Perspectives On the Latest IBM Layoffs 135
An anonymous reader writes "After IBM reported disappointing Q1 earnings in March, to nobody's surprise, layoffs (RAs or 'Resource Actions' in IBM parlance) were announced two months later; June 12 seemed to be when most of the pink slips were handed out. While this is hardly a novel occurrence at IBM, this time the RA'd employee water cooler page is now open for everyone's inspection, and Cringely let loose with some predictable I-told-you-so's about financially oriented IBM senior management. Dan Burger at IT Jungle has a more numbers-oriented take on the latest round of layoffs."
Re:Worked at IBM (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I can't speak for IBM, but I've been through layoffs before.
If they tell you you're being laid off, but you still need to do the training of your replacements, you likely only get any severance package they're giving you if you comply.
If you tell them to fuck off and train themselves, they might say "OK, you quit so you get no severance package".
So, if your choice is do it and get your severance, or not do it and get nothing at all, most people would choose the former. If you're in a position to go for the moral satisfaction of telling them to screw themselves, well, go ahead.
In my case, they were laying off an entire team which maintained a product. They kept me on a little longer to do the knowledge transfer and shut off the lights, but on my next-to-last day we got a big panic from a salesman who said there were critical bugs to be fixed and a few new features to be added, and there was a multi-million dollar sale on the line.
That, unfortunately, required that I remind them that if they had that much business on the line, then why were they cutting the entire development team? I'll help you do the knowledge transfer if my severance on the line, but suddenly realizing that you needed me to do more than the winding down process to support sales was a little much, and I was only willing to go so far.
If we had millions in the pipeline and you've now laid off the entire development team -- well, you need to be making smarter decisions. If the accountants decide to lay off your business critical people, then you have a problem with your accountants. Having the sales guys in a big panic was just insult to injury -- I don't care that your commission is at risk, because that's not my problem anymore.
Re:I'm glad I got out of there (Score:5, Informative)
I'll second everything in the parent post including the joy of leaving the company last year. I had joined in the late 90's and saw the party slowly end and the crushing grip of earnings expectations squeeze every last penny out of the soul of each employee, especially anyone with talent.
The company has been transformed by Palmisano into a company eating machine. The buying spree started around 2001 and has only increased. After each purchase of a company, any products it has are fed into the IBM sales machine which promises the world to every customer. Development then gets its hands on it and tries to graft every interface imaginable and scale it to hundreds of times anything that had ever been tried. Bandaids are wrapped on the thousands of issues that arise during this process and the product enters a permanent maintenance mode until another company is purchased with a similar product to replace it. Once replaced, it is summarily shat into the dung heap of end-of-life'd IBM crapware.
All "innovation" in IBM is now focused simply on how to make the Frankenstein mess of products the company has acquired over the past decade work with each other in only the simplest ways. No more room for real developers and in fact most good ones have either headed for the doors or are in the process of doing so.