
IBM layoffs strike first in India; workers describe as 'slaughter' and 'massive' - giis
http://wraltechwire.com/ibm-layoffs-strike-first-in-india-workers-describe-cuts-as-slaughter-and-massive-/13379415/
======
smoyer
I don't want to seem insensitive but ...

The quote at the beginning of the article describes pretty much every layoff
I've ever seen (or been through). The person quoted describes it as inhuman,
but HR and managers are told to keep it impersonal (don't induce more crying
than there is). You don't get notice (on purpose), you have to turn in
company-owned property and they want you out the door (it affects the morale
of the remaining employees).

On the other hand, the severance and extended benefits are far more generous
than any layoff I've been through here in the states. I'm not sure why
employees in struggling business units don't recognize that THEY'RE PART OF A
BUSINESS. If no one was laid off, the whole business would close when there
was no money left to pay expenses.

~~~
ElDiablo666
You do seem insensitive. Fuck their missed projections. Let all the managers
quit for their failure. Did you look at the financials? Why are you pretending
that you have the slightest clue what's going on in their business? If the
employees were in charge like they ought to be, they could deal with their
business properly and almost certainly avoid this fucking travesty. Tens of
thousands of people losing their jobs is fucking bullshit.

~~~
cones688
Maybe you should read the article

> "Announced today including managers"

This is the failing X86 based server business (STG) which IBM has sold off to
Lenovo, most likely duplicate test/support staff which Lenovo already have.
They aren't just trimming - the departments are closing down.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
IBM has sold the XSeries division, STG is a different division (storages and
systems), and is not up for sale AFAIK.

~~~
cones688
Systems and Technology Group is the hardware wing and within contains X-Series
Division. IBM is keeping the other power, storage and Z (mainframe) IIRC.

~~~
reversethrust
You're forgetting about networking and the STG software divisions (e.g.
firmware, some cloud software, the products that they acquired when they
bought Platform Computing..)

------
ck2
Um, what is happening in Syria is a slaughter, literally.

What is happening in India is mass layoffs, sad and unfortunate but
"slaughter" ?

When AOL and other US corporations outsourced all the call centers to India in
2000-2010 , there were mass layoffs here too.

~~~
dominotw
Do you feel a sense of justice now?

