needs another medal from the man Modi in India).
And, we're off to the IBM layoff races.....it's more fun that the Kentucky derby !
Feels like the right time for the annual Employee Engagement survey!
Same for the guy at the top: he or she) can be sacked at any time the board loses confidence in them.
But then again he was paid tens of millions a year and will no doubt have a generous exit payment, followed by a lucrative book deal accompanied by a speaking tour.
All for:
*presiding over the demise of a company that missed major industry trends,
*milking old products for cash,
*failing to invest in R&D and develop new products,
*buying companies at premium prices, only to sell them later at a loss,
*alienating clients with coercive practices (e.g. compliance) and high renewal costs,
*offshoring jobs to low paid employees in foreign countries,
- hiring useless senior executives and paying them obscene salaries,
*keeping the good news stories flowing to investors and The Street to boost the share price,
- et cetera, et cetera, et cetera
And you, the IBMer, get three months’ severance and an unaffordable COBRA plan, without a pay raise and the RA g-n to your head for trying to do your best in an increasingly difficult environment.