
What the IBM Layoffs Look Like - navait
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-offshoring#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews
======
junto
True story about IBM Global Services. I was working with a client that was
integrating web services with another third party. IBM GS were responsible for
managing third party's network.

Our client gave IBM the IP addresses to be white listed. They filled in a
lengthy time consuming form that got sent through layers of IBM management
till some ops team in India finally implemented the change one week later.

We started testing. It didn't work. We went back and forth for weeks. Finally
we put a conference call together with all parties. Live on the phone we sent
a series of SOAP requests over the wire. "Yes, we can see the requests", came
the answer. We saw no response.

Finally whilst on the phone call, one of the IBM Tech's piped up.

"Did you want this traffic to go in AND out?", he asked.

"Well, HTTP traffic isn't going to be of much use if we don't get a response
to our request you idiots", was the answer I wanted to give.

They pulled out the initial firewall request form. The request was to "allow
traffic from our IP addresses in through the firewall to reach the client".

They took that absolutely literally, and nobody thought to question it. They
also absolved themselves of any blame.

I detested IBM from that day on.

~~~
shepardrtc
That's not just IBM's outsourced vendors. The desire to do the minimal amount
of work to adhere to the exact wording of contracts seems to be prevalent. For
us, it takes us 3 to 4 weeks to have a single VM created. And even then its
usually done wrong. When asking them to do the partitions different, the
response is that they're unable to change the script. A month to simply have a
script run.

~~~
agumonkey
How does .. anything happen ..

~~~
bigiain
This goes a long way to explaining that Gartner report from last year which
say Marketing departments IT budgets will exceed IT departments IT budgets by
2017.

We're seeing this a lot - doing projects directly with marketing department,
largely so they can completely circumvent internal IT department's and their
apparent stonewalling on seemingly simple requests.

(Of course it also means we're seeing things like completely outlandish
requests that indicate fundamental security/privacy misunderstandings ("What
do you mean you can't import our entire customer database into the WordPress
site you're building and hosting cheaply for us?"), as well as last minute
compliance intrusions ("Oh, you need this to live on a big-corp.com subdomain?
That requires a security audit and risk assessment and mitigation document!
How on earth have you got this far without knowing that?")

------
swagtricker
This sort of stuff simply reinforces my own bias in the form of my two rules
of professional IT work:

1.) If at all possible, don't take a full time job in a technical org who's
membership is greater than Dunbar's number (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number))

2.) If at all possible, don't take a full time job in a technical org that is
viewed as a cost center (e.g. the code you write/systems you maintain don't
generate revenue).

These are no guarantee of job stability, but the violation of rule #1 (e.g.
big honkin' tech == dumb decisions & middle mgmt morons) or rule #2 (e.g. you
are a cost to be managed & cut) are far more likely to lead to job
instability. Jut my personal experience & $0.02USD.

~~~
freehunter
The problem with that is there are certain parts of IT where you would never,
ever, ever have a job if you adhered to that. Security, for example. If the
company is under 150 employees, they probably don't have a security team. They
probably aren't developing security applications or products. If they aren,
they're probably not very successful (or are about to be bought out by a big
company).

And I would wager that 80% of all IT employment is done at companies where IT
is not their main source of income. At that point, you're automatically a cost
center. Your second rule is saying "never work anywhere that doesn't produce
technology as their main business", which forces everyone to live in San
Fransisco.

Besides, IT is not a cost center for IBM, it's part of their core business.
And they still lay people off.

~~~
borvo
I don't live in San Francisco and my tribe makes a good living out of software
product development.

~~~
Phlarp
Backing this up with more anecdata, I have had zero problems finding excellent
offers at firms where technology is "the product" not just a cost to be cut,
and far from the valley at that!

~~~
freehunter
But because my anecdotes are just as good as anyone else's, the place where I
started my career has plenty of 20-30 yr veterans in their IT department, and
they are a warehouse company with an IT staff of over 200 people but their
tech doesn't directly make them any money at all.

That's a long stable career in IT in a department bigger than what he wants
the entire company to be where IT is a cost center. If you're limiting
yourself to tiny tech companies, you're missing out on a lot. Maybe company
size and products sold aren't necessarily a good indicator of your career
success...?

------
thenewwazoo
IBM has literally no disincentive to do this, either de jure or de facto. The
threat of H1-B applications being denied is either laughable or [there aren't
enough of them anyway] depending on who you ask. And IBM employees, like most
tech workers, don't think they need to act (read: bargain) collectively and
thus have no recourse. Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that
they _are_ labor, companies will continue to treat their employees as
fungible, on an increasingly global scale.

