161–170 of 428 posts
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Damn English and its lack of gender non-specific pronouns! Seriously, though... what is the implication that I am missing? What is the point of bringing up the CEO's pay? Should it be government mandated, is that what you all believe?
That pay and performance ought to be correlated? Double standard and all.
The same question applies with a CEO, which the shareholders, presumably, voted in. They could have put in someone else, maybe someone who, gasp, charges more, to run a $100 billion company.
I don't understand this attitude, as if "the powers that be"/"the Man"/"the 1%" put the CEO there and therefore it's all their fault that you don't make as much as them.
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Damn English and its lack of gender non-specific pronouns! Seriously, though... what is the implication that I am missing? What is the point of bringing up the CEO's pay? Should it be government mandated, is that what you all believe?
Singular "they" is gender-neutral and grammatically correct, I don't know why more people don't use it.
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Among other factors mentioned: employer-specific skillsets. Technology jobs are very highly specialised. And I'm not just speaking of computer tech. I'm old enough to have seen several generations of obsoleted "gold tickets". Nuclear Engineering, future destroyed March 28, 1979. Freeway engineers, the freeway protests of the 1960s/1970s. Big Three auto manufacturers, dream destroyed with the first oil embargo, and su…
Perhaps IBM has more workers that are like the workers at AT&T than we would have expected. AT&T is in a difficult position as its extremely large workforce is being attacked into irrelevance by new technology upstarts. > To Mr. Stephenson, it should be an easy choice for most workers: Learn new skills or find your career choices are very limited. “There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop…
But the bottom-up reality is that people coming into work at AT&T pushing open source, cloud, or data science agendas are perceived as threats, and are managed out.
I worked for IBM during the 80s at the height of IBM's power. It was the golden ticket. 400,000 employees and everyone was convinced it was going to hit $100B market cap. When I quit to form my own business, my 2nd line manager said "Why would anyone want to quit IBM?". Long time ago.
Crazy -- they could have almost been as big as Uber!
IBM was huge in the 80s, everyone knows that. Your comment looked absurd to me, and it turns out it was.
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$6.2M is not a lot for a big company if the leader can increase sales or profits by even a few percent... which does not appear to be the case here.
Well, there was some recently published research that claimed to find that most of the effect attributed to CEO performance actually can be explained by random fluctuations. Make of that what you will.
X and Y are arbitrary
That is a good sign. It means the ship is slowly turning around. It sucks for the employees being laid off, no doubt. However they have to do this. There is no other way. They bet big on support and services in early 2000s. So they have lots of those employees. Could they all start to learn new things adapt to the new environment, yeah, some will but not everyone will. Heck, if they didn't lay off people, they'd stil…
See, these types of comments are (again) why people have negative opinions towards silicon valley types. You may be right, but a good sign for whom, exactly? For the people who lost their jobs? For shareholders? For fans of IBM the company? Sure, yes, I agree that IBM probably has to shed people in order to stay competitive. However, it's not the fault of the people who are being affected by this, as by and large the…
The economy, so everybody. You're asking the wrong question, it isn't "Why is it a good sign that IBM has begun layoffs?" The question is "Why is it a good sign that IBM, a poor performer that is popularly believed to have misallocated resources, has begun layoffs?" It isn't a choice between IBM doing great, or doing layoffs; it is a choice between IBM continuing to do poorly and eventually imploding spectacularly, or doing layoffs. Of course layoffs don't mean a certain turn around for them, but the consequences for inaction are pretty certain.
As far as the fate of the individual employees: in the long run the vast majority will be better off. Either IBM didn't efficiently translate those employee's skills to profit, or there is inadequate demand for the skills and the employees have been shielded from that harsh reality. In the case of inefficiency (the most common case): if another company can derive more profit from the same skill - then they can also pay more. In the case of obsolete skills: unless IBM can, with a certainty, provide employment until the employee dies - they are assisting the employee in a game of retirement savings Russian roulette.
So that is the economics 101 explanation, but I've found it to be true. I've been through this twice, and in both cases I've come out the other side much better off.
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Had a friend that literally had no money for food in this time (2002, actually).
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Software engineers outside the valley, especially in the late 90s and early 2000's don't make ludicrous amounts of money. Even if you live frugally and save up, being suddenly laid off will lead you to burning through savings very quickly. It's not like retiring, you don't get the time to prepare.
Lastly, lack of empathy is not a virtue.
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Crazy -- they could have almost been as big as Uber!
IBM hit > $100 billion market cap. In 1987. That's north of $183 billion in today's dollars. IBM was huge in the 80s, everyone knows that. Your comment looked absurd to me, and it turns out it was.