~~~
ck2
No it is never a good thing when corporations discard people, anywhere. It is
like they are throwing out an old sponge they have squeezed every drop out of.

~~~
KeepTalking
Respect

------
cones688
This article massively overstates what is occurring here, these people are
members of staff involved with the part of the business which has been sold to
Lenovo and surprise surprise Lenovo already has their own departments handling
most of this stuff.

------
PakG1
I have perhaps a unique perspective on this, as I was part of IBM in Asia and
left in November 2013. I witnessed the 2013 layoff action and witnessed many
good people in Australia and Singapore laid off in the name of cost-cutting.
It is mentioned in the article that for this 2014 round, people with even PBC
1 and 2 were fired, which would have been the top performing people on their
teams. I worked as a project manager doing datacenter/infrastructure work for
IBM and was based in China. On my most recent PBC before I left, my manager
gave me a 1, and I was managing a program for innovation projects in the Asia
Pacific, as well as in charge of quality control work as part of IBM's global
quality program called Global Delivery Framework (GDF). Project team members
under me came from Australia, China, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea,
and Japan.

Firstly, it is not surprising that this is happening. The technology in the IT
industry has changed, and IBM was late to the cloud party. We were still
manually building servers for projects as of the end of 2013. I myself was put
in charge of a large project to virtualize hundreds of internal IBM
application servers. Let's say that again: as of 2013, there were still
hundreds of mission-critical IBM internal applications running on physical
hardware until I was given the project to transition them to virtual servers.
They now have the ability to run stuff virtually thanks to some new hardware
they've installed, but processes are still very manual. As I was leaving, I
told all of my teammates to be careful and get out while they could, because
as soon as IBM went full-steam into cloud, all of their jobs would get
automated. It takes anyone a few minutes to get a server with applications
running on a cloud service. At IBM, it took me a month because everything had
to be installed and configured manually, and the teams were always so busy
that you had to wait until someone was available to do their part, whether it
was installing AIX, installing DB2, configuring monitoring agents, configuring
backup agents, doing BAU handover checks, whatever. If you were IBM's execs,
which would you choose? The writing was on the wall for a long time. And while
elephants can take a while to get moving, it is true that they can eventually
dance, though they can cause a lot of damage when they finally do get going
(and need to dance more frenetically to make up for lost time).

Secondly and more importantly, it's sad that India was hit first in such a
massive way, but it's not unexpected. I have nothing against Indian people and
I think the situation is unfortunately more to do with IBM than it does with
India. IBM was truly scraping the bottom of the barrel for their hiring, and
in India, they went below the barrel in order to cut costs. It wasn't enough,
as they went too far and hired too many people who were not capable of
actually doing their jobs. I have plenty of examples, but we had sysadmins
with senior in their titles that rather deserved to be labeled junior. My
colleague beside me, a program manager of another program, turned to me
exasperated when one of the Indian project managers in her program couldn't
figure out how to fill out a project change request template. So the project
manager wanted my colleague the program manager to fill out the form instead.
Templates are there to make it clear what you're supposed to write. This level
of incompetence was a trend, but I want to make it clear again, this is not
the fault of the Indian people. This is the fault of IBM deciding to not have
high standards. When the entire Domino team in Australia was let go (Domino is
IBM's mail server) and replaced with a new, inexperienced, and untrained team
in China, yet another colleague was again exasperated. Maintenance work that
required only 6-hour change windows in her project became such that they
needed 2 entire days because the new Domino team didn't know what they were
doing. Again, it's not that the Chinese people were the problem. It's that IBM
wasn't willing to pay to hire high-quality people, nor invest into training
the people they did hire. As for why I think the issue of high/low standards
is a bigger issue than technological change, I point you to an anonymous
posting I made on Quora once. Being anonymous doesn't seem so important now.
[http://www.quora.com/IBM/What-are-the-weaknesses-of-
IBM](http://www.quora.com/IBM/What-are-the-weaknesses-of-IBM)

I tried copy-pasting the Quora post here, but then HN told me that my comment
was too long. :D

edit: clarification

~~~
josefresco
"Let's say that again: as of 2013, there were still hundreds of mission-
critical IBM internal applications running on physical hardware until I was
given the project to transition them to virtual servers."

Is this so shocking or even _wrong_? I would expect a company with the history
and size of IBM to have tons of "old" hardware/processes. In fact it's that
history, perceived wisdom and entrenchment that I would assume many in the
enterprise world would would see as an _asset_ for IBM. Am I the only one who
doesn't think a business should jump on a new tech bandwagon at the expense of
a solid and working business model? I'm not saying virtualization or cloud
computing is a fad by any measure, but how does a company rationalize
rebuilding old tech with the risk that it may be the wrong path/choice or
jeopardize a working model?

I know little of IBM and cant say I'm part of the corporate/enterprise market
but that fact that IBM has "old iron" in their portfolio seems to be less
concerning for their customers and more of a perception issue among the media.

~~~
pekru
Exactly.

Cloud is not the silver bullet. But at the same time, there is not much merit
in choosing to be a luddite and not use the capabilities of cloud where
there's a genuine need. I feel IBM, to an extent is guilty of not pursuing
things on the cloud front and is now paying for it.

~~~
crag
"Cloud is not the silver bullet."

You can say that again. And it depends on where you are. In South Florida the
cloud - well - sucks. Due to the carriers not being able to keep their
networks up. I know companies who moved their PBX into the cloud (I'm going to
name carriers) with Earthlink, Windstream, Comcast and ATT - misdirected,
noisy (like talking in a wind tunnel), dropped calls; all classic signs of
over extended networks. Latency. And you feel helpless cause all you can do is
call your carrier and wait on hold for 45 mins.