~~~
parfe
>Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor

Never going to happen. The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing
they're above the simple garbage man or postal worker. After all they create
such _value_. Admitting a union would help acknowledges they're not special.

~~~
oldmanjay
When you feel like you can sum up a few million opinions as the result of a
stupidity that you personally do not suffer, the odds that you are correct in
your assessment approach zero.

~~~
parfe
Programmers eagerly work in EA style sweatshops producing games and other
software with massive unpaid overtime, or count themselves lucky that IBM kept
them for just a few extra months to train their replacements.

IT workers could demand protection from the same abuses that custodians and
delivery drivers fought for and earned decades ago. But then the industry
might need to admit their collars aren't as white as they pretend.

~~~
Chlorus
> But then the industry might need to admit their collars aren't as white as
> they pretend.

You're fucking insane if you think the plight of the average programmer is
anywhere near what custodians go through. I used to work for one of these IBM-
like offshoring firms before I knew better and the quality of their work is
simply garbage(there's some good people in there of course). For example, I
was called in to troubleshoot a faulty URL - I asked them for it; they linked
me to a localhost page. Other joys included network engineers who didn't know
what port SSH runs on and Java programmers who literally copy-pasted straight
from the web.

------
shepardrtc
I currently work at a multi-national corporation that has offshored a vast
majority of its development and infrastructure. Any savings in cost of payroll
is absolutely outpaced by a massive increase in expenditure required for
project overruns and failures due to lower quality of work, terrible
communication, lack of real SME's, and worthless organization. The upper
management's reaction to this was to bring in consultants who are considerably
more expensive than local talent and are often laughably ineffective.
Especially since they have to fly back home every single Thursday. The sense
of impending failure among the local employees for every single project is
palpable.

~~~
EvanPlaice
In the bigger picture of things 'expensive' is a highly relative. You have to
also factor in risk and the other secondary costs.

Not sure if this applies to your company but I have some prior experience as
one of those SME/consultant/contractor guys.

For one particular multi-national company whom we did a lot of work, they had
an entire dedicated team of (underutilized) engineers/technologists that
_should_ have been more than capable of doing the work we provided.

Aside from the hour or two of daily PM work, the entire staff would disappear
for the rest of their shift and reappear just in time to check out. To this
day, I still have no clue where everybody would go. I'm not talking about an
isolated incident, I saw the same pattern take place over the course of
months.

Why was this allowed? Why was the company willing to pay us a premium to do
work that could have been handled internally?

It was a non-union shop. The company had established a very firm and well
defined scope of work. Adding additional responsibilities could screw up the
balance and put the company and it's daily operations at risk. In the bigger
picture of things, paying contractors/consultants a premium + expenses to do
the extra work is an order of magnitude less expensive than the possibility of
unionization. Just the cost savings on HR overhead (ex managing disgruntled
workers, hiring new people) alone probably made up for what we charged.

You should've seen the amount of hell raised when the coffee provided was
downgraded from Starbucks to a cheaper blend.

The whole work environment felt a lot like some sort of bizarre Mexican
standoff between worker and company interests. The company would have a very
difficult time maintaining operations and hiring replacements if their workers
were pissed off enough to leave. Meanwhile, as much as their workers liked to
complain, they had been working under such limited responsibilities for so
many years that -- in terms of engineering and/or raw technical skills -- most
of them would be useless elsewhere.

This may in part explain why many large corporations show a strong preference
for H1-B workers. Not only are they incapable of unionization but they keep
the senior staff motivated by fear of their jobs being replaced/outsourced.
Whatever the overhead cost/complexity, it pales in comparison to disrupting
operations and/or being bent over a barrel on union/compensation negotiations.

It also explains the preference for hiring millenials. Millenials have been
screwed since day one. Starting from ridiculous education loans/costs.
Extending to being forced to work unpaid/underpaid internships to make up for
lack of unrealistic industry experience requirements. The idea of a
company/union providing any form of protection is so far from our reality that
we don't even consider it as an option.

