Big Blue bloodbath: More IBM staff slashed in Europe, US IBM's ongoing “remix” of its staff has bitten again, with fresh layoffs announced in the US and Europe. The Watching IBM Facebook group says the company is going to cut 17 per cent of its US sales force to “make room in July for new open source positions”, in what it says is code-named “Project Solitaire”. In Europe, the …
Reminds of the joke about AT&T = Allen and Two Temps. If they are hiring staff for a new project what is the problem with retraining the staff they are letting go. Either way one faces a training period. The old guard needs to learn some new skills but has legacy knowledge. While the new hires may have the skills but lack the legacy knowledge.
Because you can't always retrain people to do the work.
In the world of Big Data, you can't take a DBA and toss him in to a two week training class and expect him to be a certified expert.
In the Big Data space there are a lot of people who take a course, take the certification test and then try to design solutions. As an SME I can tell you that many of the people I work with who have at least a year or two under their belt still don't know enough to be considered a lead developer or architect even though their job title says that they are.
IBM has been spending $$$$ hiring some senior talent but they aren't enough and its easier and cheaper to add to the staff with recent college grads.
To be really good at Big Data, you need to be cross disciplined in programming and in systems. That takes time and effort. IBMers for the most part lack those skills.
Posted Anon for a very good reason.
IBM has been spending $$$$ hiring some senior talent but they aren't enough and its easier and cheaper to add to the staff with recent college grads.
So what you're saying is that old dogs can't learn new tricks, and that (for the first time ever?) colleges are turning out newly minted graduates with the latest skills that business needs?
I call bullshit on that idea. You make some valid points (in particular that you can't just retrain anybody successfully, and that job titles mean little), but this looks like simple cost cutting to boost the share price.
Plus the whole thing paints a picture of a company which has been caught by surprise at the change in demand for skills. Is that a company you really want to turn to for advice?
From what I've seen of their partnership agreements it looks more like they're sucking money out of the contract and passing it on to other divisions within IBM in a desperate attempt to make money and make the other divisions appear more successful than they really are. All very short term stuff and is likely to blow up in their faces after a couple more years....
Its not really a surprise. There is definitely more to it than that.
(I'm the AC who first posted as an AC...)
IBM has been trying to get in to the Big Data space for years... going back to 2010.
Remember when IBM forked their own Hadoop release? Then they decided to give away a 32 bit version of their fork for free? (Why get 32 bit when you can get Cloudera or the Apache release in full 64 bit for free? )
The issue was that prior to Rometty, there was the traditional arrogance on the part of IBM.
IBM couldn't get any traction for a lot of reasons. In part, the early adopters of the tech were not IBM's sweet spot in terms of customers. They were the white space where it was IBM was 'vendor of last choice'.
As to the internal issues... you have to understand the blue / green dollar relationship.
Again posting Anon because I really know way too much.
As an ex-IBMer I can tell you that Hursley (and I bet lots of IBM) *used* to have an attrition rate of around 1.5%. that is tiny and unacceptable in the laws of innovative business. It's quite simple - IBM pay you a little less than they *should* but they get away with it because they ask you to do interesting jobs and work in nice surroundings while potentially travelling and with a very good work/life balance. However, this leads to laziness on behalf of the staff and managers so skills have to be refreshed with new ideas and new motivation. Moving some people on is unlikely to kill them and perhaps if they'd have managed their own careers instead of living in the 70's then they may have seen it coming and been prepared or been vital enough not to get moved on. I know MQ and CICS very well are they full of ol' boys who are completely hopeless at understanding human beings (a vital skill in any business nowadays) but very good deep-thinkers BUT (with regards to Hursley anyhow) - MQ and CICS don't need those skills much any more - they are mainly in maintenance mode but for a few projects to keep them fresh e.g. MQ appliance (which they should have done years ago but the ol' boys didn't understand !!!). So, guess what - they moved some people around and lo - MQ appliance finally got done i.e. an example of moving people on (and this case just internally) helped innovation. While they were there they shed some jobs too because times change. However, IBM knows what a crown jewel looks like and they will keep just enough people on MQ and CICS while not trying to loose too many of the ol' boys who still have their place - just not so much as they used to.
Yurp - I sound like a manager but I'm not I just moved on when I saw the math and understood a little of how IBM and business operates. I bet you this column is read by far more techies than it is managers and thus we get these simplistic bleedin' heart comments.
Just saying !
"However, IBM knows what a crown jewel looks like and they will keep just enough people on MQ and CICS while not trying to loose too many of the ol' boys who still have their place"
Wonder how the "ol' boys" feel about 'having their place'? Any of the "ol' boys" care to comment?
As an "ol' boy" in a different field, I'd be checking my CV and looking where to go to sharpish myself.
Mines the one with the pension pot in the pocket...
No, you can teach old dog new tricks... but maybe not the tricks you need and in the time frame that you need them.
Let me see if I can make this simple...
Its 1) Cheaper to hire a recent grad who's taken a semester or more on Big Data technology, has learned Scala and maybe some other Machine Learning Science classes, than it is to spend 10 months training an old dog at their current salary and hoping that they pick it up.
So on this point, yes its about the $$$ and its also about needing the skills yesterday. Colleges have had ML and Big Data related course for the past couple of years. ( I know, I was a substitute teacher for one because a friend had to travel that week and needed someone to cover for him.)
