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Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.

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Re: Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.

#181

Post by jonesb6 »

zanny wrote: post #120
mattgrice wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you're a support person working at IBM in Dubuque, Iowa, where local and state taxpayers spent $50M to lure IBM in a delusion of becoming a tech hub. [1] You specialize in Lotus Notes support for local businesses like Hormel. Last year, IBM laid off 2/3 of their Dubuque workforce, 700 people, in a city of 60,000. More than 1% of the population. Your only skill is Notes, same as dozens of other people that were la…

But you take that risk moving to a no-tech area. The best solution is to not put yourself in a position you need to get out of. And if that means the next Dubuque company needs to be offering million dollar salaries to engineers to get commit themselves out there - since there would be no other opportunities and you would be stuck, so you better have a massive nest egg after five years - then so be it.

Or reverse it, what if you're a blue collard worker in a disadvantaged community that IBM just moved into, they lure you into training at IBM in a narrow skill set with the promise of becoming white collard.

Can't blame someone for taking that risk.

Re: Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.

#182

Post by jonesb6 »

tryitnow wrote: post #137
x0x0 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And before someone suggests moving to silly valley, consider doing so requires accepting a 98%+ chance you will never own a home unless you're willing to put up with a horrific commute. In most of sf/peninsula detached homes cost $1.5m+. And even a condo is difficult to afford on the salaries available. Home ownership for most of us requires a startup win giving you at least $0.5m after taxes plus you and your spouse…

Plus there's no guarantee that moving to the Bay Area will prevent similar problems. There's a boatload of reckless spending on developers and engineers right now. It's only a matter of time before financiers start pushing for headcount reductions.

I'll just leave this [1] here..

[1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CcBl4edUMAASf7X.jpg:large

Re: Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.

#183

Post by jonesb6 »

tryitnow wrote: post #137
x0x0 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And before someone suggests moving to silly valley, consider doing so requires accepting a 98%+ chance you will never own a home unless you're willing to put up with a horrific commute. In most of sf/peninsula detached homes cost $1.5m+. And even a condo is difficult to afford on the salaries available. Home ownership for most of us requires a startup win giving you at least $0.5m after taxes plus you and your spouse…

Plus there's no guarantee that moving to the Bay Area will prevent similar problems. There's a boatload of reckless spending on developers and engineers right now. It's only a matter of time before financiers start pushing for headcount reductions.

I'll just leave this [1] here..

[1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CcBl4edUMAASf7X.jpg:large

Re: Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.

#184

Post by im_down_w_otp »

toyg wrote: post #110
eggy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fear guides all of us in some way, and striving to live means taking chances. The myth of the 'stable big company' that you can work at, and get your kid a job at after college, is past history. The U.S. changed directions when they closed a lot of the vocational schools, and the luxury afforded by being the first world economy, drove low to mid-level wages up. Dinosaurs like IBM cannot feed the machine. Manufacturin…

Sure, sure, but mortgages and kids' needs tend to get in the way of philosophical and strategic thinking.

People with mortgages and kids don't move to new places where there's more, or at least more immediate, economic opportunity?

Why not?

Kids are mobile. Mortgages can be covered by tenants or by selling the property (usually).

I only have kid (singular) and lack a mortgage, but I'd definitely move my family to a place with more opportunity if the well ran dry where we're at now. I wouldn't even hesitate or think twice about it. The temporary pain of transition is going to be a lot easier than the long-tail of fruitless toiling and economic decay.

Re: Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.

#185

Post by ams6110 »

patrickaljord wrote: post #179
dandelany wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Singular "they" is gender-neutral and grammatically correct, I don't know why more people don't use it.

People probably don't use it because at every English school in non English-speaking countries, they teach you that "they" is for plural only. I had personally never heard until recently that "they" could be singular too. It also really sounds weird to a French like me.

They also taught that "they" is plural in American schools up until the last decade or so.

I remember getting points off of papers for misusing "they" in a singular context.

So it sounds weird to me too. We were always taught that "he" is a gender-neutral singular as needed.

Re: Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.

#186

Post by bitmapbrother »

mathattack wrote: post #28
rdtsc wrote: post #11

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…

It seems to me like IBM is in perpetual layoff mode. It's not that the ship is turning around - it's that it's grinding down into irrelevance. In a sense IBM is doing it the right way - returning the capital (via dividends and buybacks) and people (unfortunately via layoffs) back to the market to work on productive things in configurations that add value. Better to do this than to waste everyone's time and money. (Bu…

Except that's not exactly what they're doing. They're laying off US workers and replacing them with cheap employee's from BRIC countries. This isn't about turning around the ship, it's about replacing the ship's crew with a foreign crew that will gladly accept a 1/3 of the wage.

Re: Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.

#187

Post by Godel_unicode »

nonanako wrote: post #167
fdej wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, there was some recently published research that claimed X actually can be explained by Y. X and Y are arbitrary

I assume you're being down voted for being new, but I read your comment as a more verbose "citation needed"

Re: Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.

#188

Post by beachy »

ImTalking wrote: post #53

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.

I worked at IBM in the 80s too, like my dad before me. The two things that struck me as unusual even then were that noone in the company has ever been laid off, and that there was widespread belief that the company really did have 2 or 3 generations of new product lines that they kept in storage, ready to release if the competition ever started to catch up.

Re: Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.

#189

Post by look_lookatme »

SilasX wrote: post #131
jwiley wrote: post #97

During the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, I was working at a super-market. One of the guys stocking shelves was a software engineer laid off by a large company after 40 years. The management at Winn Dixie put him stacking boxes in the freezer section...since they knew he needed the money and wouldn't quit. Maybe he deserved to get fired, maybe he didn't. The lesson to me that has been reinforced over my career in t…

And learn how to job search. There's surely a better job that guy could have found.

I worked at a Michaels in Plano in 2001 stocking yarn and frames with a guy that had been a systems consultant for EDS for a decade. He was in his early 30s. He got a new job after about a year of constant interviews. I use to cover for him when he'd take them.

Those were dark days, man.

Re: Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.

#190

Post by jjnoakes »

gozur88 wrote: post #148
IndianAstronaut wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I think learning new marketable skills should be everyone's hobby. Also, in our field or any professional field, you really should be very financially secure after 50 so that a job loss doesn't hurt you.

The problem is learning new skills is kind of a catch-22. After you've been doing something for a few years, assuming you're reasonably intelligent, you get to be an expert and command expert wages. Your employer is paying for an expert. He doesn't want to pay you expert wages to learn a a new, marketable skill. He can hire someone who already knows it. Or he can hire a new college grad for a fraction of what you mak…

So you take a pay cut and work your way back up. Maybe go from $120k+ to $70k. The sky is not falling...
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