Tired of being screwed by your company? Pack up and move on to another
company. Resume shows lots of movement? Too much ambition is bad for business.
Can't deal with the stress/complexity of regularly changing jobs? Better learn
to enjoy being screwed.

Engineering for many industries is a cost center and hell hath no fury like a
team of bored senior engineers with an over-inflated sense of entitlement.

Outsourcing can be used to reduce risk, avoid management complications, and
shift CapEx (ie permanent employees) to OpEx (ie disposable contractors).
Offshoring sucks but there's virtually no legal risk involved with firing
overseas workers en masse. H1-Bs cost the same as local workers but have so
many legal limitations that they're essentially the modern equivalent of
indentured servants.

------
padseeker
IBM doesn't make much of their own software. They bought lotus notes, they
made rational clear case a massive product by buying other companies and
cobbling it together. There is literally not a single company that is adding
lotus notes or rational to their enterprise development suite. Their dwindling
profits are accumulated from older companies who cannot or will not put up the
cost to transition to latest tools. However every month another one of those
companies finally bites the bullet and replaces those outdated tools. Aside
from Watson when was the last time IBM MADE SOMETHING? Maybe they have but I
haven't heard of it.

I feel bad for anyone losing their job but if your company does not make
anything and is this large what hope is there?

~~~
paulmd
IBM is fairly active in the hardware space - Blue Gene supercomputers and
POWER processors have a pretty solid presence in the HPC space. To produce
those products they do quite a lot of basic science in semiconductor and
nanotech research.

I agree with you in general though - IBM is all about the lock-in. zSystem,
for example, is basically a product for mainframe users (i.e. banks) who are
petrified of updating their software and will pay whatever it takes to get an
incrementally faster replacement. It literally lets you run your System/360
programs that you wrote 50 years ago, and System/360 was designed to directly
replace physical tabulator machines. So your program logic may be the best
part of a century old. It's basically the IBM-est product.

~~~
padseeker
I was not aware of that. Thanks for informing me. If they had no value they
would collapse and that has not happened. But I have wondered about their sub
par products that are not growing and this does seem to be finally coming back
to haunt them.

------
PierreRochard
When I worked at Deloitte they made a similar decision to outsource to India
instead of training staff to learn Python and automate the time consuming, low
value work. That's when I decided to leave, best move of my career.

~~~
SandB0x
How was the quality of the outsourced work? Did they find an existing software
house in India and send them specs a deadlines? Did they hire individuals?

~~~
tomashertus
This is one example of outsourced work(CSS code) to Asia:

.scanResultsTable th:first-child+th+th+th{padding-right: 30px; text-align:
right; width: 35%;}

Don't do it guys, really don't....

~~~
pavanky
That's not generalizing anything at all.

------
at-fates-hands
TBH, I've seen a lot of companies doing this recently. Cargill has been going
through the same thing and they've been actively culling people who are close
to be fully vested (20 year mark I believe). One friend who got their job
"moved to the India office" said she lost over 400K in pension money because
she was let go 6 months prior to her 20 year mark. After she started talking
to other employees, she found close to a dozen mid-level managers who were all
within 2-5 years of hitting the same mark.

Also, I've seen a LOT of companies to do this and it never ends well. This is
usually a harbinger of metrics slipping, profit goals missed and shaky
investors getting out. Which in turn means the company is in a slide. Moving
their stuff overseas is a way to show investors they're trying to cut costs.

It never works. I can name a half-dozen companies off the top of my head that
did this and it actually made the situation worse not better. Some of those
companies are still struggling to make it back.

Here are some off the top of my head:

1 - IBM

2 - Honeywell

3 - Cargill

4 - Thomson Reuters

5 - Best Buy

6 - Wells Fargo

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
Ford and Chrysler too.

I'm actually somewhat surprised by this move by IBM. Most companies I know of
wised up to the fact that the total cost of ownership of the system goes up
with outsourcing and you get a sub par product and as a result stopped
outsourcing any kind of core development en masse.

I myself have seen a few of the outsourced projects fail as well with a couple
of exceptions where the core team was not outsourced but some of the "busy
work" type development - CRUD etc - was outsourced and then integrated into
the core product. Still was painful logistically and savings weren't all that
great at the end of the day.

------
outside1234
This is why Trump is so popular. If you expand this to include blue collar
workers that have been savaged over the last twenty years, you can see the
vein of anger that he is tapping into.