I know another company, a local gym, which (the owner is a SOB so he deserved
everything he got) got talked into moving his cash register into the cloud. I
warned him against it. But he accused be of not being "up-scale". His way of
telling me I didn't know what I was talking about. Of course, a couple of
weeks later his Comcast goes down. He calls me, begging for help. I was like,
"Nothing I can do. You have to call Comcast".

In South Florida, the only reliable service is fiber. Even T1's are fragile.
And fiber isn't cheap.

~~~
mrjatx
You're using a very, very basic definition of cloud- one that really shouldn't
exist anymore.

You're talking about moving a physical service into a hosted service;
IAAS/SAAS. We're talking about actually developing and coding the IAAS/SAAS
solutions to be cloud ready and performant. This infers automation, utilizing
version control systems, scaling, stateless servers etc.

What those companies did was move their servers onto the web. It's like me
telling you that I'm moving my wordpress blog from my desktop to linode. Just
because I'm using linode does not mean I'm utilizing the infrastructure in any
sort of "cloud" manner. If the server goes down and I've not designed my stack
to be resilient I'm not "cloud." We expected IBM to be designing underlying
cloud infrastructure years ago. Instead they bought Softlayer. I'm not sure if
they've even done anything remotely interesting since that.

Next year they'll probably start trying to massively hire Openstack developers
just like Cisco/etc are doing now (also late to the party).

Semantics, but vastly different.

~~~
crag
"You're using a very, very basic definition of cloud- one that really
shouldn't exist anymore."

Really? This is exactly what the "cloud" service are selling. Ok there's a
middle-guy in there. The actual service provider. But from a customer point of
view - this is the cloud.

IBM, Microsoft, Google sales guys are all over the place "selling" the cloud.
"Move your infrastructure to our cloud - cheaper and access everywhere on
everything. No need to maintain a server, or even a PC. Run your business from
your iPad".

Sounds great. And would be great, if we had the communication infrastructure
in place to support it. Look, it doesn't matter what's running the cloud if no
one buys the "cloud".

Back to your topic.. I agree. But we've seen this story before from IBM (and
Cisco and MS). They are late to every party these days.

------
pyalot2
Outsourcing jobs. Outsourcing layoffs. Checks out, what did India expect?

~~~
CmonDev
Yes, not really a lay-off. More like winding down the scale of outsourcing. I
hope jobs will re-emerge onshore later on.

~~~
dagw
_I hope jobs will re-emerge onshore later on._

If by "onshore" you mean China, then you'll probably get your wish. Otherwise,
probably not.

~~~
nailer
I've worked with 10 Indian employees that could easily be replaced with a
single competent westerner (of any descent whatsoever) for 1/3 the price.

I suspect I'm not alone.

~~~
KumarAseem
And I have worked with 10 westerners who also can be easily replaced by 1
Indian who will do the work in a much better manner.

Just because you might have had exposure to some idiots does not mean you
label the whole bunch as incompetent.

~~~
nailer
It's certainly not a rule, just an observable phenomena, working in IBM with
colleagues in Hyderabad and at Google partnering with Intuit in, IIRC,
Bangalore.

It's a cultural difference: in India, people become engineers because it
carries prestige. They don't code because they love computing (this is
measurable: ask how many outsourced engineers have GitHub accounts). The lack
of actual interest in their profession demonstrates itself in their work.

The best Indian programmers I've met have either left India or weren't born
there in the first place, in either case I'd consider them westerners.

------
Max_Horstmann
| STG Bangalore literally turned into a slaughter house today

obligatory: [http://xkcd.com/725](http://xkcd.com/725)

~~~
TeMPOraL
There's also an obligatory xkcd to that obligatory xkcd:
[http://xkcd.com/1108/](http://xkcd.com/1108/).

------
sspiff
low social oversight and regulations result in easily attracting jobs and
fewer protection when jobs need to be cut. On a downhill slope, it's much
simpler and cheaper to cut jobs in developing economies, precisely for the
same reasons it's cheaper to create jobs there when things go uphill.

