Hacker News Reader

Comment by pesenti | Hacker News Reader

IBM employee here. I have no idea if the cuts are true or not but keep in mind that Cringely has made dooms day predictions in the past that were widely innacurate, see for example: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070504_0020... or http://www.cringely.com/2012/04/18/not-your-fathers-ibm/

I am part of Watson and we have been hiring a lot (as well as providing great internships).

View on HN

It's amazing how if someone said blatantly false things over and over again about Google or Yahoo laying off employees then it would get flagged out of existence, yet somehow Cringely makes the same false "prediction" over and over again about IBM and people vote it right up. Check your source people, you are actively spreading disinformation by a known doomsday prophet, and like most doomsday prophets he has been wrong every time.

If other HNers Are anything like me, they perceive IBM as this massive, outdated company that's behind the times and only useful for supporting COBOL systems. This is obviously not true, but that's the perception. This makes people quick to upvote "news" that confirms the bias.

I think the problem is that IBM has transitioned itself largely into a services company computing with the likes of TCS, Wipro, Infosys and Cap Gemini, and for people like us, those companies add zero value in the tech space. Unfortunately, whatever they're doing with Z/OS and the Z13 platform, Watson, and who knows what else is so marginalized that no one really cares.

Services company maybe - but along the likes of TCS, Wipro, Infosys? Come on.

IBM's heavily into research - and has its fingers dipped into a lot of exciting areas. "A boy and his atom" come to mind.

That they're not customer facing is the issue.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. People are hoping that to be the case here, since IBM is largely perceived by HN to be a hopelessly outdated enterprise behemoth.

Unfortunately not very uncommon. I'm amazed how much trust people seem to give to business intelligence companies like IDC.

A good example is their predictions on mobile phone OS market share. According to them, windows mobile is poised to take the no2 spot from iOS in just two years. The problem is that they move those two years forward every six months when their latest report on actual market share and updated predictions are published.

Does IBM never do large firings?

In Rochester, MN, IBM has been doing several very large rounds of layoffs over the past 5 years. Nearly half the building is empty now and being rented to other companies.

Rochester was the AS/400 facility wasn't it? Or iSeries in latter years.

The article almost opens with a line about the previous biggest ever layoff in history of 60,000 people. In 1993. By IBM...

Clarification...

The original link went to http://www.itworld.com/article/2875112/ibm-is-about-to-get-h... - it got changed (for good reasons) to the origoinal Cringely page (which _doesn't_ have the comparison to IBM's 1993 layoffs)

Link has clickbait all over it. Hasn't hooked me yet.

But more seriously, have there been any other large, but not "biggest ever" firings since 1993? Anyone have a chart?

I dunno - 60,000 people? I can't think of anything of that magnitude (not that I keep on top of that kind of stuff...)

Watson is probably one of the most valuable projects that IBM is currently working on. Cutting people from the Watson team would be an extremely bad decision. I have no doubt that you guys are in good shape in that department. Also, all the publicity that IBM has been working on with Watson has been very wise and well executed.

If it happens, I wish they would publish the aggregate stats on the age of employees laid off versus the age of employees not laid off. I remember my dad was laid off from IBM after like 25 or 30 years of service, just before he got full retirement benefits. He's fine, not eating cat food or anything, but I'd really like to see those stats.

Layoffs are generally never easy.

When my friends project got cancelled as conexant, they gave everyone a list of the ages of everyone being let go, likely to avoid an age discrimination suit.

Even if they didn't make it public, one bets they look at age if to just avoid a reason for a lawsuit.

I was laid off once, and got a similar thing - a couple printed pages listing everybody's age and sex.

It's shitty, but I'm sure a company as big as IBM will make sure they're ass is covered.

I was laid off by IBM in 2013, I can confirm that they handed out exactly such a thing.

I would be very surprised if this report holds true. He writes he heard about it before Christmas. I simply can't believe such information didn't leak deliberately or unintentionally during the month since.

I do not work at IBM, but from the outside, it seems that the Watson team is doing very well - and working on extremely interesting problems. I wish you the best.

@pesenti, would love to get someone on the Watson team to come down to Miami to give a talk at my group RefreshMiami. email me brian @ refreshmiami .com if you're interested.

I had heard that Watson had a hiring freeze over the summer. It sounded strange given such a high profile bet on the cloud.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com