~~~
gaius
Indeed, Trump is the _only_ candidate who believes manufacturing should happen
onshore, as far as I can tell.

~~~
kough
Sanders seems to agree:

[1]: [http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-
read/reversing-t...](http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-
read/reversing-the-slide-in-manufacturing)

[2]:
[http://www.sanders.senate.gov/agenda/#step7](http://www.sanders.senate.gov/agenda/#step7)

------
mark_l_watson
I wish there was more "onshoring" of jobs to very low cost of living areas in
the USA. For example, I live in Arizona and the cost of living is so much less
than Silicon Valley and San Diego where I have worked before.

Life is good in the country and I wish more companies would consider setting
up development offices where low cost housing was very nearby office space.
Save money and still be in convenient time zones.

I have what is probably an unpopular opinion, but I can't really blame
corporations for using foreign development centers. However, I would like to
see them penalized via slightly higher tax rates.

~~~
paulddraper
Or just remove corporate tax.

------
cognivore
I can't think of two many companies that are more irrelevant to the future of
computing. What does IBM actually do anymore? Seems to me they just need
legions of consultants and cheap developers to bleed their customers under the
guise of offering "solutions."

~~~
dominotw
They seem to do bunch of smaller startups like these

[https://www.compose.io/](https://www.compose.io/)

~~~
mooreds
Here's the wikipedia list:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_IBM#Acquisitions_since_2000)

------
planetjones
Sad, but it's happening everywhere. I have nothing against the best people
being employed irrespective of their country of origin. But I really feel ill
at ease when companies like IBM say quality does not matter at all and let's
just cut costs as recklessly as possible.

~~~
dimgl
Why? You get what you pay for. Most of the stuff I've reviewed from outsourced
companies is pure garbage. These companies are simply shooting themselves in
the foot by doing this.

~~~
planetjones
Some companies e.g. banks have no choice but to keep using IBM products as
their whole infrastructure relies on IBM mainframes and tools. Companies like
IBM just want to milk cash cows like this and 'maximise shareholder value'. So
they try and get everything done as cheap as possible. On a PowerPoint and in
an investment prospectus it looks great.

Truly a race to the bottom.

------
veeragoni
I wonder Watson might have helped them to take such steps. Basically putting
HR/Finance data into Watson hands and figure out optimum way of doing things
with algorithms/forecasting etc.. Could be an interesting AI application.

~~~
amptorn
Watson is a red herring.

~~~
Panoramix
Could you expand on this? I haven't heard much info on Watson besides IBM's
publicity.

~~~
amptorn
I'm in the same position, but the presence of all publicity and no real
product is part of what leads me to believe that Watson is much like Deep Blue
or AlphaGo: it was designed to solve an extremely specific problem, and its
capabilities do not generalise readily to any other problem. This despite the
fact that Jeopardy is a "general knowledge" quiz.

Imagine if Watson was an app. What would you do with it? As I understand it,
it takes an oblique textual reference of some kind and turns it into a
concrete, explicit reference. You talk about something and it figures out what
you're talking about. That's great! It's a hard problem and it's extremely
impressive that it's been solved.

But in practical value terms, that's just a toy. And when would it be more
useful than Google Search, or Wikipedia, or Siri? Can Watson _do_ anything,
book a trip, set a timer? Well, that capability would have to be plugged in,
along with voice recognition and speech synthesis. But can it reliably
determine _what_ I want it to do? Or even _whether_ I want it to do anything?
Can it follow a conversation? Is it even stateful? What, if any, role does the
core Watson functionality play in the systems which eventually do these
things?

And how does Watson generalise to other areas? IBM was looking at applying it
to healthcare. How would this work? Presumably, here your "oblique textual
reference" is a collection of data (symptoms and measurements) collected from
a patient, and the end result is a diagnosis, like "What is rubella?". Now,
firstly, how useful is that? Is that the hard part of being a doctor? What
about carrying out the tests, what about prescribing treatment or choosing
further tests? What about missing hints, e.g. can Watson handle visual data
from simply looking at a patient? Or does the doctor have to inform Watson
that the patient is leaning slightly to her right when she sits, and has
trouble getting onto the bed? So does Watson's single trick actually help,
does it even slightly alleviate the workload of a medical professional?

And secondly, how readily does Watson adapt from the world of general
knowledge quiz answers to the world of medical diagnoses? Are these worlds
even remotely structurally similar? Can they be modelled and correlated using
the same basic structures? Is there some heavy modification and serious domain
knowledge needed to alter Watson to do this? Or are the two problems basically
on different planets, such that an entirely different machine needs to be
built?

The same goes for applying Watson to business analytics, for example. In my
mind, Watson is a machine which, as it currently exists, _best case scenario_
, can look at all of your financial graphs and go "Ding! You're in a
recession." And then nothing else. This may be of some use, but I doubt it.

All of this is ignoring the backend, which is that Watson in reality is this
monumental pile of expensive, high-performance hardware and IBM Research code
- and we all know how much research code ever resembles a working, saleable
product. All of that to handle one real-time quiz game. You're going to shrink
that until it fits in one office? Or you're going to have a server farm full
of them serving requests at great expense?

I feel like people perceive Watson as a hair's breadth from strong AI, and IBM
doesn't want to disabuse anybody of that notion. But I think the really
valuable stuff in Watson - advances in computing techniques which I don't
really know anything about but I'm certain must be there - is far less
tangible, and is going to be very difficult to extricate from Watson itself,
let alone monetize.

Just off the top of my head. Unsourced hunches.

------
jayess
"Resource Action." That's even worse than my previous corporate cog job where
they called it a RIF, "Reduction in Force." Who sits around and justifies
themselves by coming up with idiotic terms like this?

