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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.

#51

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dcwca wrote: post #27
mattzito wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? For IBM. It's good when you consider the alternative where a great company is slowly destroyed and everyone loses their jobs.

I'm finding it hard to understand how the current situation differs from that situation.

Like so many other big corps, IBM did some questionable things because of bad management and got into avoidable trouble.

Now the innocent employees - the ones who didn't get a chance to steer the ship - are being thrown into the ocean.

In a sane world, those employees would sue the board for some of its decisions. Those decisions may have been good for the short term interests of the shareholders, but clearly they weren't good for the long term interests of the company, or of patient shareholders who took the long view.

Bad management is a plague in tech. We've seen a long succession of big corps make the most incredibly surreal, bizarre, dysfunctional decisions, and then show wide-eyed "Who? Us?" surprise when layoffs become necessary because the corps crash into the rocks.

The usual justification that "shareholders win" is bullshit. They don't. No one does, except sometimes - in the short term only - the bad management itself.

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

#52

Post by ams6110 »

makecheck wrote: post #34
mattzito wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Executive pay doesn’t seem to follow the high-risk-high-reward scenario; they keep the “high reward” but see apparently none of the “high risk”. A much more balanced system would be something like, for each executive: - Your base pay is $51 million. - If you FAIL at your task, YOU OWE THE COMPANY $50 million. - If you succeed, you receive an extra $20 million. If you choose to split $15 million of this reward with em…

I do agree with the point that the executives often don't appear to suffer the pain of failure, but if the layoffs are of the scope mentioned, the number of jobs that could be saved with $50,000,000 is somewhere on the order of a rounding error.

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

#53

Post by ImTalking »

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.

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

#54

Post by rdtsc »

revelation wrote: post #42
rdtsc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? For IBM. For shareholders. For people who are not laid off and still work there. > it's not the fault of the people who are being affected by this, as by and large they were not responsible for IBM's decision to get more and more into support and services. Is it surprising that IBM…

A company is it's employees. If IBM still has cheese slicer designers in 2016, it's because they failed to train them. The discussion we're having here is because there seem to be no repercussions to their failure.

> A company is it's employees

But they are not the same group of employees though ;-) that's the point.

> The discussion we're having here is because there seem to be no repercussions to their failure.

Ok and how should we punishing all the failed startups though? Who is holding them responsible for their failure?

> it's because they failed to train them

We should try. But in general this is like the idea of "Why don't we just retrain all the coal miners to write web apps?" The reality is that you can't retrain everyone.

Some of the programming stuff seems easy to programmers for example, because well, we forgot the time when we didn't know it yet. But it is not something you can take a few night classes and read a book or two and get to writing back-end services.

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

#55

Post by redblacktree »

mathattack wrote: post #40

Here's what I don't get... If you have any options at all, why stay at a company with sub-par technology that abuses their workers? They've been stuck in low 3 Glassdoor [0] range for a while. It's layoff after layoff as they slowly dismantle the company. Why stay? Geographic limitations? Narrow skillsets? [0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/IBM-Reviews-E354.htm#trend...

Fear of the unknown? Atrophy of key interviewing skills? Comfort with their position? There are a lot of reasons that people stay, even when a position or company is not optimal.

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

#56

Post by moonlighter »

Meanwhile, IBM's CEO Ginny Rometty not only pocketed a salary of $1.6M in 2015, but also took a bonus of $4.6M. Not bad for 16 straight quarters of shrinking sales, evaporating profits and a falling stock price.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-ibm-s-ceo-w...

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

#57

Post by kazinator »

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.

That's 2nd line manager thinking for you!

If only suspenders could talk ... of course they can't since their jaws are firmly clenched into the upper hems of size 46 slacks.

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

#58

Post by komaromy »

moonlighter wrote: post #56

Meanwhile, IBM's CEO Ginny Rometty not only pocketed a salary of $1.6M in 2015, but also took a bonus of $4.6M. Not bad for 16 straight quarters of shrinking sales, evaporating profits and a falling stock price. http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-ibm-s-ceo-w...

That doesn't sound like all that much for the CEO of an IBM-sized company.

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

#59

Post by dogma1138 »

makecheck wrote: post #34
mattzito wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Executive pay doesn’t seem to follow the high-risk-high-reward scenario; they keep the “high reward” but see apparently none of the “high risk”. A much more balanced system would be something like, for each executive: - Your base pay is $51 million. - If you FAIL at your task, YOU OWE THE COMPANY $50 million. - If you succeed, you receive an extra $20 million. If you choose to split $15 million of this reward with em…

That's not that far from how it works except for the last part. Many executive have a low base pay but a very high bonus component especially CEO's it's usually not 50 to 1 (unless they take a "symbolic" salary when it ends up being usually millions to one) but it's quite high.

Now granted it's not if you fail at your task you owe a company money but you don't get it, the owe a company money could happen it's usually common in some countries (UK for example) where the CEO gets a "loan" for X amount which is spread out over some years, it's again not usually to put skin in the game but to lock a CEO to the company, the CEO change at Sage about a year ago had a loan component to it.

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

#60

Post by jacques_chester »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #19
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm not understanding your comment, but according to Forbes[1], IBM is prominent in cloud services and exceeds AWS in revenue. It sounds as though IBM's doing things right, at least in this space. It may be that in other markets, they've fallen behind or failed to innovate, e.g. the vast mobile market. 1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2015/04/27/move-over-...

According to the article IBM bought Softlayer and has only just launched BlueMix. I tried Bluemix and found it unoriginal and a cit crap. Not that the world of cloud services moves according to my preferences, but I'm not seeing it used anywhere else either. If IBM is "prominent" in cloud services it's from acquisitions. Whereas AWS pioneered the cloud industry. This is certainly "doing things right" in that it's pro…

> but I'm not seeing it used anywhere else either.

Bluemix is a re-branded Cloud Foundry. IBM donates engineering to the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

CF is used in a lot of places.

Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, the leading donor of engineering to Cloud Foundry. We have our own distribution of Cloud Foundry, PCF, that is a competitor to Bluemix.

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