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IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

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Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#81

Post by dta3456 »

pas wrote: post #17
jve wrote: post #5

Firing talent because of age is not so smart I think. Of course I don't know who they fire, etc. But I'm young, yeah, and I want to distance myself from IBM products. Why? I'v been setting IBM Tivoli/Spectrum protect to backup client computers and, ugh, is it ugly, unfriendly and complex piece of software. I'v also touched the server part. Maybe it's just me, the windows guy (but who loves scripting) and it is more a…

The simple fact, that IBM stuff is never used by big sites (fb, spotify, google, etc..) despite their solutions being available for ages should lead anyone to the conclusion that they are salesware. QRadar is a glorified syslog server with a query interface (bought by IBM in 2011, formerly developed by Q1 Labs, est 2001), and ... again the fact that Splunk is available (started 2 years after Q1 Labs), that the ELK st…

I don't think QRadar is Salesware, we use it in our SOC and it's not bad. It's serviceable at least.

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#82

Post by lowdose »

Kneecaps07 wrote: post #79
reustle wrote: post #4

> International Business Machines Corp. has fired as many as 100,000 employees in the last few years in an effort to boost its appeal to millennials > “The company hires 50,000 employees each year.” > The number of IBM employees has fallen to its lowest point in six years, with 350,600 global workers at the end of 2018 -- a 19% reduction since 2013. The fact that a company can have such high turnover and still functi…

My ex used to work there. It was an older building where everyone had their own office. There would be hallways and hallways of offices and she had no idea who anyone was or what they did all day. Everyone just sat in their office with the doors closed.

She should have recorded this with a camera and do some live private office walk-ins saying she is from HR here to do the interview.

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#83

Post by blaser-waffle »

Misteur-Z wrote: post #75
js8 wrote: post #14

Of course, the explanation is BS, everybody sees that. But I want to comment that as a young mainframer (I started 14 years ago at the age of 26, with a big IBM competitor), I really enjoyed working with older people. They work quite hard (they have survived lots of changes in the organization, and that - in majority of cases - means that their contribution was appreciated somewhere), often are less crazy (they are s…

One day I have to take the time to write a blog post on how I started my engineering career at IBM working on mainframe at 21, then freaked out 6 years later in one of the biggest bank in the world where most of those older people where incompetent and judgemental. Everything was dinosaurs in constant politics and lies on both side, vendors and clients. Worst IT practices and work ethics you could imagine. Lost sourc…

> in one of the biggest bank in the world where most of those older people where incompetent and judgemental. Everything was dinosaurs in constant politics and lies on both side, vendors and clients.

This is true in most large orgs. That statement was true in the military, tech companies, and the non-tech companies I've worked for. The amount of politics and the size of egos grows exponentially the larger you get.

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#84

Post by TacticalTable »

martinpw wrote: post #38
meddlepal wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on the definition of millennial that is used. I'm in my early 30s but I have a couple friends that are 24/25/26 and personally they align as millennials rather than Gen Z. Very tail end of course but definitely millennial.

Makes me sad that anyone chooses to self identify into marketing buckets like this.

Generational groups aren't exclusively marketing buckets. They're a useful (if rough) description of a set of people within an age group, that's more useful than solely marketing.

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#85

Post by makomk »

avar wrote: post #53
oblio wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Other users need some sort of mainframe reliability, but that's also achievable on a distributed system running on unreliable PCs. I don't buy this. Many of our critical systems are on PC architectures. Mainframes don't have some magic sauce, well designed distributed architectures should offer enough reliability. Edit: reading comprehension fail, please ignore my comment :-)

Even with your edit this is worth replying to: Why waste your money on a single rack-mounted PC when you can buy 40 cheap cellphones running Android and network them together. That'll probably provide greater reliability. The obvious answer is the same as why some use mainframes over PCs. You can't easily convert all workloads running on a rack-mounted PC to a network of cellphones. Similarly, you can't easily conver…

The obvious answer is that a stack of cheap cellphones running Android is a pain to develop for, deploy and manage compared to something actually designed for server use. These are probably not areas where mainframes have the upper hand this century.

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#86

Post by MperorM »

angarg12 wrote: post #67

I'm an early millennial and ex IBMer. We know this is bullcrap. What sets IBM apart from Google isn't older workers, but things that don't appeal to millennial sensibilities: deep management hierarchies, focus in sales and marketing instead of tech, a hellscape cubicled office out of the 50s... IBM convinced me that Office Space is a documentary. I would be hard pressed to find anything cool I did on my time there; q…

From all the horror stories I hear about IBM it makes me wonder whether we are talking about the same company.

I work at IBM in europe. We have open office spaces, I will work remotely for the entirety of next year. I guess the work I'm doing would be considered 'uncool' by most people my age (Internal Devops engineering).

I'm always surprised whenever I read just how bad it's supposed to be as it doesn't remotely match my experience.

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#87

Post by lunias »

I interned at IBM a decade ago. I was studying computer science in Tucson, AZ and was super excited to get picked up by such a well-known company. I never wrote a line of code for them. I decommissioned assets. That is, I scoured massive labs for ancient pieces of hardware, traversed the rat's nest of fiber optic cabling holding them in place, extricated them from their racks, and ultimately placed them in storage closets. The campus was massive, but largely deserted. Senior people that I interacted with indicated that it was a cool place in the late eighties and into the nineties. It's a boneyard now.

That being said, I was glad to get to work with some experienced people. All of the other college-aged people that I knew there were stuck mindlessly writing tests.

Re: IBM Fired as Many as 100k in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows

#88

Post by jki275 »

austinprete wrote: post #65
jnbiche wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ageism in our industry should be a concern to everyone, regardless of the amount of grey hair they have. We all get old, after all. And more importantly, even if we didn't all get old, it's still wrong to discriminate (we don't all become black over time, but it's still wrong to discriminate in the basis of race).

Not sure the comparison to race is either fitting or appropriate here. Becoming more old undoubtedly has a negative effect on performance/productivity at some point, I don’t think the same can ever be said for becoming more black.

Getting “old” often increases performance and productivity though...
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