------
manishsharan
If I had start-up capital , today I would have jumped on a plane to
Banagalore. Regardless of the negative stories about Indian programmers, IBM
does have some very talented and skilled people with a lot of experience and
excellent work ethics. This being a massive lay-off and not a firing, the good
and bad programmers alike have been let go. The interview process would have
to be extra stringent and long and tedious, but you would end up with high
quality people , who otherwise would never interview with a new start up. And
after being let go from a blue-chip company, they would be more receptive of
offers from early stage start ups.

------
victor27
The 3 months of compensation mentioned here - is equivalent only to 1.5 months
in any other country. So not overtly generous.

I'm sure their employment contracts mention 1-2 months of salary in event of
termination (or a similar notice period in case the employee wants to leave) -
so this is not more than committed.

(In India the "Base Salary" component is often 50% of FIXED compensation, not
including bonuses. This is done to reduce the statutory requirements on the
company, especially in times like this.)

~~~
nailer
> The 3 months of compensation mentioned here - is equivalent only to 1.5
> months in any other country.

Why?

3 months of salary, to spend in India where things are relatively cheaper,
seems like 3 months of Salary to me.

~~~
kranner
It's 3 months of 'basic pay', which would be half or less than half of the
total salary. The rest is divided into so-called perks such as house rent
allowance, travel allowance, education allowance, etc., which are partially
tax-deductible for employees to various extents.

------
BenSS
This is completely normal business for IBM. I saw it too many times during my
tenure there and it was obviously well overdue for the India branches.

There are regular cuts across the board, and there is actually very little
attention paid to the internal ratings of the employees or keeping well-
functioning groups together. Everyone left behind is expected to take up the
slack, and additional hires are only made when things break badly enough for
upper level management to be aware of it.

------
linux_devil
What else you expect in country with poor labor laws? Layoffs is fine I think
almost every company need to go through this phase one day or other for cost
cutting. But there should be a procedure , a short 2 hours notice as seen in
this article is shocking.

~~~
walshemj
Yes on sites like
[http://workplace.stackexchange.com/](http://workplace.stackexchange.com/) the
questions about some of the labor practices in India are shocking almost pre
Victorian in their harshness.

And I suspect that getting a job in a MNC is seen a bit like the civil service
is ie a job for life.

------
london12
IBM has spent an astonishing US$100K, per IBM employee!, on stock buybacks in
the last 3yrs alone, and they are committed to more than half of that
additionally in the next couple of years. They are only interested in
increasing equity value among executives. IBM executives have stopped
investing in their people, instead focusing on their personal bank accounts.
IBM has given up on the idea of organic growth with the talent that they have
-- they would rather chop off what they don't know how to manage and acquire
new skills through acquisitions. Innovation is dying on the vine at IBM.

------
reversethrust
For what it's worth, a colleague asked a coworker (in Austin) who works
regularly with India STG staff. To the coworker in Austin, they aren't aware
of any of their Indian STG contacts, nor their teams, being affected. At least
not as per the article.

------
known
Unlike Capitalism, Globalization is Zero-Sum.

------
thejosh
How many workers were actually cut?

~~~
negamax
According to article 'One analyst has estimated that IBM will cut 13,000 of
its more than 434,000 workers'.

Not sure how many (what percentage) is in India and how many are affected.

~~~
VLM
IBM is no longer a USA company and has not been for some time, logic would
dictate that if they've only got ten thousand or so employees left in the USA,
if they plan to downsize 13K, at least some citizens of India are going to
have to go. They'll (probably) never get rid of the local USA sales force and
some service techs, so by definition layoffs will now start to happen in
India.

GE is the same way, as are some other former USA companies, when all the
Americans are fired you have to begin firing in India and China, which is new
to those areas.

Now if they really wanted inhumane, they'd make the Indian workers train their
replacements, then fire them.

~~~
iends
The unofficial IBM union
([http://www.endicottalliance.org/](http://www.endicottalliance.org/))
estimates there to be ~66,000 FTE in the USA.

~~~
VLM
That's interesting, I was linear extrapolating from continuous losses around
the last time an employer was a customer of IBM, leading me to think they're
down to almost zero by now. The loss rate isn't as linear as expected.

------
hungry_coder
Fire everyone. Keep the coders.

