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IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

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Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#51

Post by skelet »

kchamplewski wrote: post #31
js8 wrote: post #14

Of course, the explanation is BS, everybody sees that. But I want to comment that as a young mainframer (I started 14 years ago at the age of 26, with a big IBM competitor), I really enjoyed working with older people. They work quite hard (they have survived lots of changes in the organization, and that - in majority of cases - means that their contribution was appreciated somewhere), often are less crazy (they are s…

I'm curious, how many real competitors are there to IBM in the mainframe space? From what I've seen the majority of the products in use are basically IBM only.

Fujitsu and Sun/Oracle

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#52

Post by fybe »

I did a 6 month internship in IBM 2 years ago and I'm glad I didn't get an offer at the end of it. The culture, the politics and the fear was too much for me.

Every week there would be some sort of a "commotion" or "going away" party as people were let go. It mostly DBA's and Unix Support guys that were clearly over 40 years old.

My manager was straight up implying "if you don't get the work done, you won't get a good reference for me and you'll be on the next list". I'm in my 20s and that was the first time someone in a professional setting threatened me in such manner.

I needed a reference after I left, but from my team the manager was let go, 3 out 5 team members were let go and the others and the remaining 2 left. The manager of the manager was forced to a sabbatical and just like that poof, my old team was gone.

I will never go back to IBM, no matter how cool and hip they make it for my generation.

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#53

Post by avar »

oblio wrote: post #44
avar wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main competitor isn't other mainframes, but PCs. A lot of mainframe users never needed a mainframe, they just didn't want to get fired for not buying IBM. Other users need some sort of mainframe reliability, but that's also achievable on a distributed system running on unreliable PCs. There are some users whose use is genuinely deeply entwined with features mainframes provide, but those are dying out.

> Other users need some sort of mainframe reliability, but that's also achievable on a distributed system running on unreliable PCs. I don't buy this. Many of our critical systems are on PC architectures. Mainframes don't have some magic sauce, well designed distributed architectures should offer enough reliability. Edit: reading comprehension fail, please ignore my comment :-)

Even with your edit this is worth replying to:

Why waste your money on a single rack-mounted PC when you can buy 40 cheap cellphones running Android and network them together. That'll probably provide greater reliability.

The obvious answer is the same as why some use mainframes over PCs. You can't easily convert all workloads running on a rack-mounted PC to a network of cellphones. Similarly, you can't easily convert all programs running on mainframes to running on PCs.

Which is what I was alluding to with the last paragraph in my upthread comment. There are mainframe use-cases that are genuinely entwined with those hardware platforms. A mainframe isn't just a fridge-sized PC.

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#54

Post by 2sk21 »

xvector wrote: post #15

When I went to the multi-day IBM recruiting event for new grads about 2 years ago, there were red flags ALL OVER the place. It was frankly ridiculous. Talking with some employees they were basically saying "don't work here" as plainly as they could while being watched over by IBM recruiters. You just knew you were walking into a failing company defined solely by bureaucracy and politics with employees that don't real…

I just left IBM recently myself. I was involved in a lot of recruiting work and I know exactly what you mean. I too found the whole process completely cringeworthy. Suitable for the FellowKids subreddit:-)

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#56

Post by ggm »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #40
Apocryphon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like something that IBM regularly does, similar to Cisco's revolving lay-off cycles. Microserfs by Douglas Coupland has a part where the protagonist's father is fired from IBM after being there for years.

Well, Microserfs was written in 1994, just after IBM's 1993 cataclysm where Lou Gerstner was hired to save the company and immediately fired 160,000 people. That was very much a one-off event.

A one off event because of scale. but part of a continuation of downsizing. So only one off in one sense not in others.

Cisco's one off downsizing has been threefold.

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#57

Post by 2sk21 »

MegaButts wrote: post #22

I was curious what IBM still makes that people use since they sold their Thinkpad division to Lenovo years ago, so I googled it: > IBM produces and sells computer hardware, middleware and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a major research organization, holding the record for most U.S. patents generated by a business (as of 2…

As an ex-IBMer with a few dozen patents, I can explain this. The company offer a big cash bonus for filing patents. But I do have to mention that it's not very easy to get an a patent idea through the internal review process. These patents are mostly for enabling horse trading with other big tech companies. For example, Google bought a big batch of patents from IBM when they got hit by the first wave of lawsuits about 9 years ago.

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#58

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

pas wrote: post #17
jve wrote: post #5

Firing talent because of age is not so smart I think. Of course I don't know who they fire, etc. But I'm young, yeah, and I want to distance myself from IBM products. Why? I'v been setting IBM Tivoli/Spectrum protect to backup client computers and, ugh, is it ugly, unfriendly and complex piece of software. I'v also touched the server part. Maybe it's just me, the windows guy (but who loves scripting) and it is more a…

The simple fact, that IBM stuff is never used by big sites (fb, spotify, google, etc..) despite their solutions being available for ages should lead anyone to the conclusion that they are salesware. QRadar is a glorified syslog server with a query interface (bought by IBM in 2011, formerly developed by Q1 Labs, est 2001), and ... again the fact that Splunk is available (started 2 years after Q1 Labs), that the ELK st…

> The simple fact, that IBM stuff is never used by big sites (fb, spotify, google, etc..) despite their solutions being available for ages should lead anyone to the conclusion that they are salesware.

They are used by big sites, governments are the biggest sites you can get.

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#60

Post by dang »

The submitted title was "IBM fired 100,000 employees to be more appealing to Millenials". Unless that was Bloomberg's original title and subsequently changed, this was a case of editorializing and making a title more baity, which breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We take away submission privileges from accounts who do that, so please don't do that.
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