IBM Shifts Remaining US-Based AIX Dev Jobs To India 77
According to The Register, IBM has shifted the roles of US IBM Systems employees developing AIX over to the Indian office. From the report: Prior to this transition, said to taken place in the third quarter of 2022, AIX development was split more or less evenly between the US and India, an IBM source told The Register. With the arrival of 2023, the entire group had been moved to India. Roughly 80 US-based AIX developers were affected, our source estimates. We're told they were "redeployed," and given an indeterminate amount of time to find a new position internally, in keeping with practices we reported last week based on claims by other IBM employees.
Evidently, the majority of those redeployed found jobs elsewhere at IBM. A lesser number of staff are evidently stuck in "redeployment limbo," with no IBM job identified and no evident prospects at the company. "It also appears that these people in 'redeployment' limbo within IBM are all older, retirement eligible employees," our source said. "The general sense among my peers is that redeployment is being used to nudge older employees out of the company and to do so in a manner that avoids the type of scrutiny that comes with layoffs."
Layoffs generally come with a severance payment and may have reporting requirements. Redeployments -- directing workers to find another internal position, which may require relocating -- can avoid cost and bureaucracy. They also have the potential to encourage workers to depart on their own. We're told that IBM does not disclose redeployment numbers to its employees and does not report how internal jobs were obtained -- through internal search, with the assistance of management -- or were not obtained -- employees left in limbo or who choose to leave rather than wait.
Evidently, the majority of those redeployed found jobs elsewhere at IBM. A lesser number of staff are evidently stuck in "redeployment limbo," with no IBM job identified and no evident prospects at the company. "It also appears that these people in 'redeployment' limbo within IBM are all older, retirement eligible employees," our source said. "The general sense among my peers is that redeployment is being used to nudge older employees out of the company and to do so in a manner that avoids the type of scrutiny that comes with layoffs."
Layoffs generally come with a severance payment and may have reporting requirements. Redeployments -- directing workers to find another internal position, which may require relocating -- can avoid cost and bureaucracy. They also have the potential to encourage workers to depart on their own. We're told that IBM does not disclose redeployment numbers to its employees and does not report how internal jobs were obtained -- through internal search, with the assistance of management -- or were not obtained -- employees left in limbo or who choose to leave rather than wait.
Ka-Ching... (Score:5, Insightful)
These "older, retirement eligible employees" will be able to name their price after they're begged to come clean up after the Indians, soon.
Re: Ka-Ching... (Score:5, Informative)
I expect IBM to kill AIX instead, it's a dead end.
So no or very little new development, just a few new patches and then in a few years it's axed.
Re: Ka-Ching... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Ka-Ching... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Ka-Ching... (Score:5, Informative)
ironic, in that people from india, in tech, tend to emphasize java and even M$ style systems. when I interview and look for even the most basic linux skills, they almost never are there. windows, oh yeah, this and that, but not ip networking, not unix of any kind, just no.
if you want java, have all you want. but, uh, that's not even a thing in my world. embedded and unix types dont do lots of java; and if java sits on top and does things, that's not our job ;)
ibm sending its unix to india. yeah. bye bye ibm unix.
(ob disc: I used to work at dec, sgi, sun and a few others like that in my day. goml)
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I am curious long term, how their code quality is going to be, mainly because the offshore places are mainly familiar with Windows, as with Windows, they can follow guides in lock-step and parrot information from somewhere else, stamping cookie cutter configs.
Linux (and UNIX in general), is different, and can't really be done with the lock-step mentality. There are many ways to implement something like Hashicorp Vault, all which will work in varying degrees. It takes knowing and going off the beaten track
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ironic, in that people from india, in tech, tend to emphasize java and even M$ style systems. when I interview and look for even the most basic linux skills, they almost never are there. windows, oh yeah, this and that, but not ip networking, not unix of any kind, just no.
if you want java, have all you want. but, uh, that's not even a thing in my world. embedded and unix types dont do lots of java; and if java sits on top and does things, that's not our job ;)
It's not ironic, that's where the demand is. Java development is expensive, so surprise, there's lots of Java experience in India now. Going out on a limb; AIX development is expensive, so now there will be more AIX development experience in India. Whether we like it or not, Java development on Windows/Mac, deployed to Linux servers is the king of the hill right now. Pretending otherwise changes nothing, and I like how you say _if_Java sits on top, like you don't know the answer to that, or merely installi
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I guess that they couldn't find another software company to unload the support burden of this obsolete software, like they did with OS/2 and Lotus Notes/Domino?
