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IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

latimes.com

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Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#91

Post by op00to »

dralley wrote: post #4
marktangotango wrote: post #3

I think the notable thing here is; this is really a Redhat layoff since IBM "subsumed" or reverse merged or whatever it was with Redhat. My take is that IBM has been a barely warm carcass for > 20 years already and the Redhat deal did nothing to change that. Here I'm certain that the layoff will be onshore, and the continued hiring will be offshore. That's what they've been doing forever, and their lack of growth and…

Red Hat has not done and is not very likely to do layoffs, and is one of the higher growth areas of IBM of which they speak. We did better than most about not over-hiring in the first place.

Expect layoffs in late Feb or March.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#92

Post by horsawlarway »

time_to_smile wrote: post #70
horsawlarway wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's almost like they're doing layoffs for the sake of appearances It's almost like you're noticing this because the media is playing up layoff reports in tech. To quote... you - "4000 seems like a tiny number in context of total headcount, and when you take into account that they've somehow lost more than 5 times as many in the past year." They've reduced staff by 5 times this amount over the last 24 months, but t…

This is a weird take. Are you arguing that we aren't seeing an abnormally high number of layoffs in tech? That this is just "media sensationalism"? Nearly all the layoff reports I've come across I hear about before they're in the mainstream media. Additionally I predicted months ago that we'd be seeing massive layoffs in tech, before the media was talking about it at all. These layoffs are real, are atypical for what…

If you look at most of the headcounts from companies doing layoffs - you'll see that they're still sitting around the 2021 numbers after accounting for the cuts.

So basically - we had a large glut of hiring during covid in tech as demand was high for those products and services (being in lockdown certainly helped) and now we're seeing a relatively minor adjustment back down.

Given the increased interest rates and the slump in demand - I think we're actually still well on the light side of the possible wave of layoffs.

I think the reporting is still in line with the gloom and doom headlines that attract attention. Basically - they're reporting much more on the tech layoffs because it garners views.

The increase in tech hiring was just as hard - and while it did get media attention, it was not nearly as intense and recurrent.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#93

Post by brazzledazzle »

danrocks wrote: post #8

Not to be snarky or anything, but a legitimate question: what does IBM actually do? I used to work for a partnering engineering team at and met with dozens of enterprise clients (think Fortune 100) and I never heard anybody ever mention any IBM products. I am really intrigued to understand what keeps this company afloat. My main hypothesis is selling to government and acting more as a holding of acquired companies th…

They buy other companies and then drain their life force into IBM like corporate vampires. Once their acquisition is on life support they graft the remains onto their body and look for new victims to consume.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#94

Post by [deleted] »

jjice wrote: post #54
belter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is $4.5 billion in Mainframe just in one quarter...

It's an interesting thing they have going on. I worked at a large retailer who depended on an IBM mainframe running DB2. That thing was crazy expensive and their migration to their cloud mainframe offering was even more expensive for the raw compute, but made sense when maintenance and everything was added. Something like 90%+ of the top 100 banks depend on mainframes and same with the top 100 retailers. Few customer…

[deleted]

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#95

Post by jimbo9991 »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #73
alephnerd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on my interactions with specific IBM teams: They are a major systems integrator in the financial and govt world, they have a massive professional services team ensuring everything from AIX to RHEL7.2 is running and not breaking for customers, they have very smart HPC and Quantum Chemistry people working on building Quatumn Computing algorithms, they are building features in IBM Cloud for our EU banking counterp…

>Tech Bros on HN just don't have the visibility and remain in their weird HN echo chamber As someone who has worked in consulting on the Enterprise side for 25 years, the HN attitudes towards IBM, SAP, Oracle, and even SaaS companies like SF/SNOW/Adobe is baffling. Corporate America would literally cease to function if these companies disappeared one night, but would hardly bat an eye over the disappearance of Facebo…

Hacker news has always been an outgrowth of the startup world, and has never had much respect for "serious business". I guess because of the slow pace and paper pushing, which is a valid complaint about working at these kinds of organizations. It's something you eventually come to understand, but as a young person fresh from a CS program I understand how it can feel.

This is likely to become less extreme over time as our experiment with low to negative interest rate policy comes to a close.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#96

Post by alephnerd »

jimbo9991 wrote: post #95
DebtDeflation wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Tech Bros on HN just don't have the visibility and remain in their weird HN echo chamber As someone who has worked in consulting on the Enterprise side for 25 years, the HN attitudes towards IBM, SAP, Oracle, and even SaaS companies like SF/SNOW/Adobe is baffling. Corporate America would literally cease to function if these companies disappeared one night, but would hardly bat an eye over the disappearance of Facebo…

Hacker news has always been an outgrowth of the startup world, and has never had much respect for "serious business". I guess because of the slow pace and paper pushing, which is a valid complaint about working at these kinds of organizations. It's something you eventually come to understand, but as a young person fresh from a CS program I understand how it can feel. This is likely to become less extreme over time as…

Even the startup conversations on here are completely detached from reality to be honest. There's a lack of understanding among commentators about how VC works, Category Creation, Pricing Strategy, GTM, Sales, etc. Most YC startup founders have their own private board at this point that they discuss stuff on now.

