IBM layoffs now top 1,200
Most of the cuts in the US and Canada
Posted in Management, 29th February 2012 12:48 GMT
Watch Now : Virtual Machine Movement with Hyper-V
IBM has laid off over 1,200 employees in the last few days, according to a union organising group for the company's staff.
Alliance@IBM's homepage reports job cuts of 1,202 staff members, a collated figure gathered from the organisation's members sending in their severance letters, so-called "resource action" documents.
Lee Conrad, the coordinator of the group, told Bloomberg that most of the job cuts were in the US, although some were in Canada.
Ex- and current IBM employees have been posting about the cuts on the Alliance@IBM's job cuts reports community page, with one saying he had been laid off after 33 years with the company.
Doug Shelton, an IBM spokesman in the US, would not confirm the number of redundancies to Bloomberg.
"IBM is constantly rebalancing its workforce,” he said. “That means reducing in some areas and hiring in others – based on shifts in technology and client demand. This allows IBM to remain competitive and relevant in an industry that is constantly changing.”
IBM's current global workforce is 433,362 employees. It no longer releases geographic breakdown information on its staff, but at the end of 2008, the company had 115,000 workers in the US out of its 398,455 worldwide.
The company yesterday reported annual revenue for 2011 of $109.9bn, up from $99.9bn the year before, and net income of $15.6bn, up from $14.8bn in 2010. ®
Watch Now : Virtual Machine Movement with Hyper-V
COMMENTS
Well Educated?
I've worked with a ton of outsourced Indians, and the term "well-educated" never came to mind. "Not educated" or rather "completely stupid" came to mind a lot, though. I'm assuming you're talking about software developers, but maybe there's something else we outsource a lot to India that they actually educate themselves about before doing. I've made more money in freelance cleaning up/fixing problems (or more usually just starting the project over) caused by outsourced Indian developers, than I have from regular clients.
The way I've seen the world of contract development to work (mind you, I've only been doing it for five years) is you hire an Indian for $10-$20/hour to sit on his ass and do nothing, and you get burned because you paid upfront for 200 hours of work. Then you hire someone with actual skills, experience, and a formal education for $30-$150/hour, but are reluctant in negotiations because you already spent so much money on the project. This good developer is forced to take a huge risk with you because you're unwilling to pay any money upfront because of the time you got burned. Then when the good developer finishes the project in just a few hours, you give them a bonus because they're "amazing", though they're actually only good, but you don't know that because Indian you hired is so terrible he couldn't possibly rank on any sort of measure of programming skill.
</rant>
I've personally been in this situation at least a dozen times, and so has everyone else I know in the freelance world. Does IBM have a monopoly on the six half-decent outsourced Indian developers out there or is this the reason they've been fading into the dark for the last 15 years?
Did they cut any executive salaries?
I didn't think so...
and they wonder why we ae all unhappy
1200 in the US, but nearly 2000 have gone in Germany. There are now <100000 in the US for the first time in years. Last time they went through major redundancies in the US, they offered people positions in the 'growth markets' on local rates, you can imagine how well that went down.
Ac for very obvious reasons
In Germany 8000 out of 20000
..are supposed to "become self-employed and then be hired as contractors on a per-project basis, depending on demand. That all being managed through a global project/resource portal".
What that means in my opinion is that IBM has decided that 40% of their business is not worth it and the cheapest way of getting rid of people is to annoy them. That saves all the redundancy payoffs for the long-term employees.
Qualified people are already quite scarce here in Germany, as the economy is doing well and demographics does its work.
But then, who needs IBM today ? Their hardware is nice, but lots of cheap x86 alternatives exist. Armies of developers and consultants can do their job.
Staff that TUPE over from new Outsourced Contracts will go directly to Manpower. Much as I will be TUPEing to a new supplier over the comming months after 20years due to IBM loosing a huge contract thanks to its IDC in Bangalore.....
The new Office Garage series:
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