Re: Ka-Ching... (Score:4, Insightful)
As an annually-licensed piece of software used across multiple product lines, I suspect AIX, while maybe not the industry darling it once was, is likely a cash cow generating profits sufficient to more than cover to cost of the 80 employees that formerly supported it.
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The OS is "free", except that you need an IBM Power server to run it. Those have a huge price premium over their Intel and AMD powered competitors.
Re: Ka-Ching... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a lot of companies that have widespread use of AIX. Same with Oracle Solaris. Neither is going away, just because the momentum is too great, and they have man-centuries of work piled up on the hardware and OS platform. For example, DB/2 is something that is going to probably outlast our civilization.
It would be nice if there were a migration path. AIX's future really hinges on how POWER keeps up. Can IBM get POWER to do 64+ cores? Can IBM still use TurboCore mode to cut the amount of cores in half, crank up the clock speed, and allow the active cores to use the disabled cores' caches? If IBM isn't able to keep the foot on the accelerator when it comes to hardware, their best bet might be to go with porting to RISC-V, ARM, or amd64... which will be a very major undertaking because AIX has been on POWER hardware for so long, that it would be a true effort to get it somewhere else. However, if IBM can't keep up with other chip architectures, they should have some migration path for the companies that pay big bucks for IBM iron and all the 9s that one gets from the POWER platform.
Re: Ka-Ching... (Score:4, Interesting)
Can IBM get POWER to do 64+ cores?
Eh. They support 120 threads per socket. They do much wider SMT than x86 cpus tend to, so it's 15 full cores with 8 threads per core. Or 30 full cores with 4 way SMT.
Unfortunately IBM did weird stuff with Power 10, so there are no Talos systems, which means no good benchmarks.
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There are a lot of companies that have widespread use of AIX. Same with Oracle Solaris.
I think you're right, I'd imagine those companies will continue using AIX as long as POWER systems are still being produced.
Solaris is a bit different tough. Didn't Oracle announce the end of SPARC production a few years ago? I know Fujitsu used to make SPARC based systems, I don't know if that's still a thing. Solaris on x86 was never really all that popular, and running stuff compiled for SPARC on Solaris x86 is crummy.
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I think they use it a lot internally to cross compile OS/400 and mainframe stuff. It’s unix but has some unique features and quirks. The smit configuration tool is really nice to work with.
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My experience from smit is that it was decent, but it was horribly slow to install patches.
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Re:Ka-Ching... (Score:5, Interesting)
These "older, retirement eligible employees" will be able to name their price after they're begged to come clean up after the Indians, soon.
That actually happened to a friend of mine when his employer shifted printer development to India. They had to rehire all the old engineers to fix the mistakes being made by the development team in India. In the end it cost more and took longer than just doing the work in house using experienced developers. But I'm sure some MBA made the numbers look good and got a promotion and a raise out of the deal.
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Something similar happened to me as well and now my previous employer pays my new employer for my time as a consultant. I don't mind - it is a job I can do in my sleep and the new company pays better anyway.
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It is much much cheaper to award a consultancy contract to a team of 3-5 key former employees than to have ongoing employment for 80.
This works because of the empirical fact in that output vs. workers is governed by a power law. Price's law [dariusforoux.com] or Lotka's law suggests that in a given domain approximately 50% of the work is done by only root n of the workers, where n = 2 approximately. The trick is of course to identify which ones are the key employees.
And if you RTFA, half the work was already being done in Ind
its a version of bsd that ibm has (Score:2, Interesting)
in 89 i discovered a root exploit by accident depressing a second key on trying ot exit a program
lets just say that was fun to have access to my report card file that was for a different system
lol
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What the fuck is AIX?
Think Solaris for the IBM.