HN has devolved into burned out Gen X or elder Millenial FAANG engineers bitching about their gilded cage existence.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#97

Post by skissane »

imroot wrote: post #63
rhacker wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty much anything you purchase at a store goes through ibm

IBM sold their retail technology division to Toshiba a few years ago. Most of their cash register controllers can run on x86, so, it's not dependent on their hardware for the backend. Their cash registers can run the 4690 OS or Windows/Linux/whatever, but, most choose to run the 4690 Operating System due to its security features. I worked at IBM in their retail marketing side in the early 2000's, so, it's possible th…

> Their cash registers can run the 4690 OS or Windows/Linux/whatever, but, most choose to run the 4690 Operating System due to its security features.

> I worked at IBM in their retail marketing side in the early 2000's, so, it's possible that everything I've typed here is 20+ years out of date.

4690 is pretty close to dead. Maybe not entirely dead, but closer to that status than it has ever been before. From what I understand, even before IBM sold it to Toshiba, the plan already was to discontinue 4690 and replace it with Linux. At the time of the sale, IBM was in the progress of replacing it with "IRES" (IBM Retail Environment for SUSE); Toshiba has instead chosen as the replacement its own Linux distribution, "TCx Sky", which is a customised version of Wind River Linux.

The terminal release of the 4690 OS was V6R5, released 7 years ago. The latest security update was CSD 2010, released in January 2020. There are probably still some people using it even today, but it is very much a legacy system, with zero plans for any further enhancements; it isn't even clear if there will be any further security updates in the future, or if the January 2020 update was the last one. (I guess it may depend on how many people are still using it, what further security bugs might be discovered, how much those people are willing to pay to fix them, etc).

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#98

Post by skissane »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #43
rhacker wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty much anything you purchase at a store goes through ibm

Banks love IBM mainframes/midranges. They might not be blistering fast, but they're a joy to work with if you have the budget.

I find them really interesting because they are a whole other world, the "road not taken". They are very different from Unix/POSIX/Linux/*BSD/macOS/etc, even moreso than Windows is. Windows is not a Unix, but it has borrowed a lot of ideas from Unix–and is arguably growing more Unix-like as time goes by, borrowing more and more ideas from Unix-land–Windows is a lot closer to Unix than most mainframe operating systems are–even MS-DOS is a lot closer to Unix than most mainframe operating systems (indeed, if you read the source code and design docs for MS-DOS 2, they repeatedly mention the influence upon it of Microsoft's Unix, Xenix.)

Consider some ideas which exist in z/OS but not in Unix or Windows:

- record-oriented file system: the filesystem is aware of the record-boundaries of files, whether they contain fixed length or variable length records, etc – and enforces them

- indexed files: key-value type files are built in to the filesystem, not some add-on library

- the catalog: a database mapping file paths (dataset names) to the volumes they are stored on: so you can move a file to another disk volume (or even to tape) without changing its filesystem path. You can kind of approximate this using mount points, symbolic links, etc – but it is a lot messier

- partitioned data sets (PDS/PDSE): like ZIP/TAR files, but again, built-in to the filesystem

- block-oriented terminals: you send/receive data to terminals as a screenful at a time, not a character at a time

- DDnames: your program inherits (the moral equivalent of) file descriptors, but instead of just having numbers, they have names (instead of fd 0, you have a DD called "SYSIN")

You can argue about whether the above features are sensible – the designers of Unix were well-aware of them, but decided they were examples of unnecessary complexity – but sensible or not, they are interesting.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#99

Post by FireBeyond »

dusanh wrote: post #67
FireBeyond wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they (we, I should say, I work at Red Hat, but not in RHEL) as a company improved profits 10% after adjustment for inflation.

How is Red Hat doing with all they layoffs around anyway? I'd imagine they would be fairly resilient.

None announced as yet. Definitely changes and "belt tightening", and other optimizations (most people had assumed that bonuses were automatic and 100%, but they will be more tightly focused on individual performance now).

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#100

Post by kamaal »

jjice wrote: post #54
belter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is $4.5 billion in Mainframe just in one quarter...

It's an interesting thing they have going on. I worked at a large retailer who depended on an IBM mainframe running DB2. That thing was crazy expensive and their migration to their cloud mainframe offering was even more expensive for the raw compute, but made sense when maintenance and everything was added. Something like 90%+ of the top 100 banks depend on mainframes and same with the top 100 retailers. Few customer…

>>migration to their cloud mainframe offering was even more expensive for the raw compute

Mainframes were always cheaper. The only reason things like Hadoop and MR even picked up for heavy batch jobs, was because in the last decade lots of cheaper consumer hardware was available, due to companies having over invested in building data centers. The excess capacity was sent to hadoop work. If you have continuous ongoing investments in Mainframe tech or wish to start something new, you are better off using Mainframes.

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