Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 117 posts

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#61

Post by mullingitover »

danrocks wrote: post #8

Not 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…

IBM files more patents than any other company, year in and year out, and has done so since before we were born.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#62

Post by tinktank »

yazzku wrote: post #34
chr15p wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Oct-Dec 2022 (according to https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-4Q22-Earnings-Chart... ) Mainframes: $4.5 billion Consulting: $4.8 billion (even after selling off Kyndral) Software: $7.3 billion Software includes all of Red Hat, a pretty big security business, and "transaction processing" which isn't explained but I guess is running payroll and the like for other companies. So lots of un-sexy stuff that never…

A piece of my soul died just trying to imagine the depths of boredom this would take you.

There is some serious engineering in what they do -- CPU and memory architecture, OS design and implementation, high speed networking, homomorphic encryption are all areas I've collabed with IBM. I assure you, the average engineer quality at IBM I've worked with has been incredibly high and the people themselves very _very_ creative.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#63

Post by imroot »

rhacker wrote: post #28
chr15p wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Oct-Dec 2022 (according to https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-4Q22-Earnings-Chart... ) Mainframes: $4.5 billion Consulting: $4.8 billion (even after selling off Kyndral) Software: $7.3 billion Software includes all of Red Hat, a pretty big security business, and "transaction processing" which isn't explained but I guess is running payroll and the like for other companies. So lots of un-sexy stuff that never…

pretty much anything you purchase at a store goes through ibm

IBM sold their retail technology division to Toshiba a few years ago.

Most of their cash register controllers can run on x86, so, it's not dependent on their hardware for the backend.

Their cash registers can run the 4690 OS or Windows/Linux/whatever, but, most choose to run the 4690 Operating System due to its security features.

I worked at IBM in their retail marketing side in the early 2000's, so, it's possible that everything I've typed here is 20+ years out of date.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#64

Post by AnotherGoodName »

danrocks wrote: post #8

Not 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…

Typically when a government department with no IT needs something they go to IBM.

Of course IBM then have massive cost overruns they charge to the government and they repeatedly bungle it all in embarrassing ways. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-...

I think governments haven't yet caught on to the new age mantra

"Everyone gets fired for buying IBM"

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#65

Post by sgt »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #43
rhacker wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty much anything you purchase at a store goes through ibm

Banks love IBM mainframes/midranges. They might not be blistering fast, but they're a joy to work with if you have the budget.

Joy to work with... for whom?

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#66

Post by YetAnotherNick »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #43
rhacker wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty much anything you purchase at a store goes through ibm

Banks love IBM mainframes/midranges. They might not be blistering fast, but they're a joy to work with if you have the budget.

Can you expand on why they are joy to work with?

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#67

Post by dusanh »

FireBeyond wrote: post #16
alewi481 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fairly popular at the company I work for and they've been an IBM acquisition since 2019.

And they (we, I should say, I work at Red Hat, but not in RHEL) as a company improved profits 10% after adjustment for inflation.

How is Red Hat doing with all they layoffs around anyway? I'd imagine they would be fairly resilient.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#68

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #66
ASalazarMX wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks love IBM mainframes/midranges. They might not be blistering fast, but they're a joy to work with if you have the budget.

Can you expand on why they are joy to work with?

You don’t need to wrestle AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Spark, Aurora, etc… to run a batch job. The kinds of tasks that take integrating multiple different providers and software packages to do in cloud architecture are OS-level features on mainframe. It’s less flexible and more expensive, but an order less accidental complexity.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#69

Post by thrownawaydad »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #53
yazzku wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A piece of my soul died just trying to imagine the depths of boredom this would take you.

One of the best places I ever worked. Really good engineers, and a really calm workplace where you are given the time and space to do good work. No dysfunctional 2 week sprints or hours of "agile ceremony" madness, etc. Of course this was 20 years go, and maybe it depended on the team you were on. I don't know if it is the same now. The only time I had a problem there is when my manager came in and said I had to take…

Worked there in the 90s. Probably the most professional engineering environment I've ever seen. And compared to what you might expect of the time and place, quite egalitarian. My boss and half the team were women, and there were several people from unusual backgrounds that would be considered economically disadvantaged these days. Everyone had an office. No politics. Just GSD.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#70

Post by time_to_smile »

horsawlarway wrote: post #10
jstx1 wrote: post #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 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 t…

This is a weird take. Are you arguing that we aren't seeing an abnormally high number of layoffs in tech? That this is just "media sensationalism"?

Nearly all the layoff reports I've come across I hear about before they're in the mainstream media. Additionally I predicted months ago that we'd be seeing massive layoffs in tech, before the media was talking about it at all.

These layoffs are real, are atypical for what we've seen the past decade, and are impacting a large number of real devs.

Honestly I haven't even seen the media talking about it until the last few weeks. When I talked about impending tech layoffs back in Oct-Nov nobody outside of the tech community had any idea that there were any issues facing tech.

I hardly see how layoffs are being "played up" rather than just being reported.

Post reply on HN