If you also have to ask "What is Solaris?" then I throw in the towel.
Re:This in turn begs the question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also knows as Aches and Pains. The IBM version of Unix.
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AIX = Ain't UNIX
Re:This in turn begs the question... (Score:5, Informative)
AIX, or Alien Interpretation of UNIX has been around a long time. Overall, it isn't bad, and it works well, just because it has had decades to mature on standardized hardware.
Overall, I wish IBM would open source it, just to see what could be done. It has a very good rating for being hard to kill, decently secure, and decently reliable. You can even deploy it where there is no root user or role (to do system updates, one boots the LPAR from a different root filesystem to do the updates, then boots back). AIX also has trustchk, which is a very solid way of protecting executables from tampering, all the while allowing for updates.
Re:This in turn begs the question... (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't just BSD. It also has licensed SVR4 code in it, so it sort of has both ways of doing things. Then it adds its own twist, because the OS originally came from a third party... which AFAIK, IBM fixed a lot of, especially from the transition from 3.x to 4.x.
I wish IBM didn't try to compete with Accenture, and the other Indian firms on their own turf. Instead, IBM had something that was unique and people would buy -- a one stop shop for everything. You could buy the hardware, backend database, software, OS, network stuff, and just have one number to call when stuff broke. If a drive failed, an IBM SE would be automatically called out to fix it without having to put in a PMR/PMH.
IBM sort of reminds me of Sears. Sears pretty much obliterated itself by trying to compete with companies that were designed from the bottom up to just focus on price over everything. However, Sears was built on getting decent products, where even their cheapest "Budget Beating Value" were not bad items. Had Sears kept with that, having known good brands, solid support, parts and such, they likely would be around today, since not everyone wants to just go for whatever a big box store has for an appliance -- they want something known and good, and Kenmore, even though it often was rebranded stuff, was a solid performer and repairable. IBM is the same. They need to go back on focusing on patents, making new stuff, and using their strengths as being the only real mainframe company out there, as well as having extremely fast (though expensive) CPUs with Z and POWER. Software-wise, if you are scaling on a large scale, DB/2 is the only game in town, and IBM needs to capitalize on that. IBM needs to sell goods and their strong stuff... not try to go toe-to-toe with Indian companies who can easily prevail on price and sheer armies of workers.
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Where do you think systemd stole the idea of binary log files from? AIX started that.
Should be illegal (Score:3)
This should be 100% illegal, redepoloying jobs to India or outsourcing to a third world country is nothing but IBM giving the middle finger to America and the workers who have sacrificed their time building IBM to what it is today. My goal for this year is to ditch every IBM product my team has deployed over the last few years. That's Red Hat, Stackrox (Now Openshift Cluster Security), and Ansible, for a total of almost 120k a year spend. Screw'em....
Re: Should be illegal (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Should be illegal (Score:3)
Nobody sacrificed their time. They got paid for it.
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Nonsense.
Company Men put on their three-piece suits, arrived early, sang the IBM Song every morning at 8, and rarely saw their families.
I know some guys my age who are pretty messed up because their dads were never home.
They got a gold watch one year and a pink slip the next.
Broken to the core. The loyalty was one-way.
Re: Should be illegal (Score:2)
They got paid.
They didn't do it for free.
Missing information. (Score:3, Funny)
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Previous company was 95% Indian in our support department. That side of the building always smelled awful and building management had to hang signs saying not to leave underwear in the bathroom and do not flush anything other than toilet paper.
Re:Missing information. (Score:4, Informative)
They work cheap and can't negotiate for higher wages elsewhere.
Re:Missing information. (Score:4, Interesting)
Or if they are smart, they get permanent resident status, and get out of the H-1B hellhole.
IMHO, the H-1B program needs to be chucked. If people are such experts that they need to be imported on a specific visa, they should get permanent residency so they are not shackled to a company which can fire (and thus have them deported) at anytime. That way, if they are worth a hefty sum of money, they can jump to another company to get it. The H-1B program doesn't benefit the visa holders, nor the US in general.
Re:Missing information. (Score:5, Interesting)
It takes awhile for them to get permanent resident status, though. The viability of that path changes with the mood of the public and/or the administration in office.
