IBM Planning 10,000 Job Cuts in Europe Ahead of Unit Sale (bloomberg.com) 44
International Business Machines is planning to cut about 10,000 jobs in Europe in an attempt to lower costs at its slow-growth services unit and prepare the business for a spinoff. From a report: The wide-ranging losses will affect about 20% of staff in the region, according to people familiar with the matter. The U.K. and Germany are set to be most impacted, with cuts also planned in Poland, Slovakia, Italy and Belgium. IBM announced the job cuts in Europe earlier in November during a meeting with European labor representatives, according to a union officer briefed on proceedings. The person asked not to be identified because the talks are private. IBM shares fell 1.6% at 9:37 a.m. in New York. They've declined 8.6% this year.
Re: Getting rid of union deadweight (Score:2, Insightful)
Fuck off, free market hating monopolist in disguise.
You can not just leave and choose to eat no food anymore, and you know it.
In a free market, everyone can organize, and eventually will. Workers that are organizing is what keeps *employers that are organizing* in balance.
All you want is for them to not do the very thing you do! Because you beloeve they will be abusive assholes with their power. Because you are.
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Found the parasite.
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Europe econ [Re:Good] (Score:5, Insightful)
Failed? Most are doing better than the USA, at least for the lower and middle classes. While they may not be able to buy as many gizmos as US consumers, Europe does "the basics" better, such as healthcare, housing, transportation, and education. And they get longer vacations. US ignores the basics in pursuit of more "stuff" and letting the rich get bloated under the false religion of trickle-down.
Re: Europe econ [Re:Good] (Score:3)
We are able to buy more stuff too. With far less work an more free time.
Signed,
The EU.
(Please don't confuse us with the continent Europe. Russia is not part of us.)
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Re: Good (Score:1)
Hilarious, coming from the country that is juust starting to think about how to get up from shitting itself, slipping in its own shit, and falling face-first into its own feces, in the hope of not falling over in eight years again.
Sorry, mate. You're Rome in the crumbling years.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
This is IBM the buggy whip of IT.
Back in the Day IBM was the big name in computing, where Business relied on them for operations, and were much more trusted than many of the other failed Mainframe companies.
However they have sold off their PC unit, their Software Unit, they are just mainly a consulting company. Which a lot of businesses are realizing why bother with IBM Global Services if none of their stuff is IBM anymore?
Being an American Brand, IBM makes much of its consulting services managing American government stuff. As it is easier to contract with an American Company vs dealing with public outcry if you go with a foreign company.
Lately I don't thing IBM can really get much of a headway in Europe, as they are also going a bit nationalistic too. So they more apt to go with say Siemens vs IBM.
This will not necessarily fix their problems (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM is supposed to be a software and hardware company. My experience of them - I worked closely with them for a couple of years quite recently - is that they are totally hidebound, slaves to their processes to the extent that they actually get very little done. This may be necessary when dealing with government contracts, but it has spread to other "service" departments as well.
Sacking a few thousand people is not going to help there, they then won't have enough left to fulfil their internally mandated obligations.
As an example: They had some leased third-party hardware in one of their computer centers. The contract ran out and was not extended. The owner of that hardware then wanted to pick it up, the customer also wanted it picked up by the owner. The problem was that IBM no longer had a contractual relationship with that hardware company so they had no right to enter that center. I believe it was sorted eventually, it just took several months with this hardware clogging up space which was needed for other hardware and eating power which was also needed elsewhere.
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What they should do is let different high-level managers use and tune their own processes and see which ones work out best, and combine the best ideas for later tests. It's kind of the genetic algorithm of management R&D.
Also, different employees work better under different processes. Finding good matches should be a priority.
Good "team" software could also propel them. I really liked many aspects
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What are the top things they didn't like about Notes (ignoring technical glitches)?
Re: you like notes?? (Score:3)
I remember it as : A nice idea, a nightmare implementation.
But I didn't look into it too deeply. It felt a bit like "written by consultants". You know ... lots and lots of complexity that served nothing but itself.
