Hands up if you want to volunteer for layoffs, IBM tells staff
Hands up if you want to volunteer for layoffs, IBM tells staff
Global 'Resource Actions' to hit Europe hard, with Enterprise Ops & Support, CIO, HR and Real Estate in firing line
Among the ways you can do layoffs, this is one of the better ones for sure. People who are kind of checked out already anyway can get a nice paycheck on their way out and start looking for something new, while people who still have something important to get out of the job get the option to stay.
Consent matters!
207I'm 4 weeks away from my voluntary redundancy. I was planning on leaving the job this year anyway, as I wanted to move, so to get a nice paycheck with it was a definite bonus.
Of the people that chose voluntary redundancy, it was mostly those without ties to the area, those that could move, young enough to re-skill, or old enough to retire. The ones that were forced into redundancy have families, mortgages, history in the area, enough baggage to cause inertia. Part of my reasoning to take the voluntary redundancy was to help save at least one person from that.
So absolutely, consent matters. It just sucks that this is happening at all.
The company's stated reasons for redundancy was to move skills to other locations in the country. This is after a year's long effort to co-locate in order to facilitate collaboration. What it really seems to be is that our location has very high staff retention, and therefore high salaries, and the company thinks it can hire younger and cheaper elsewhere. The skill and knowledge lost with this move is staggering, everyone can see that, but profit is the most important factor the company cares about, so it'll inflict its own wounds to get profit up. Capitalism is weird.
63I got laid off a couple of years ago by a large tech company (rhymes with Brisco). It sort of sucked, but it was part of a mass layoff of about half the employees who had come into Brisco when our original small company was acquired by them. Interestingly enough, everybody who was laid off was single and childless - all the people who were married and/or had kids were kept on. At least until this new round of layoffs, because fuck everybody we're going with AI.
2
My work did this a few years ago and one guy who was planning on retiring took it. He got a full extra year of pay and 2 or 3 years of medical insurance out of the deal.
9Absolutely, I'd happily take a redundancy payout from my current job.
6
I mean if there are severance packages, I wouldn't say no.
111IBM laid me off 6 years ago. the severance package wasnt awful, I did a mini-retirement for a few years. it was nice
77Damn, wish I could get fired by ibm
24Yeah, being laid off by a huge company can be a lot less awful than a smaller one because they pay you off pretty nicely.
9
I was laid-off in 2022 and got a pretty nice severance, and my new job pays 40% more. I wish I had known how relatively quickly I was going to find another job because I would have enjoyed my time off a lot more. I personally don't know anyone who has been laid-off and ended up worse off.
44I was laid off from a big company in 2023, after being with them for 5 years. They told us in March, had it hang over our heads for 2 months, while they did rounds of layoffs. My coworker and myself got laid off finally at the very end. So did the guy I got hired, and had been with the company for like 3 years.
When I tell people I got laid off, they give me sympathy, but I tell them it's not that bad because due to a contract they had to give me 3 months notice in order to lay me off. My boss said I didn't have to work those 3 months, so it was a paid vacation. I also got like 12 grand in severance, and possibly 25 grand in benefits in an investment account. I can still get unemployment, which I'm on, and will run out soon. I've moved cities and haven't worked a day since the end of May 2023... I did live with my parents for 4 months though, I'm 38.
10
This is called a VRIF, Voluntary Reduction in Force, and usually comes with a sizable severance. Lots of people close to retirement at my last job took the offer because it was worth it.
109That's what I was looking for in the article but nothing is mentioned.
11
Was given the option about 6 years ago at IBM. Jumped at the opportunity, unfortunately wasn't approved. "no, we still have a lot of work for you"
Ended up leaving 3 months later, ah well
28Didn't know Henry Cavill works at IBM.
25🎵Throw some severance coin to your Witcher🎵
17
Can we all agree that photo was created by ChatGPT and not an artist. Maybe they ought to put their money where their mouth is.
22Absolutely not! ChatGPT is a large language model and cannot generate images.ChatGPT can have a little image gen once in a while as a treat.
