We have over 10,000 people working here, about 2000 here in Lexington - we will cut about 5% of the global workforce - the cuts will be brutal, nobody will like this. The stock price may recover a bit but as long as our earnings keep dropping (and they will) we will have to cut work force. So, long story short, Rooke announced the cut, it'll be massive about 500 folks will get an ax this time around - that's 5% of the overall workforce. I expect us here in Lexington to be affected the most. I've heard some folks in marketing already are getting ready for cuts - so be ready, 2016 will be really bad but now 2015 is something that we should focus on.
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As a former Lexmark employee who got booted out almost 3 years ago during the inkjet product deletion, I would like to encourage everyone who are getting this round of layoff to hold your head held high. Yes it is scary and can be very bitter, but there is live after Lexmark. I was lucky that I found another job in Louisville just a week prior to my departure, so I actually had time for a week long family vacation before I started a new job. The commuting between Lexington and Louisville was long, but was very therapeutic after a long day of busy work. In all aspects, until I found this new job now in Lexington, the Louisville job was a better job than my 8 years life in Lexmark. I learned great new skill and a whole bunch of new people in a different business field. I wasn't grown in my career until I left Lexmark.
Don't be despaired! There is definitely life after Lexmark.
There will be a lot of offshoring of jobs, get ready for that. And if there really was a clear cut "cost" advantage of all this offshoring, it's hard to argue against it. But if you really are trying to develop new things, you try to position both of your teams to complement each other to promote a round-the-clock development. You set clear boundaries on who owns what, you you keep to your word on who owns what, so there's no mistake and overlap. I can't count how many times I was working on something, and the interest of "speeding up the deadline", management math proposed overseas team taking over, and rewrote part of my work...And then when I took it over when the timezone shifted, I had to spend so much time figuring out what was wrong what was new, and since it was completely new code, had to troubleshoot it, and ended up rewriting part of that. And if something wasn't working that I did, they would rewrite/redo what I did, and it went back and forth...I stopped sending my changes back, and just managed two development branch, stuff we did here and stuff they did, and then it was often, who finished first...Totally retarded. If we spent more time actually working 24 hrs as a real team instead of redoing everything what each other did, perhaps we could have, oh, I don't know, focus on our competitors more so than trying to compete against each other maybe? But how do you expect people here and abroad react? I mean, if management keeps saying, well for the cost of 1 engineer here, we can hire X engineers overseas, how do you think things will end up in terms of employee morale and conflict among others in the same company? And while a lot of people here end up redirecting their sort of threat at the actual offshore teams, it's not really their fault either. At the same time, the offshore workers probably don't understand why people here do feel threatened. People have no choice here that the cost of living is wacked versus abroad...And there will be a point in which, the same line of thinking, someone will come along and say "well for the price of 1 good person in bangalore, we can hire 20+ people from pakistan, or vietnam, or name your other country that the cost of living is considerably lower, wages, cheap" even though the actual persons skill might not really be the same. Then, when your faced with having no job, no money to put food on your table or keep your house, maybe those people can understand.... And on top of that, for every unemployed U.S. worker that is put onto the street over this apparent "cost advantage", that unemployed person ends up being a liability to the rest of us taxpayers, in terms of all the unemployment assistance the rest of us ends up having to pay in the form of taxes. So yeah, the companies get a financial benefit for getting rid of some U.S. employee here, because they don't have to deal with the aftermath of that unemployed person...The rest of us taxpayers at both the federal and state level ends up footing the bill for it and being accountable for it....So it's not just a shitty deal for the person getting RIFed...It's a shitty deal for the rest of the taxpayers here, because we end up having to pay for it, especially all of you on W2's. Companies are not alone in this, many companies do it. And usually, when they do, the most capable employees are the ones the first to leave, because this is bullshit, and they don't need to put up with this bullshit, because there are plenty of companies that already learned that those "cost advantages" aren't really as pronounced as people think .
Good luck to all.