I had higj hopes because I asumed the complexity would result in massive power, which would make it awesome. But it turned out to be pain, rather. So I dismissed it quickly.
There just was no good alternative if yuo hated Outlook as much as the next guy at a time when it was the main door for malwa
Re: This will not necessarily fix their problems (Score:3)
Your solution to too much management is ... more management?
Ever heard of the term "bullshit jobs"?
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Good project software, or good usage of, reduces the need for managers.
IBM's specific problems versus general malaise (Score:5, Interesting)
Partial concurrence, though I think IBM's largest specific problem is over-optimization for anti-human values of optimization. In other words, I might describe it as the "ultimate triumph" of the MBAs. You're describing one typical anecdote of bean counting, but I think the "anti-focus" that is most killing the company is the workforce optimization thing.
Rather than being a company built around a large core of long-term employees with high loyalty to the company, they are transitioning to a tiny kernel of lifers focused on high-level management and as much of the real work as possible is effectively externalized and handled by people on short-term contracts. They increasingly dangle direct employment as a lure to make the contract people work harder, but the real objective is to pay the fewest number of people for the shortest times possible for the biggest possible sales. Not the vision of the junior Watson who made the company so successful. (The senior Watson had some good ideas, too, but mixed with bad and then the history got rewritten. A lot.)
However I think IBM is being destroyed by a more general malaise of monopolization. I think that's a bad thing, but it's the fashion in the business world, and IBM's problem is that it doesn't actually have one. I like to put it in the form of a new genre of joke, though it doesn't seem to be catching on. But here are a few examples (in a definition list, yet) of areas of corporate focus:
So as the joke applies to IBM, I actually see it as a failure to have a real corporate focus of monopolization. This story is just one of the natural results of a company that can't remember why it exists. MBAs can always find the least "profitable" people and chop them off. At least for sufficiently short-sighted values of "profitable".
Usual disclaimer needed, eh? I also worked with and for IBM for much of my late and not-much-lamented career. They did pay well and most of my coworkers were nice people. Nicer than me, at least, even before I got too old (and crotchety). But I think most of my higher perspectives of the company are from books, not from my years in the trenches. Most recently, I read IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black, which was rather disheartening. The IBM Way by Francis "Buck" Rodgers was at the other end of the spectrum.
(Currently reading Deep Learning with Python and not seeing any connection to IBM. Used to be a time that any book about computers had to acknowledge IBM, but these days most authors can barely remember the company exists. I think there were a few mentions in Console Wars , but nothing about how IBM briefly dominated the game CPUs...)
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I just thought of a possible joke for Microsoft:
All your liability are not belong to us.
Supposed to be a EULA joke about Microsoft's greatest and perhaps only innovation. The joke needs more work, however.
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They had very few people on short-term contracts in the case I was involved in. They had bought into a business and pretty much anyone on a short term contract was shown the door as soon as their contract expired. A lot of the rest are presumably on their way out now.
I do know that they had great difficulty keeping the staff they had inherited. The older ones were taking retirement - early or not - and the younger ones were looking for new jobs. Some retired and then took new jobs.
I was watching this fr
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Not sure how much I should say even though it's been some years since I was retired... They didn't even care enough to caution me about what I might remember, eh? Not even considering that I did quite a bit of HR work in the last few years.
Putting in in demographic terms, if you have a total population around 300,000 with a career lifespan around 30 years, then the replacement rate is only 10,000 per year. But Rometty was publicly proud of hiring far more than that one year. The number that comes to mind is
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How did you get HR's to render in your slashdot post?
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It's actually a definition list. No horizon tags involved. Why it renders that way? Slashdot 2020 is still broken.
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Then some text after the final DL tag.
But this time the DD was just a space to avoi
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they are totally hidebound, slaves to their processes to the extent that they actually get very little done.