~~~
johnward
Referring to humans as "resources" in general is creepy to me.

~~~
strongai
Yes it is. I believe the usage comes from the days when calling them
'personnel' was deemed creepy!

------
arafa
It's surprising they mention regulatory work (around data privacy) going
offshore. I saw that happen at another company I worked for and it didn't go
well. When the feds realized there's no one in person they can talk to and
hold responsible, those jobs all came right back less than a year later.

------
guelo
Establishment Republicans and Democrats agree that this is good, this is the
way things should work in the globalized world. This kind of thing explains
the rise of both Trump and Sanders.

~~~
hackuser
This suddenly hit home today, reading this IBM article. I wish I'd seen your
comment before I posted mine to another subthread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263317)

------
danso
Are there many/any companies that take the "automate yourself out of a job"
credo seriously? That is, realizing the benefits of designed automation,
produced by experienced developers who want to ascend from their initial roles
by delegating that work to a well engineered system? I guess it's possible to
outsource jobs while rewarding employees who are able to raise the tide for
everyone, but it kind of sounds like IBM and most big tech companies see it as
a zero sum game that is winnable by driving down labor costs.

~~~
accountatwork
IBM is particularly dysfunctional in this regard. I keep in touch with a lot
of friends at IBM and a common story is that they'll cut headcount by one on a
local team and hire two or three people overseas. The overseas people will
require so much handholding to produce correct work that it consumes in entire
person's time locally, negating any potential cost advantage and causing
massive delays, as simple work items require corrections taking multiple round
trips between people in different time zones.

I don't have anything against overseas labor and I've worked at companies
where the overseas dev teams are first class citizens and produce work that's
comparable to the work produced here, but IBM is not one of those companies.

------
freehunter
Disclaimer: I am a (US) IBM employee, but my opinions are 100% my own

Shipping jobs overseas sucks. I live in the Midwest where most cities were hit
by manufacturing going overseas, and my own family was impacted hard by it,
like most people's were. I work in IT, so of course I know how much offshoring
sucks. And I know what I'm about to say is going to be controversial. I'm not
saying it to be glib or to downplay the pain that losing your job inflicts
upon the whole family. What I'm saying is a warning.

Because this kind of stuff isn't new. It's not like this is the first time
anyone has ever heard of sending jobs to other countries. And in terms of
layoffs in general, IBM has 500,000 employees and is constantly restructuring
itself to stay competitive in the ever-changing tech market. When mainframe
and storage had a big layoff last year, my response as an IBMer was "we still
have mainframe and storage people?" We spun off (or spun down) those parts of
the business a long time ago, you had to have realized that your days were
numbered.

I work for a hot part of IBM. A part of IBM that makes the company a lot of
money. My job is fairly secure. But I know it won't be like that forever.
Hell, it won't be like that for more than a handful of years. Because things
change constantly. Right now I'm working on a project that will automate quite
a bit of my work. And I'm hoping to take the skills from I've learned from
that and using them to launch into the next hot thing.

Yes, when it's my turn to be laid off I will complain so loudly that they will
hear me in whatever offshore country happens to take my job. But to be honest,
by then I will be working somewhere else, doing something else. Because this
isn't a new thing. Everyone knows that companies offshore and outsource and
lay off employees they don't need anymore. And if you read the article, it
seems like these people knew it was coming, but stayed until the end anyway.

Layoffs suck. Offshoring sucks. But have you seen IBM stock lately? I've never
gotten a bonus and I've never gotten a raise, because those two things only
happen when we're making money. There is no way in any universe that you could
look at your job at IBM and think "yeah, this will hold me until retirement".
That's not a reality in today's job market. My grandpa worked at the same
factory his whole life from the day he graduated high school to the day the
factory moved to Mexico. Between that and the five more years he worked until
he retired, he had five different jobs. That's the reality of today's job
market.

It sucks, but you have to just accept it. Two years, maybe three. If you're
still at the same job after that, you're probably cheating yourself.

