back to article IBM layoffs now top 1,200

IBM has laid off over 1,200 employees in the last few days, according to a union organising group for the company's staff. Alliance@IBM's homepage reports job cuts of 1,202 staff members, a collated figure gathered from the organisation's members sending in their severance letters, so-called "resource action" documents. Lee …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    wonder..

    how many will be outsourced to manpower or some other slave driving subcontractor

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: wonder..

      They'll be outsourced (if you can call it that) to IBM elsewhere, most likely.

      Pretty sure they're taking on heaps of people in so-called "Growth Markets" (India, Brazil, China, SE Asia in general....). The US (and probably much of Europe) do not qualify as the markets are getting saturated, not to mention that employees in established markets usually cost more.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: wonder..

        Last I worked for IBM (as a contractor), a great many Indian people were around, as much of the operations outsourcing was going East (and I do not mean towards Armonk), and for many reasons, cheap and well-educated labour plus cheap power, to name two.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Well Educated?

          I've worked with a ton of outsourced Indians, and the term "well-educated" never came to mind. "Not educated" or rather "completely stupid" came to mind a lot, though. I'm assuming you're talking about software developers, but maybe there's something else we outsource a lot to India that they actually educate themselves about before doing. I've made more money in freelance cleaning up/fixing problems (or more usually just starting the project over) caused by outsourced Indian developers, than I have from regular clients.

          The way I've seen the world of contract development to work (mind you, I've only been doing it for five years) is you hire an Indian for $10-$20/hour to sit on his ass and do nothing, and you get burned because you paid upfront for 200 hours of work. Then you hire someone with actual skills, experience, and a formal education for $30-$150/hour, but are reluctant in negotiations because you already spent so much money on the project. This good developer is forced to take a huge risk with you because you're unwilling to pay any money upfront because of the time you got burned. Then when the good developer finishes the project in just a few hours, you give them a bonus because they're "amazing", though they're actually only good, but you don't know that because Indian you hired is so terrible he couldn't possibly rank on any sort of measure of programming skill.

          </rant>

          I've personally been in this situation at least a dozen times, and so has everyone else I know in the freelance world. Does IBM have a monopoly on the six half-decent outsourced Indian developers out there or is this the reason they've been fading into the dark for the last 15 years?

  2. W.O.Frobozz
    FAIL

    Wait...

    ...shouldn't the article say "rightsizing?" After all, IBM coined that awful term.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    and they wonder why we ae all unhappy

    1200 in the US, but nearly 2000 have gone in Germany. There are now <100000 in the US for the first time in years. Last time they went through major redundancies in the US, they offered people positions in the 'growth markets' on local rates, you can imagine how well that went down.

    Ac for very obvious reasons

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Did they cut any executive salaries?

    I didn't think so...

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Manpower?

    jobs won't be going to contractor shops like manpower I fancy... that's also being cut I hear....

  6. Beachrider

    Details are sparse...

    The IBM layoff is apparently affecting middle-management and professionals, mostly. The IBM USA manufacturing workforce was not as strongly affected. It kind of makes sense for IBM education and research to deploy across a broader (international) range of potential customers, but this stuff is never pretty.

    IBM tends to handle upper management retirements in a different way. Sometimes this results in golden-parachutes, sometimes a range of demotions/retirements. There doesn't appear to be much of that in this action.

    1,200 out of nearly 400,000 isn't mathematically large, but it hurts when it affects you...

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    In Germany 8000 out of 20000

    ..are supposed to "become self-employed and then be hired as contractors on a per-project basis, depending on demand. That all being managed through a global project/resource portal".

    What that means in my opinion is that IBM has decided that 40% of their business is not worth it and the cheapest way of getting rid of people is to annoy them. That saves all the redundancy payoffs for the long-term employees.

    Qualified people are already quite scarce here in Germany, as the economy is doing well and demographics does its work.

    But then, who needs IBM today ? Their hardware is nice, but lots of cheap x86 alternatives exist. Armies of developers and consultants can do their job.

  8. Beachrider

    Where do you get those numbers?

    8000 laid off in Germany? Where is that announcement?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Announcement?

      You think that would be announced?

      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-01/verdi-rep-says-ibm-could-cut-more-than-8-000-jobs-in-long-term.html

      or, if you read German, http://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/it-medien/schrumpfkurs-ibm-baut-in-deutschland-tausende-stellen-ab/6135510.html

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Where do you get those numbers?

      See http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/0,1518,812630,00.html

      Google translate will do some kind of translation.

  9. Beachrider

    The German layoff has no date or timeframe

    Der Spiegel article has no timeframe and all numbers are estimates. It is almost certainly something that doesn't happen in 2012. It is a pretty wild SWAG and shouldn't be compared to the actual layoff being discussed in this article.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Staff that TUPE over from new Outsourced Contracts will go directly to Manpower. Much as I will be TUPEing to a new supplier over the comming months after 20years due to IBM loosing a huge contract thanks to its IDC in Bangalore.....

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