4
The picture is bullshit, most people taking voluntary severance would be giving each other high-five’s and pumping the air.
21Except if the severance package is BS and they don’t find enough volunteers (but hey! They tried!) and people get volunteered
3
IBM already silently reduced more tan 5000 positions globally two years ago, creating a separate independent company called Kyndryl. Ernst and Young did the same before that, three years ago outsourcing half of the IT department. Silently.
20Wow, IBM is still around?
20Our tech leans heavily on AS400s, if you can believe that. And we have 98% market share in our space. They're complex, but they work, and don't fail.
29I worked with that and COBOL lol. I'll never be without a job I guess.
DB2 isn't terrible tbh but of course I want to use something like postgres if I had the choice.
12
Yeah but they don't do anything anymore. They create nothing, they innovate nothing, they build nothing. They're a "service company" now. It's not at all a shock that they're failing to anyone but them themselves. IBM should never have green lit that brainless brain drain shift of focus.
18That's entirely untrue. IBM does mega projects and research for things the average consumer wouldn't know or care about. Their customer base is industries, not people.
40An IBM Power9 supercomputer built in 2018 is #7 on the top500.org supercomputer list. That's not nothing.
Dunno if they're going anywhere now though or if that was their last hurrah.
39Having worked for a couple chip design shops, and now at ibm... ibm is the one of a few companies pushing the envelope in chip design. You just don't need what they make, so you've never heard of it.
31Last I read IBM was one of the big companies pursuing R&D in quantum computers and such plus they have some software stuff like crimestat and the weather channel under their umbrella.
28They also do quite a bit of engineering r&d stuff.
They just sell the licenses for their solutions and research now rather than directly making products from it.
12They do things like ruin CentOS and buy up and screw up smaller data center companies.
10You just have no idea what they do, clearly. That doesn't mean they don't do anything.
7IBM is still just as active, just not in the consumer markets anymore. They're big into industry research and more specialized computing these days.
2You really, really should inform yourself before you make statements about things you know jack shit about.
0
Yeah. And they have 3% market share of the cloud services.
AWS has 34%.
3IBM is a law firm masquerading as a tech company. Anyone who has experienced their "partnerships" already knows this. Jesus Christ their contacts are insane. Once they get their claws in you're fucked.
Source - 10+ years dealing with them in various capacities.
2IBM appears to be returning to its roots - mainframe engineering.
1
If someone volunteered to be laid off wouldn't that invalidate their unemployment?
8Generally it is proffered with a severance package that invalidates the unemployment. The package is likely better than what you'd get with unemployment and saves the company money by not increasing their unemployment insurance.
26Depends on the jurisdiction. I got a decent severence and was still eligible for unemployment in WA state USA.
2
AIBM Corp is a few years early in this timeline
5AI BM
4Open the door HAL
1
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Resource Action, as Big Blue likes to euphemistically refer to layoffs, shouldn't be a massive surprise to anyone with more than a passing interest in IBM as it was signaled last month in a Q4 earnings call.
Insiders told us this latest process is not considered to be financial but “transformative,” although IBM was quite clear in January when CFO James Kavanaugh discussed achieving “$3 billion annual run rate in savings by the end of 2024.” This is a third bigger than the initial ambition.
As if often the preferred route, IBM is seeking employees that are happy to take voluntary redundancy, rather than ditching someone that doesn’t want to leave.
Slovakia, we're told, is to feel the tightest squeeze with around a third of IBM’s cuts in Europe landing on its International (shared services) Center in Bratislava; the Center in Hungary that supports EO&S/ Q2C, as well as the Finance function in Bulgaria are also going to absorb what our sources described as the most dramatic staff reductions.
We asked IBM to comment on the points raised above, and a spokesperson sent us a statement, insisting this is not a cost saving initiative.
This rebalancing is driven by increases in productivity and our continued push to align our workforce with the skills most in demand among our clients, especially areas such as AI and hybrid cloud."
The original article contains 488 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 53%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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