I think we could retain the H1-B program, but it would require much greater oversight of the program. As it stands:
H1-Bs are used to fill job postings that are only listed to meet legal requirements. The job listings often include stupid requirements (10 years+ experience in Rust, for example) that the H1-Bs themselves can't meet despite them being used to fill the posts, often before the jobs are even listed publicly.
H1-Bs are often less-qualified to do work than Americans, forcing American workers to train their H1-B replacements as a condition of receiving severance. American workers thus-replaced may lose their severance if they complain publicly about the process (breaking an NDA).
Per the above, training large groups of H1-Bs and deporting the slow learners is cheaper/easier than training people off the street in the United States, calling into question the idea that we need the H1-B program at all to fill critical shortages of skilled workers since so many H1-Bs aren't necessarily skilled before they fill their posts.
H1-Bs never earn as much as American counterparts doing the same job.
Fix the above and the program could work as intended, which is to bring in workers that already have skills that Americans might not have in great enough quantity to fill available job posts. The H1-B program should not be used to lower salary floors; replace already-employed Americans; and encourage the import of powerless, unskilled foreign workers.
160 devs (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news IBM supports it’s legacy OS products with skeleton crews while charging it’s locked in customers an absolute mint. This doesn’t surprise me at all having used some of these products, more confirms my long held suspicions.
Re:160 devs (Score:5, Interesting)
The ironic thing is that since AIX 5L, any Linux binaries work on the OS... although Linux on POWER isn't that common. In theory, this should work in reverse, although the big endian/little endian thing might hamper porting to x86... and ARM is a world to itself for endian-ness.
AIX has some nice things. PowerVM is tried and true, and you can get a good amount of 9s from IBM POWER hardware. However, on x86 or ARM, the good hardware/software features are not present, so one might be better off with just using a Linux distribution.
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I thought Linux partitions on POWER was a selling point?
IIRC it's under IBM i as the host, but memory is a bit fuzzy today.
Re:160 devs (Score:5, Interesting)
However, on x86 or ARM, the good hardware/software features are not present, so one might be better off with just using a Linux distribution.
They don't make the specialised x86 hardware any more so that version of AIX is dead. As for Linux distributions, having run the same software on both platforms, the stuff running on AIX has been noticeably more stable. However software running on AIX is a pain in the ass to maintain and develop for because of inherent differences between the way API's and software functions on AIX vs Linux. I expect that what will happen is that the Indians will basically be ripping FOSS software, porting it to AIX which IBM will then plans to re-sell to it's customers at mark-ups that would make Apple and Oracle go white faced. The whole thing smells of a Boeing 737/MCAS type situation where a high availability system is now being developed at bargain basement prices and sold to customers at premium prices. It's one of those genius business model master strokes aimed at increasing profit margins that will jump up and bite IBM in the balls if the stability factor on AIX starts tanking because that is literally the 90% of the reason people use it.
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I haven't looked in AIX in about 10 years, is CICS available on it?
Redeployment limbo (Score:2)
So, if you're in this position... do you still get paid? If so, and it were me, I might be tempted to just ride it out and force IBM's hand.
AIX? (Score:3)
Wait, AIX is still a thing?
Re:AIX? (Score:4, Insightful)
AIX isn't going to die. Even though it has a binary compatibility guarantee (IIRC) back to 3.2.5.1, there are a ton of applications and workflows ontop of the OS, mainly because it doesn't really change. Ten years from now, the same commands that are used to carve out a WPAR will still work.
This is especially important in government and banking where there is a ton of paperwork, and the less change the better.
I have a feeling that AIX was going to be put in "maintenance mode" anyway. Probably IBM i will soon follow.
In any case... SMIT happens.
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"Probably IBM i will soon follow"
I truly hope not. OS400 (IBM i) is a damn good OS.
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In any case... SMIT happens.
Thanks for giving me a chuckle this morning! :)
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bank here, our AIX footprint has shrunk a ton. Almost but not quite going away. Same with the mainframe.
