IBM To Furlough Most Of Its U.S. Hardware Staff In Late August
forbes.com
forbes.com
The real story is that IBM has been moving to 100% offshore & H1B labor for a while, and this is just one more nail in the coffin. In a decade or so I'd be surprised if they have any US engineers outside of their research division.
But I'm sure that I just grossly oversimplified the problems that they are facing.
I find this hilariously ironic.
They are. IBM's mainframe business is quickly becoming a dinosaur, cloud or not.
The furlough is a way to prevent another round of layoffs. By furloughing a division, you can save X%. You cant have two rounds of layoffs within 3 months and not destroy existing projects.
As to experience, the mainframe guys have been doing "private cloud" on a small scale since the early 1970s, via VM/370 and its successors. Current versions can easily host dozens of VMs on a single hardware machine, running several guest OSes, including Linux.
Mainframes are a different animal -- that HQ is in NY. Supposedly they are making money.
I love writing software but some days I hate my profession. I'm seriously considering getting into a different career (where knowledge capital doesn't degrade as fast) and code for fun (as a hobby). The problem is I'm in my mid-30s. Starting over has a very high opportunity cost.
What kind of super-humans are they looking for?
These companies are looking for what you may consider a needle in the haystack; someone with an extremely narrow tech focus. You may think that this person doesn't exist and the company is crazy, but they actually aren't. They will eventually find someone who matches the job description to a T, even if they have to pay for that individual's relocation.
Bay Area companies also do not generally value engineers with business skills, communication, or even social skills. I used to think code monkey was just a fun description of an engineer. But, I've found in the Bay Area, companies really want what I would consider to be a very 1-dimensional employee.
In my college years I was told by a CS professor that if I didn't have experience with many programming languages and operating systems, then I had no business calling myself a computer scientist. Yet, at a recent meetup in SF for a specific programming language, the speaker asked for a show of hands for those individuals with experience in another, relatively popular language. Only about 1% of the room raised their hands. I was pretty shocked and wondered where those people would be, career-wise, in a few years.
Basically, he'll get laid off in the next 2-3 years, and he'll need to start at a lower scale and work his way up again with another semiconductor company, or do something else.
This is an issue in many technical fields, software too. An old friend's dad did his Phd thesis in vacuum tubes. If you can't stay current in your current job, you have to find a way on the side. Or do something else. But EEs are in MUCH better shape than liberal arts majors. Their major at least signals that they're smart, good at math, and can work hard.
You could say it, but I wouldn't believe it...
Did I miss something or is this a list of things on any viable business model. I would have liked to see them make "out of the box" moves, but alas, this is the IBM we all know and love.
As in, much of IBM's operations are still in the NYC area.
My perception is they give a lot of money back to shareholders while milking long standing businesses. I would think aggressive cost cutting is normal for them.
On June 12 I was laid off anyway, and while I was saddened to leave, part of me was relieved to be moving on. Based off my first-hand knowledge, I can attest that IBM is a huge company, and as such it's very easy to get lost in the day-to-day grind and have your skills as a Software Engineer stagnate. The company did not value employee creativity like I thought it would, and internally teams are constantly absorbed in office/management politics, to the point it ends up taking a negative toll on developer productivity. There were many occasions where I wanted to move fast and resolve customer issues or system bugs, but was slowed by the enormous overhead/red tape involved in making even a simple change.
So if I could give one piece of advice to CEO Ginni Rometty it would be this: Transform IBM into an organization that can move fast to benefit the customer. I believe many of the struggles IBM is currently facing stem from an organization structure that is slow and inefficient, part of which is due to low employee morale (it's a little hard to focus on your work when you're constantly fearing cuts/layoffs).
Fortunately for me I got back up on my feet pretty quickly, and landed a better paying job that values employee creativity. I still keep up with IBM news through the IBM Alliance, and feel for a number of IBM friends and former STG colleagues who are most likely affected by this furlough.
30% pay for 1 week of a 52 week year works out to 0.5% of your salary. It could be worse...
Mainframes are a growing business. They're failing with their Unix boxes, same as Oracle. They can't compete with Linux. The other area where they are failing is in sales of retail systems. E-commerce and iPads are killing their intelligent cash register.
I left IBM STG middle of last year. In the span of about 6 months, half of my former department either left IBM or transferred elsewhere in the company. In the latest rounds of layoffs, I was surprised at how many good people (but middle aged) in the larger organization were dumped, and how some bare some areas have gotten (100,000's of code falls on 1 or 2 people).
Of course, we were really, really awful at managing our HW capex, so that may be an extreme example, but even if 25% less HW is required across many industries that's a huge blow to revenues.