Multiple layoffs occurred in Burlington VT, Endicott NY and Austin TX today. They appear to have been a long time coming as several of the former employees mentioned spending the better part of 2006 training their replacements to perform the tasks for which they alone were responsible.

Rightsizing is not uncommon and often used by companies to get rid of a few bad apples - or even one - while avoiding discrimination or other charges (By no means am I saying all those laid off were bad apples). It isn’t clear how many folks were let go today, but there hasn’t been any news coverage of it in any of the cities where it occurred. That leads me to believe that this is planned and not substantial. (edit 12 Sept 2006: article in NY newspaper speculates the number of worldwide layoff to be between 500 and 700 people. Some employees are with the IBM-Endicott tech group but it isn’t clear if all are)

I found the discussion at the IBM board at Yahoo! about the layoffs interesting. It is obviously worth noting that disgruntled and emotional former employees are not impartial in their criticisms, but some of the critiques were interesting to me.

The link to the thread is here. The UI is kind of distracting but you can change the appearance to suit you using the view menu. Here are some highlights:

“I once had a PDM, during a moment of rare honesty, once tell me that IBM now did not expect employees to be in a long term status, rather, a short term association.”

You don’t have to tell me how IBM has changed, I’m a 2nd-generation IBMer. I grew up going to the “IBM Christmas parties” where they would hire out a big auditorium and fill it with piles of presents, sorted by age and gender, for kids of employees. That IBM is long, long gone.

Of course I was/am a commodity, treated like garbage - thrown out when the usefulness is gone.

In my case, I have identical skills as my co-workers who remain - C++ Object Oriented programming, with 4 years of Java experience as well. Very current skills. However, the guy in India does same for fraction of my pay, and I’m one of the first in my area to train a guy in India - and yes, alarm bells went off in my head this spring when I was told I had someone to “help” me with the software component I owned.

I had my desk cleaned out 10 days ago, in case it was a “march you to the door” layoff.

Good summary of IBM resource situation. Result:

“This lack of retention of experenced employees, and teh(sic) constant resource shifting churn, IMO is one of the reasons IBM executes poorly globally.”

This result has been proven for years by the break even or worse performance of services (IGS type) despite the best excuses and financial face lift that IBM financial engineering can muster.

All the profits come from divisions with minimal cross tower requirements.

That last line is telling and seems to be true. I don’t think the IBM jams are unifying the company fast enough or thoroughly enough to make consequential change.

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