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Comment by trifurcate | Hacker News Reader

> If they came out and said "We are pausing hiring..." the markets would rightly be like "Man they are screwed..."

This hasn't been the case with the ongoing tech layoffs though? Investors for the most part congratulate these companies for diligently cutting costs in preparation of a recession.

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That is the case for companies that overhired during the bull market. IBM, on the other hand, has been losing employee counts steadily for over a decade.

If a company that people are expecting to be losing relevance does a layoff, it’s still not a good sign.

I don't even properly know what IBM is now that they spun a bunch of things off.

I guess they tossed all the services/consulting into Kyndryl and everything else got to stay blue.

They spun off only Global Technology Services, which was only IT infrastructure consulting.

Most of the business consulting, including outsourcing software engineering, is still with IBM.

So they're a consulting company now?

I know they got rid of OS's and laptops a while back; I assume they don't make or service mainframes/minicomputers anymore. Do they do any software/hardware development, or is it all consulting?

I think they still have mainframes, but that's a few years ago that I'm remembering.

They ditched consumer electronics years ago; margins are razor thin and it's all made in China so just let em handle it.

Still plenty of hardware and software stuff done via IBM with POWER systems, AIX, etc. They were an early investor in Red Hat and now own it entirely.

Through their various acquisitions over the years they are basically now a "Big 4" consulting Co with a name we typically don't associate with that industry

IBM has acquired Red Hat, UStream, Alchemy, Cloudant, SoftLayer, Vivisimo, Blekko, and a lot of other companies. They have, in fact, almost everything needed to build anything the FAANG companies are building.

The missing pieces (in my subjective opinion) are: (1) happy AND talented employees and (2) a rapid execution culture.

You mean they acquired a bunch of infrastructure stuff, but no consumer products (unless you count failed blekko). That's not a fair match for anything that FAANG companies are building.

They do have consumer products too, but by and large, yes. And a lot of consulting-oriented stuff too.

I was making the point that they have a solid platform available to build almost anything the FAANG companies have. Of course, they will have to build them. For that, they need to hire great engineers and they need to retain and keep them happy.

(Quick note: Traction is a whole different ballgame, but there are companies who gained initial traction through the customers of their business clients. In IBM's case, that is almost every major government agency and Fortune 500 businesses.)

In my neck of the woods they're still known as a massive overhirer.

I have a few contacts with them and mostly they just rested and (not) vested.

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