Re:AIX? (Score:4, Interesting)
I recently found out you can still buy Catia for AIX. If you’re not familiar, Catia is what they use to design things like jumbo jets.
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Yes, AIX was AFAIR the first system CATIA was developed for back in the 1980s. It is not an AIX exclusive, though. Have seen CATIA for Windows over two decades ago.
"Redeployed"... that's funny... (Score:1)
The ironic thing is that in other areas, it is mentioned on other websites that other divisions of IBM cannot hire "redeployed" employees. So, basically those AIX guys are essentially laid off, but with a month or two to sit there and wrap up before getting shitcanned.
Of course, the US government is going to love this, especially how India cozies up to Russia every chance they get. But IBM of now isn't the Big Blue of the past that actually invented stuff. The IBM of today has handed its title of patent
Re: "Redeployed"... that's funny... (Score:2)
Tollways is a milk cow for IBM, so if they move out of Texas it might be a motive to stop road toll collection.
The death spiral speeds up (Score:3)
I just finished migrating Cobol to an AIX machine (Score:3)
Next 20 years I can spend on migrating AIX to RedHat.
The slow death-by-apalling-managemt continues (Score:3)
Hired gun CEOs are often deadly. As a brilliant innovative company ages it becomes as vulnerable to debilitating and deadly diseases as a living organism. Incompetent boards of directors (often with people appointed for political reasons) eventually hire some random idiot CEO and if he/she is slightly incompetent in the field the company is in, this is akin to contracting cancer. The problems will gradually grow, and metastasize. Eventually, some other CEO can be brought in and, like a course of chemotherapy, possibly put the cancer into remission, but rarely does a company fully recover from one of these illnesses and return to its former rigor. Companies like this often experience a series of remissions and returns, but each usually leaves them weaker just as in living organisms.
Can anybody name a significant new product that IBM has rolled-out since the IBM PS/2 and the OS/2 operating systems? There's been a constant drip drip drip of product lines being sold-off and senior employees being retired and replaced by H1-B hires and outsourcing, but I cannot recall any new things. Any reasonably competent board of directors, looking to protect investors, SHOULD correct this sort of behaviors but they rarely do and I'm not counting on IBM's board suddenly discovering a few functional brain cells.
The one thing certain in these scenarios: the board members play golf with the CEO and his team, and the CEO and his team have been given golden parachutes that will enable them to eventually depart with a payout of millions of dollars as the workers who they commanded lose their jobs and the investors who were supposed to be represented by the board lose their shirts.
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"significant new product that IBM has rolled-out since the IBM PS/2 and the OS/2 operating systems"
POWER systems and Z-series mainframes continue to develop.
Under the covers, a 2022 Z-series bears little comparison to that from 20 or even 10 years ago. Ditto POWER systems. I'd call them new products except for the backwards compatibility.
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Can anybody name a significant new product that IBM has rolled-out since the IBM PS/2 and the OS/2 operating systems?
The ThinkPad line was also pretty important when it came to x86 laptops, although Lenovo has it now.
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IBM hasn't innovated since the early 90s. After that they furiously slashed and burned, to the point that no trace of innovative culture remains. Current day IBM is purely an offshoring/cash cowing operation. They have been in a multi-decade dismantlement which will probably wind down in another decade or so.
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Can anybody name a significant new product that IBM has rolled-out since the IBM PS/2 and the OS/2 operating systems? There's been a constant drip drip drip of product lines being sold-off and senior employees being retired and replaced by H1-B hires and outsourcing, but I cannot recall any new things.
Recently? IBM Q?
And well, IBM has led the patents in the US for 29 years straight... many of them related to two-nanometer processes, and quantum computing... E.g.: https://fortune.com/2023/01/06... [fortune.com]
So why not Apple? (Score:2)
Seriously.
There ought to be some room for Kernel-level AIX Devs. to transmogrify into macOS Devs.
That sounds like a possible talent sink for some of these people.
In fact, since IBM is such a Mac-friendly Company, perhaps there are some groups writing internal Mac Tools there, too.
Jamf is another possibility, as well.
Jus' sayin'. Don't Hate. . .
Gotta keep the stock price up (Score:1)
Positive aspects (Score:1)