Thread regarding IBM layoffs

I mean, getting rid of the people legitimately coasting with zero attempt to keep their skills relevant is at least understandable from a business perspective. Doubly so if they're doing the bare minimum to get their paycheck, or even worse literally doing nothing all day every day while just pretending to be busy. This goes for people of all ages in all roles.

There are two overall problems though:

1. Plenty of people who are actually high performers still get cut. I don't doubt that a not-insignificant amount of the people cut fall into the description above. But keep in mind that with all the RAs over the past several years, many of those coasters are already gone. So I really think that the amount of legitimately high performers getting cut is much higher than you're implying.

2. Even with the assumption that the vast majority of RA victims are coasters, the fact remains that IBM treats their employees poorly. What that means is that the high performers who aren't coasters are likely to get fed up with the poor treatment and jump to somewhere that at least shows their employees a modicum of respect. And as high performers, they can do that fairly easily if they're so inclined. This is especially true of younger people (the very people in their target age bracket) who have any shred of talent in their field. The fact that people see their peers get cut and then fear for their own jobs further contributes to this.

While I see your overall point and agree to some extent, the fact of the matter is that the current course of the company is heading to the point of no return. This is assuming it's not already there.

Anecdotal irrelevance aside, I sold $40mm worth of WebSphere Voice Response the year I was terminated, at 53. I was at the very top of the band 10 scale, and for good reason.

I think there's only a small cultural bias towards youth and a lot of the age discrimination is an exaggeration. Lots of laid off people I've worked with who had 35+ years under their belt can be entitled and are often cruising by. They're the same ones posting on forums about how they were kicking a-- then unfairly targetted out of the blue. No matter how much you know about obscure systems, if you cruise too long you end up at the back of the line for the lifeboat.

That recent youtube video summarizing propublica said that 60% of layoffs were of employees 40 or over. Think about those two values relative to the length of an IT or engineering career and how little they actually fit the narrative and that's the pivot point they actually went with!

I'm also under 30 and on a mainframe product. One of my coworkers a few years from retirement put it well a couple months ago: It takes a minimum of 5 years to be fully comfortable working with the mainframe, and even more time to be comfortable with certain specific components. If you hire 20 college grads right now and give them proper training on the job, if you're lucky then 2 will still be there at the 5 year mark. In the meantime, in those 5 years you likely have a minimum of 10-15 senior people either jumping or retiring on their own. And then you have the people who get RAd or PIPed. And then consider the fact that we pretty much never get anywhere close to 20 new people in a given year. Even when we do, keep in mind that if they're sufficiently talented then there's a good chance that all the people from that batch will be gone by year 3, let alone year 5.

It's a ----ty combination of age discrimination, constant hiring freezes, and just treating people like --- to begin with. They're cutting the people necessary to train the needed pipeline, not bringing in enough new people to train, and chasing good people of all ages away by not showing them any respect. Yes, they've absolutely been shooting themselves in the foot and I don't think there's much of a chance of recovery at this point!

Much of the mainframe team & the talent that drove IBM revenue is GONE. I agree with you, those folks were irreplaceable. The mainframe marketers, developers and product managers left in droves last year, never to return. People just don't like being treated like rubbish especially by people with zero talent and skills. Sadly, those are the ones that will stay at IBM because they don't have the skills to move on.

IBM has literally shot themselves in the foot and its going to be a long slow death.

Given the data in the ProPublica article, and the structure of IBM benefits (US at least) can we make a case for hostile workplace for older employees? “Old Heads” have their severance based on years of service eliminated.

26 year old employee with 2 years of service receives same RA consideration as older employees with decades of service?

Under 40s “Millenials” get a lot of perks. 20 weeks of parental leave (while some are over 40, vast majority are under).

My prior manager made numerous comments about how much our GM (direct report to Ginni) likes Millenials, etc. Never anything positive about older workers. Seems like all new HR policies harm those over 40 while benefiting younger workers.

You're right, this isn't taught in college. The truth is that it was NEVER taught in college. You learn in the job, and it takes a long time. Some products or components take years to learn. To become a z/OS system programmer takes several years. Many of my mainframe colleagues spent their entire careers in the same organization. Ginni should remember this from her early engineering days.