IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
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Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#2Ooo, this sounds like a nice recipe for company collapse. You hate to see giants who advanced computing get taken over by MBAs who play that "cost center" and "revenue center" bullshit. I'm sure all their enterprise customers will be understanding of the unfixed bugs when the service agent explains how they made Watson 0.03% more effective at capturing pet names this fiscal year
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#3I think the notable thing here is; this is really a Redhat layoff since IBM "subsumed" or reverse merged or whatever it was with Redhat. My take is that IBM has been a barely warm carcass for > 20 years already and the Redhat deal did nothing to change that. Here I'm certain that the layoff will be onshore, and the continued hiring will be offshore. That's what they've been doing forever, and their lack of growth and innovation continue to reflect it.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#4I think the notable thing here is; this is really a Redhat layoff since IBM "subsumed" or reverse merged or whatever it was with Redhat. My take is that IBM has been a barely warm carcass for > 20 years already and the Redhat deal did nothing to change that. Here I'm certain that the layoff will be onshore, and the continued hiring will be offshore. That's what they've been doing forever, and their lack of growth and…
Red Hat has not done and is not very likely to do layoffs, and is one of the higher growth areas of IBM of which they speak.
We did better than most about not over-hiring in the first place.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#5> Chief Executive Arvind Krishna has been trying to pivot Big Blue from its traditional business of infrastructure and information technology services to the fast-growing cloud-computing market.
Skating to where the puck has been. While other companies are taking a look at how much they are spending on cloud. It's already a commodified market yet IBM sees itself as the one to grow into it.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#6> IBM’s current headcount is 260,000, Kavanaugh said. That is about 22,000 lower than the figure disclosed for December 2021.
4000 seems like a tiny number in context of total headcount, and when you take into account that they've somehow lost more than 5 times as many in the past year.
> The cuts will focus on workers remaining after spinoffs of the Kyndryl and Watson Health units
So the already dead parts of the company? It's almost like they're doing layoffs for the sake of appearances; they aren't really changing anything.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#7Ooo, this sounds like a nice recipe for company collapse. You hate to see giants who advanced computing get taken over by MBAs who play that "cost center" and "revenue center" bullshit. I'm sure all their enterprise customers will be understanding of the unfixed bugs when the service agent explains how they made Watson 0.03% more effective at capturing pet names this fiscal year
IBM has been a dead company since about late 80's/early 90's.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#8Not to be snarky or anything, but a legitimate question: what does IBM actually do? I used to work for a partnering engineering team at and met with dozens of enterprise clients (think Fortune 100) and I never heard anybody ever mention any IBM products. I am really intrigued to understand what keeps this company afloat. My main hypothesis is selling to government and acting more as a holding of acquired companies than anything else.
They have 260k employees, for what?
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#9Not to be snarky or anything, but a legitimate question: what does IBM actually do? I used to work for a partnering engineering team at and met with dozens of enterprise clients (think Fortune 100) and I never heard anybody ever mention any IBM products. I am really intrigued to understand what keeps this company afloat. My main hypothesis is selling to government and acting more as a holding of acquired companies th…
I'd say legacy mainframe use is a big ticket item. My Fortune 500 company still has IBM mainframes for some internal corporate functions, and I know military/gov still use said mainframes to manage legacy systems. Those contracts can be quite lucrative.
But yeah, they do seem to be running on inertia. I've never heard of anyone buying anything IBM for new work.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#10> IBM’s current headcount is 260,000, Kavanaugh said. That is about 22,000 lower than the figure disclosed for December 2021. 4000 seems like a tiny number in context of total headcount, and when you take into account that they've somehow lost more than 5 times as many in the past year. > The cuts will focus on workers remaining after spinoffs of the Kyndryl and Watson Health units So the already dead parts of the co…
> It's almost like they're doing layoffs for the sake of appearances
It's almost like you're noticing this because the media is playing up layoff reports in tech.
To quote... you - "4000 seems like a tiny number in context of total headcount, and when you take into account that they've somehow lost more than 5 times as many in the past year."
They've reduced staff by 5 times this amount over the last 24 months, but this is the reduction that you think is for the sake of appearances... I wonder if that's because this is the one getting media attention...?