2) Not everyone can develop the skills that they need. You can't take a DBA who's certified on Oracle and DB2, now tell him he's going to be a Big Data Data Engineer. You would be surprised on how many people who have years on Big Data tech who still don't really understand HBase . Also you can't take an old dog who hasn't programmed in 10+ years and make them a top notch programmer in under 6 months. Not to mention teach them a new language like Scala.
So yes, Dorothy, its cheaper to hire the talent who are younger and more experienced. Blend them with SMEs and you have a team.
3) What you may not know... This is IBM's 4th attempt to enter the Big Data market. So already there are IBMers who have been learning the skills . They also have some very smart people who hadn't left the borg. Already IBM is using the old Illustra team that they acquired from the Informix acquisition. So if you hadn't seen the writing on the wall over the past 2+ years and taught yourself the necessary skills, you're effectively dead weight.
Yes, I am posting this anon for a very good reason.
Thinking about IBM skills have you noticed that every time they get involved you end up with 99% of the people they send being those related to management/methodology and 1% being technical/people who actually do something?
Of those 1%, most are very inexperienced.....
They reinvent themselves at need.
That's how HP would present their recent history and glorious future. But the reality is that corporations have a life cycle, and to be successful you do need to reinvent yourself, but you can't pick the winners. That means you need to try lots of things, be agile in spotting what's growing and what's not, know how to manage cash cow businesses whilst growing other smaller operations. GE have over the decades done this very well. Most IT companies haven't remaining one trick ponies, and either fail to come up with new ideas on a timely basis (eg Nokia), come up with great ideas decades before their time and then see others exploit them when they become feasible (Microsoft and tablets), try and pick winners that will quickly scale to the size of an existing dominant core business (IBM, HP, and a million other companies).
There's two related dimensions that appear to be common to these bumbling dinosaurs. The first is the sort of painfully centralised and restrictive decision making that squashes innovation and entrepreneurship. Motorola mobile, Nokia mobile, General Motors all failed mainly for this reason, that good ideas were either squashed, or happened far too slowly. Arguably this is what is killing Microsoft.
The second is where the business centralises its support processes like procurement, HR, finance, IT, etc into a cost-obsessed provider that the commercial units have to use, often mixing third party outsource into a devil's brew. This monopoly provider starts setting out policies that suit it, and ostensibly are about "efficiency". Funnily enough you never hear these internal providers talk about "agility", "flexibility", or "customers". And when you're dealing with a monolithic services provider, the business has to spend too much energy fighting internal battles, it can't recruit people fast enough, or at the right salary, it can't get quotes quickly enough to complete urgent tenders, it is obliged to use cheap suppliers who the operating managers know are not trustworthy, delivering anything through IT takes forever and costs a fortune, etc etc. And as this force-feeding of support services goes on, it sucks the life out of the business. The entrepreneurs move on to less bureaucratic companies, or fail because their energy is sapped in internal battles.
Bringing this back to IBM, I'll wager they (like my own employer) suffer from both of these problems. They aren't going to reinvent their culture (something far harder than it sounds). In the short term they'll do what every other US corp does - share buybacks to boost the price and bolster the executive options, they'll buy other companies and then watch as they squash the life out of it in a few scant years.
The promises of cloud and big data are very ephemeral, and over stated. Where's the value in all of this data other than advertising re-sellers? Take a look at mobile telcos. They have (supposedly) the ultimate goldmine - mobile browsing and content history, even potentially purchasing data, address, credit and payment data on their customers, the plans they signed up for, their loyalty, and their location on a near continuous and real time data. If that is all so valuable, why aren't mobile telcos THE data play? The answer is because not all data has value, and where it does have value that may be depressingly tiny. Cloud services are just a way of outsourcing a few web servers, and a way of warehousing all that low value data, but bit barns are a commodity business.
IBM might want to reinvent itself, but if it does it will truly be the exception rather than the rule.
No, they will not be fine.
They still lack the credibility and traction.
At the same time, they can't sell their products and services cheap enough to gain the traction unless they tie it to a marketing effort and 'partner' with a company to produce a 'showcase' solution.
Even at their H and J level customers, they can't sell their services to compete with the offshore / onshore resources that claim to have deep expertise. Even their questionable expertise is still deeper than IBM's.
Of course IBM does have a few good people and they have hired a few from companies like Databricks and have bought the talent like Explorsys (Cleveland Clinic spinoff) So they can get some wins, but still they are a little fish in the space.
They have a lot to do before they can turn the ship around. So no they will not be fine for a long time. And they will be shedding jobs along the way.
IBM has to shed their ego and arrogant culture.
Again Posted Anon because I do know more than I can talk about. ;-)
This post has been deleted by its author
For years the IBM UK has been sucking in graduates on their grad program.
They're (IBM) pushing many legacy skilled people out of the door, whilst "pulling in the future". A great idea you would have thought - however many grads are there as a door opener to the IT industry, they no longer see IBM as a career, they see IBM as a stepping stone to their next position in Google, Amazon or similar.
In a few years IBM will be Ginny, her loyal disciples, and passing through grads. Not a great model.
Via an recently ex-IBM
While grads may be thinking that IBM is a good stepping stone, the reality is that most of them are worked so hard trying to do jobs beyond their experience level (filling in for experienced people who have been let go) while on the intake programs that they effectively burn-out early. This seems to be encouraged by the upper management so that they (the management) don't need to provide grading pay rises once they (the youngster) move off the program.
One good thing is that the few young people who survive their three or four year intake program while still remaining relatively sane and positive will be great employees, but the rest.....
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