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Businesses IBM

IBM Cuts 3,900 Jobs (reuters.com) 27

Posted by msmash from the tough-luck dept.
IBM on Wednesday announced 3,900 layoffs as part of some asset divestments and missed its annual cash target, dampening cheer around beating revenue expectations in the fourth quarter. From a report: Chief Financial Officer James Kavanaugh told Reuters that the company was still "committed to hiring for client-facing research and development". The layoffs -- related to the spinoff of its Kyndryl business and a part of AI unit Watson Health -- will cause a $300 million charge in the January-March period, IBM said.
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IBM Cuts 3,900 Jobs More

IBM Cuts 3,900 Jobs

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  • As long as the CEO takes full responsibility (Score:5, Funny)

    by S_Stout ( 2725099 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @11:22PM (#63241269)
    When a CEO says they take full responsibility, I feel all warm and fuzzy inside and do not care if they took a pay cut.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • When a CEO says they take full responsibility, I feel all warm and fuzzy inside and do not care if they took a pay cut.

      they take responsibility in the "Look at how much i saved the company by not having to pay the surfs i deserve raise and bonus" way, not the" i failed the company and now we have to lay off people that need this job" way

    • Indeed. As far as they are concerned, the consequences of taking full responsibility amount to publicly proclaiming that they are taking full responsibility and, at worst, walking away with a $25+M settlement. What isn't there to like about taking full responsibility?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Deservedly Funny, but I think the bigger joke is how IBM got through the Great Depression without firing anyone: Selling stuff (mostly office hardware) to help other companies fire more of their employees.

  • Kyndryl and Watson Health (Score:3)

    by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @11:37PM (#63241285)

    Yeah, that was inevitable. There were folks still in IBM that worked with what eventually became Kyndryl. Kyndryl become it's own company back in '21 independent of IBM and more than likely they were holding on to folks to reassign them elsewhere. But there's not much they could have been placed into.

    IBM's Watson Health unit was AI in the healthcare industry before AI came to the healthcare industry. There's been a lot of growth in that industry and the Watson framework was a first gen that is not nearly as flexible as other more modern machine learning frameworks. But IBM also leaned heavy in their integrations as a way that Watson Health would be superior until even that failed. The fact that IBM indicated that they're selling Watson Health to Francisco Partners is a clear indication that IBM is leaving the business end of AI. Maybe getting out of selling packages of AI and getting back to coding AI is what IBM needed. They still seem interested in promoting their framework, even if they're aren't making the end product. Who knows? But yeah, they had put a ton of chips in the Watson Health thing, I'm pretty sure it'll cost them a pretty penny to sell it off.

    • It seems like they stated Watson would solve all the world's problems. And it didn't work out that way. That seems to be the story of Artificial Intelligence, it's just a fancy parlor trick. By the time they figured that out, the whole system is screwed. I anticipate it's going to be a bumpy ride. Just going by the results so far.

      • IA is pretty useful but watson had its big push in the early 2010s and the kinds of places that might want one are either propping IBM up with some legacy mainframes theyre locked into or theyve had a decade long project to get out from underneath one.

        I know if an IBM salesman showed up and tried to sell me anything other than a blade server he’d have an uphill battle against my biases

  • Then IBM could have boasted that the increased their workforce by 200% while reducing the costs with 300%.
    Now we have to read these pathetic excuses like that the CEO takes full responsibility.

    • Because you can't move your sales staff abroad. They already moved virtually everything to India sometime ago. They have a couple of departments that do engineering projects that are basically PR stunts but all the core stuff is in India and has been for some time. It made the news around here when they shipped it all years ago.

      But you still need sales staff to sell the services those dirt cheap Indians are performing. Plus a handful of customer service reps for the bigger clients. It's not that many e
      • The problem is they arenâ(TM)t performing, IBM hasnâ(TM)t innovated in over a decade. You cannot outsource innovation.

      • Well in a lot of watsons lifespan they had a US team I had several friends on it and then one of them came back to work with me somewhere else. I was surprised he’d quit such an interesting position and when I asked about it he said “Watson is fucking stupid and that place is bullshit”

        Dont know if they closed up shop or he quit, not really polite to pry further after a response like that.

  • Watson...I need you. (allusion to Alexander Graham Bell....) ...To take a walk as the health unit is a sickening big blue.

    JoshK.

  • Race to the bottom (Score:3)

    by felixrising ( 1135205 ) on Thursday January 26, 2023 @12:49AM (#63241371)
    IBM are in a race to the bottom, they've so thoroughly shot themselves in the foot, and these days everyone works with someone who was unceremoniously dropped or had a bad experience at IBM, their ability to actually hire and attract real talent is long gone. Maybe hiring straight out of uni and underpaying them will net some quality, those people will eventually figure out what's what and move on anyway.

    • Re:Race to the bottom (Score:4, Insightful)

      by junkname ( 8623905 ) on Thursday January 26, 2023 @09:45AM (#63241905)

      Exactly. I will NEVER work there again. Im in the RTP, NC area and everyone around here knows you don't go work for IBM if you want job security. They are going to miss a quarter? Expect layoffs. Next quarter, they may re-hire several of those they laid off, just to do it again. Either way, working under the axe constantly encourages you to work really hard - at finding another job.

      • I actually asked, no begged my manager to be put on a Resource Action about 10 years ago. I watched the company go down hill so bad from 1998.

        I finished up my career there as a solo Information Security Analyst (ISA). Some of the problems I had was with vulnerability patching on my last client, the Windows team constantly argued with the Active Directory team on who should apply which patch. Of course the first insanity was seperating those into two teams.

        I was one of the people moved to hourly with that

    • It was only 10 years ago that I still thought very highly of them. Lots of gaming systems were still POWER, they were making some of the most deeply pipelined CPUs in existence, watson was winning jeopardy.

      Looks like being a boring as fuck MSP didnt pay off. It’s interesting because a lot of other big tech companies do that work too. You just never hear about Microsoft whoring themselves out to banks and the government for bespoke software contracts.

  • I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that.

  • Tech companies cut jobs in downturns (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aldousd666 ( 640240 ) on Thursday January 26, 2023 @01:16AM (#63241383) Journal
    Everyone seems to be surprised by the fact that a publicly traded company cuts jobs, especially one with a heavy R&D budget, during an economic downturn. This is how it has always been. The fact that we have had government prop-ups for 20 straight years doesn't mean anything. It's a temporary situation. In real life, we have downturns, and tech companies, especially those with shareholders, they fire people as a protective measure. This is always how it has been, and only very naive people should be surprised by this.

  • Happens all the time, they have been shoveling jobs off to India and China for decades. "hiring for client-facing research and development" simply means they are prioritizing the thin scrim of customer-facing reps that can speak the language in the US and the EU.

    Watson is toast, and has been since about 2015.

  • Cutting one person, call me when there is real news

  • Look, IBM... (Score:3)

    by kurkosdr ( 2378710 ) on Thursday January 26, 2023 @08:07AM (#63241731)
    All the cool kids had their layoffs a couple of weeks ago. Please be more "agile".

  • the sun rose this morning.

  • I-1 = H, B+1=C, M-1=L

    Oh, so that's why they keep selling stuff to HCL.

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