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Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

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Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#11

Post by pacaro »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #7
wtbob wrote: post #5

> It’s a blow to Dubuque and Columbia, cities that spent a combined $84 million on tax breaks and other incentives to lure Big Blue in the hopes of attracting other technology firms and incubating a startup scene. Anyone who would pursue IBM in hopes of 'incubating a startup scene' is, not to put too fine a point on it, grossly incompetent. > Instead, Ross found herself toiling on what she described as a new-age asse…

> Anyone who would pursue IBM in hopes of 'incubating a startup scene' is, not to put too fine a point on it, grossly incompetent. Indeed -- and just one of the most painfully obvious illustrations of why the "high taxes with favored big companies getting tax breaks" strategy is a lot less fair and efficient than the "medium-low taxes for everybody" strategy. (Of course, the latter doesn't give the politicians any ch…

The city should just embrace sunk costs, I mean, double down, and invest in helping the laid off workers create a startup scene. That at least has a hope in hell of achieving something

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#12

Post by darkarmani »

I can't believe no one mentioned this gem:

"Grassley, a Republican, wrote to Rometty on April 16 to express concern about “reports of mass layoffs” even as IBM requested H-1B work visas to allow 5,800 foreign employees to be authorized to work for the company in the U.S."

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#13

Post by Killswitch »

I live in Dubuque Iowa, and I'll say this, everyone knew IBM was only coming for a short period of time. This was expected from everyone here.

Dubuque has a long history of trying to lure people here, and it's horrible. First it was luring blacks from Chicago with free housing and prepaid credit cards to up the minority count so the city could qualify for grants. Then it was IBM.

Not much smart people here.

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#14

Post by kitd »

It's the same for small suppliers as well, not just locations, depending on large companies for business.

If the large company takes their business away, trauma normally ensues for the small supplier/location.

I worked for an oil major who wouldn't do business with small suppliers for this reason.

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#15

Post by thoth »

simonw wrote: post #2

"Instead, Ross found herself toiling on what she described as a new-age assembly line -- each employee solving a narrowly focused part of a corporate customer’s technical problem and then passing the baton to the next person." Can anyone decipher the above and explain what kind of work IBM employees in these kinds of offices perform?

I had a job once where I provisioned storage. As in, log into a filer/array (NetApps in my case), create a volume, hand it off typically to system admins that would then create a VM or use the volume for something else. That was it, my portion was mostly "create volume 500G" and sometimes a few extra configuration steps, like mirroring or setting up replication.

I don't know what that IBM office was doing specifically, but I can easily imagine the situation described in the article!

I looked into moving up the stack, so to speak, as soon as I could because that job was so hyperspecialized it was essentially non-transferable.

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#16

Post by nova22033 »

darkarmani wrote: post #12

I can't believe no one mentioned this gem: "Grassley, a Republican, wrote to Rometty on April 16 to express concern about “reports of mass layoffs” even as IBM requested H-1B work visas to allow 5,800 foreign employees to be authorized to work for the company in the U.S."

>reports of mass layoffs

Whatever happened to the Cringley reported mass layoffs?

http://www.cringely.com/2015/01/22/ibms-reorg-hell-launches-...

IBM’s big layoff-cum-reorganization called Project Chrome kicks-off next week when 26 percent of IBM employees will get calls from their managers followed by thick envelopes on their doorsteps. By the end of February all 26 percent will be gone. I’m told this has been in the planning for months and I first heard about it back in November.

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#17

Post by Geekette »

If city officials bothered with a little research (assuming they don't already know), they'd find several examples of Big Co. entering and leaving small cities and towns without creating economic value equivalent to the huge incentives used to lure them in. Very similar to how officials chase Olympic hosting bids, even when history clearly shows that the legacy is additional debt and underutilized facilities (e.g. purpose-built stadiums/villages that only get used during the occasion).

Everytime I read of such schemes, I can't help but wonder how much lasting value could have been created by using just a minute fraction of the money wasted to foster the local startup/small business scene instead.

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#18

Post by at-fates-hands »

darkarmani wrote: post #12

I can't believe no one mentioned this gem: "Grassley, a Republican, wrote to Rometty on April 16 to express concern about “reports of mass layoffs” even as IBM requested H-1B work visas to allow 5,800 foreign employees to be authorized to work for the company in the U.S."

I saw that too and was going to comment on it.

I'm starting to see a lot more companies who are starting to outsource their work to H1-B's and even moving a lot of their work to India.

My sister worked at Cargill for 20 years and just recently found out her entire department (enterprise application development) with all her developers were being canned and the jobs sent over to India.

Hell, the current project I'm on, we have a team of 23 people and myself and one BA are the only American born people on the team. The rest are all from India and have to go back in a few months when their H1-B visas expire.

Two years ago, I found out Thomson Reuters were in the process of outsourcing 80% of their development in a combination of H1-B's and work going directly to India.

I always thought as a developer my job would be relatively safe and I could work in a nice stable corporate environment - guess I was wrong.

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#19

Post by brandonl222 »

amyjess wrote: post #10
wtbob wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly operations, I imagine: OS, database & storage administration. While other companies were investing in their employee base, IBM was cutting costs. Much like a farmer who eats his seed corn and then has nothing to plant while others steward their resources carefully and see a bumper crop, IBM is seeing the results of over a decade of underinvestment: who here would choose an IBM cloud solution over AWS, Google,…

> who here would choose an IBM cloud solution over AWS, Google, DigitalOcean or Linode? Why do you think IBM bought Softlayer?

Who?

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#20

Post by amyjess »

brandonl222 wrote: post #19
amyjess wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who here would choose an IBM cloud solution over AWS, Google, DigitalOcean or Linode? Why do you think IBM bought Softlayer?

Who?

http://softlayer.com

Surprised you haven't heard of them -- they're a pretty big player in the datacenter space. Also, I know for a fact that a good chunk of Linode's servers are actually hosted at Softlayer DCs (e.g. any Linode server hosted in Dallas is physically at Softlayer's DAL-2 location, which used to be called The Planet).

My best friend is a tech there, he joined right after the acquisition, and he tells me that the word around the office is "IBM wanted to have a good cloud business, so they bought one".

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