~~~
hackuser
> It sucks, but you have to just accept it.

It's interesting that we all, or so many of us, think 'you just have to accept
it', as if it's a law of nature.

Today, I had a revelation: Trying to grasp the revolt of working class
Americans against both the Democratic and Republican parties, it suddenly
struck me: Why should that group 'just accept' globalization? (Or immigration
or deregulation or the free market pricing of everything from health care to
college ...)

So far all the benefits have been accrued by a very narrow subset of society,
while working class life has become harder and well-paying jobs and social
mobility more scarce. Probably not coincidentally, the people benefitting are
those who had a seat at the table when the rules were written. Everyone else,
per both parties, would see the benefits magically 'trickle down' \- but of
course they haven't, and it's been decades.

So why should working class voters take that deal?

~~~
paulddraper
Because fighting it is like punching a hurricane. It's based on fundamental
forces that won't change no matter how hard you fight. If standard of living
is imbalanced, it will eventually find its level.

Instead of fighting forces of nature, we should use them. E.g. reducing
corporate tax.

~~~
hackuser
> fighting it is like punching a hurricane

I strongly disagree. Protectionists have been elected many times in many
countries. In the UK, there's a good chance they will with draw from the EU.
Worldwide, progress for the WTO is dead. In the US, Trump and Sanders
generally are against globalization, and even Clinton has rejected the TPP (on
the campaign trail; we'll see what happens if she gets elected).

Provide some evidence that globalization, especially in its current form, is
irresistable.

> Instead of fighting forces of nature, we should use them. E.g. reducing
> corporate tax.

But that hasn't helped the working class, so why should they want to do that?
So even more wealth can accrue to the wealthy few?

> If standard of living is imbalanced, it will eventually find its level.

And in the long run, we are all dead.

~~~
paulddraper
> Protectionists have been elected many times in many countries.

I'm not saying it's impossible to punch a hurricane.

I'm saying you can only harm yourself. Like the U.S. did with tariffs to turn
a sudden recession in the 1920 into the Great Depression (aided by subsequent
massive government spending crowding out industry investment).

------
_delirium
Sounds along the lines of what many people here were speculating last week:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220800)

------
jonawesomegreen
Does anyone have any information on what sort of teams they are moving? The
image in the article references Watson, but I would be willing to bet teams
working on that sort of research are staying in the US. I would bet its the
sort of "maintenance" teams that are moving offshore, as they are seen as cost
centers.

~~~
johnward
Probably not watson. r/ibm has mentioned Global Technical Services.

------
randyrand
Why do Americans think they are entitled to higher pay for the same work?

~~~
johnward
Cost of living?

~~~
paulddraper
Which pays other people, and begs the same question.