I watched a presentation by Dave Snowden who developed a decision making framework (called cynefin) while working at IBM, it sounded like their failures had actually helped him come to this model of thought. One example he gave of problems working at IBM was that it had become common practice for managers to over tip taxi drivers in order to obtain a blank recipt after paying in cash which could then be filled out to obtain the necessary depratmental funding for items that would not get official approval bu
What to do when the i- and zSeries goes away? (Score:3)
Those were good (albeit overpriced) machines. And you can't beat their documentation (after all, they've had 40-60 years to write those manuals). I predict IBM doing a split soon with the hardware units being parted out because (a) they don't have as good ROI as their services and cloud stuff and (b) being cash cows, they'll be easy to sell. But that's just their MBAs thinking that they can keep the battleship from sinking by sawing it in half. That will work about as well as their current strategy of trying to save it by throwing people overboard. THINK!
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You're a little late. They already dumped most of the hardware units years ago.
Re: What to do when the i- and zSeries goes away? (Score:2)
Why? When they can make IBM look good now, when their resume is written, at the cost of it dying later, when their new job contract is signed.
I suggest we re-define the term "traveling salesman" in this context. Or maybe "business fleas". Jumping from business to fuck to business to fuck, until there's nothing left but tears.
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Why would they go away? Is there another common architecture with the security features of the Z series?
IBM Z Infrastructure [ibm.com]
Let's see, what do we want running our bank? An architecture where data and instructions can be encrypted in memory, in transit, and in use and decrypted only when and where needed, and explicitly designed to minimize the possibility of side-channel attacks? Or systems built with Intel chips, which have to be have their firmware constantly updated with laye
I Brexit M (Score:2)
Buh Bye
IBM is under massive age discrimination lawsuit (Score:1)
IBM (Score:2)
IBM (Score:3)
Only old people have heard of IBM .. seriously .. ask a young person what IBM is? They'll have no idea.
How could this happen?
Re: IBM (Score:2)
East-Asia made the same stuff, but cheaper.
So basically, it's the result of global income inequality.
If all jobs that are exactly the same would cost exactly the same in the entire world (e.g. Nyarlathotep enforcing it), they'd probably still be making business machines (like computers).
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I tested this, you were right.
Translation (Score:2)
IBM takes this money and puts it in the bank, then sells that part of the business anyway. They hand over their "candidates for redundancy" plan to the new owner, who makes 10,000 people redundant straight away, or who refuses to sign them in to new contracts as they migrate to a new holding company, effectively side-stepping any legal obl
Re: Translation (Score:2)
At the moment IBM in Europe is being undercut by a lot of medium sized agile consultancies. The difference between Europe and the US is that travel is easy and most professional are super comfortable so can easily take the risk to work for these types of consultancies. Most of these types of consultancies are privately owned by the consultants and can easily undercut contract rates from big conglomerates.
This is news? (Score:2)
When was the last time IBM was in the news for anything besides firing people? It's all they've had to show for their miserable existence for years. If they were hiring 10000 people, that would be news, but firing them? Not only is that not news for nerds, it's not news to anyone born before last night.
Still working on accessibility stuff (Score:2)
I can answer that question. I recently saw several videos of Dr Asakawa demonstrating a sensor unit for the blind. She was featured on the evening news going through airports with a kind of robot suitcase and a shoulder mounted camera.
Another disclaimer needed? Not sure she's still with IBM, though when she first went to CMU she was definitely linked to IBM. And some years after that I remember seeing her in a video in the lobby of the IBM office when I visited an old friend for lunch.
"Slow-growth" (Score:3)
So it was healthy and stable and not gamber material... that's why it must die ... --.--
It was perfectly fine. And factually had bigger log term survival chances than high-growth businesses. (Take one colony of bacteria in a petri dish of limited resources that grows exponentially, and one that stays the same. See which one lives longer.)
I swear, it's like the mirroring of government agencies that grow inefficient and slow because they lack competition. In a "the opposite of evil, is evil" way.
"Slow-growth" -- What's wrong with modern capitalism, in two words.
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Warren Buffett generally says it's better to be profitable than grow. Growing sometimes takes a company outside of what it does well.