------
platform
_) IBM pension liability approaches 100 billion USD [1]

_ ) IBM has a number of low profit IT services. Cutting the services
completely out of their portfolio, for one reason or another, at this point in
time -- was not an option

My conjecture is the above are the reasons, and will continue to be reasons
for layoffs specifically in US or other high-cost locations

Another prediction: If you look at the list in [1]. And see an IT company with
large generic IT services portfolio, and shrinking product portfolio (software
or hardware does not matter) -- they will do similar layoffs until they become
'leaders' again, or declare bankruptcy or get a bailout.

[1] [http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/05/corporate-pensions-most-
und...](http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/05/corporate-pensions-most-underfunded/)

(this list is from 2013, but my search for more recent data indicates not much
has changed)

------
TaylorGood
This headline from today is rather scary then:

"Yoox Net-a-Porter turns to IBM to propel its luxury e-commerce experience"

[http://digiday.com/brands/yoox-net-porter-turns-ibm-
propel-l...](http://digiday.com/brands/yoox-net-porter-turns-ibm-propel-
luxury-e-commerce-experience/?curator=TechREDEF)

------
martin_bech
Why anyone in this position, would be willing to train his replacement, is
beyond me.

~~~
jmcgough
A friend of mine was in this position. It was a requirement for her to get
severance, as degrading and awful as it was.

~~~
johnward
Yeah it's either train and get severance or leave now. However, IBM just
reduced the severance from 2 weeks per year of tenure to a standard 1 month.
At that point I'm not sure it even matters.

------
pfarnsworth
Aren't there laws that prevent these sort of stealth layoffs? It sounds like
they might be violating federal laws by not announcing it properly.

~~~
paulddraper
What? What are you referencing?

------
hackbinary
Won't buy IBM/Lenovo stuff ever again. It was too late to stop the purchase of
our new VMware cluster and SAN last year, but this year we will not buy
replacement IBM/Lenovo backup storage servers. Roughly £20,000 which is not
huge, but then again, it is not nothing either.

------
protomyth
So, I guess Cringely continues to be right
[http://www.cringely.com](http://www.cringely.com)

I notice he has an article on IBM on the top and his books is pretty good. I'm
not sure I agree about Intel systems, but he at least reasons it out.

------
wehadfun
IBM should just relocate to India.

------
icedtea
it is happening on the same way for EMC now. My team,me and lots of people
were gone for the deal with Dell. They've been transferring all the work to
China. Right now, what i heard from my co-worker, the laid off is still
ongoing.

------
dinkumthinkum
So, I'm trying to figure out the general HN view based on the comments in
seeing ...

Is it the case the HNers generally view programming as a fairly low paid blue
collar position?

------
paulddraper
IBM is notable for the exception to Crockford's do-good-not-evil license:
"IBM, its customers, partners, and minions may use JSLint for evil "

------
slantedview
IBM rule #1: Do not ever work for IBM.

IBM rule #2: See IBM rule #1.

~~~
samstave
IBM rule #3: This rule intentionally left blank.

~~~
erbo
IBM rule #4: All rules shall be composed of series of nonblank characters,
separated by blanks.

~~~
Retra
Encoded in EBCDIC.

------
_jnc
Why do they enforce having a referrer set? If you refresh the page it becomes
a 404.

~~~
chei0aiV
If you use the url posted, it does a redirect from

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-
work/tech-c...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-
careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-
offshoring#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews)

to

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-
work/tech-c...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-
careers/.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews)

and doesn't work on refresh.

But, if you remove the "#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews" fragment, the url works
fine...

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-
work/tech-c...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-
careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-
offshoring)

------
tunichtgut
please someone send a link of this comment section to warren buffet that he
can "figure out" why his IBM shares are down 2 billion dollars...

~~~
PhantomGremlin
These sorts of comments about IBM have been appearing for years if not
decades. The existence of previous comments didn't stop Buffett from buying
IBM stock and the existence of the current comments won't influence him
either.

Nonetheless, he's probably having second thoughts. In the past he's admitted
he didn't invest in technology companies because he couldn't understand them.
Foolishly he violated his own guidelines here.

A number of years ago I owned Burlington Northern stock as it was being
acquired by Berkshire. The merger terms allowed choosing cash vs Berkshire
stock vs some combination. I chose cash, because I was uncomfortable with
owning the giant conglomerate which Berkshire now is.

~~~
tunichtgut
I think cash was the wrong decision. BH resembles the US economy. Nothing
wrong with that.

------
thecosas
Ouch

