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What isn't clear here is whether or not the employees had the expectation set before them that they keep these skills up to date and acquire these skills.
If you spend your whole day working on engines, and the company comes and says, you need to learn transmissions, and we will dock your pay 10% while you spend every friday learning transmissions, that's a raw deal. If the situation is "You were expected to keep up with the new engine certifications, and you haven't done so, therefore you will spend every friday learning them at a 10% salary reduction" then that implies that the employees something else.
It sounds from the article that the employees were somewhat blindsided by this, and that its a little arbitrary.
You people do realize that corporations are ALWAYS watching what other corporations are doing and benchmark themselves off of each other right? The issue here is they are trying out a new concept to once again destroy the already stagnant wages of the workforce. Company's USED to train their employees. Then they cut training to save costs and told us to train ourselves in our own time. Now theyre going to pay us less if we DONT keep up with our training on our own time, on our own dime. Today you tell the IBM employees to buck up, tomorrow your company adopts the same policy. Bear in mind its not a 10% reduction in pay, its 13% and 3% more every year after due to inflation.
And for those saying IBM isn't doing so well they just invented a computer that won a Jeopardy game against the world Jeopardy champions using AI and are incorporating it into commercial applications. So while they aren't selling as many laptops as they used to theyre still on the cutting edge.
It really affects whether quality candidates will apply in the future or not.
Yep, GE quickly axed its annual performance firing scheme when they realized they were losing the best talent. Even though the top performers passed the annual performance, they didn't like the fact that it was occurring nor did they want to work somewhere with a policy like that.
- There was still deadwood at IBM when I left, in 2009. Talking to my friends and ex-colleagues in the company today, some deadwood does exist, although in far smaller numbers than before. Most of the deadwood that my friends know about happens to be in management; lots of technical managers in IBM wouldn't be able to code their way out of a paper bag.
- IBM has been laying off people in China, India and Brazil too.
- The education requirement/pay cut is perfectly reasonable, if fairly applied. There are no details yet, but if management unilaterally decides that John Doe needs to pick up some skills in CAMSS (or SCAMS) without John's input or some kind of objective assessment, then it is not reasonable. It'd be like me saying to RarelyRelocating "Sir, your skills in written Sanskrit are deficient, you need to beef them up and BTW we'll cut your pay by 10% while you do so." But what if your job does not require you to write Sanskrit? So everything hinges on how the deficiency is identified. Knowing IBM, first-line managers will be given a list of employee names and told to "have the talk" with those folks (that was how it was done when I was in IBM management). In the next few days I'll try to have lunch with my IBM ex-colleagues and let you know how the measure is implemented. Stay tuned.
Tech Managers are not expected to be able to write code. Coding is for the entry-level employees.
In the next few days I'll try to have lunch with my IBM ex-colleagues and let you know how the measure is implemented.
I just talked to one of my friends who is still with IBM. He received an email from his immediate manager identifying him as one of the folks who need more education. There was no prior objective assessment done of his skills/education in any area, nor did he have any input on the adequacy of his skills for his job. He does not think that his manager knows in details what he was working on. For those who are not familiar with IBM today: telecommuting is routine, and sometimes you'd go for months or years without a face-to-face meeting with your manager and colleagues as they could be in different states or countries. So, for his manager to unilaterally say that he was lacking skills in area X was simply laughable.
Stay tuned, I will talk to other friends in IBM over the next few days/weeks.
Here are my thoughts on why this is not a good move at IBM:
1. Anyone applying to IBM and comes across this will not want to work there if they can get a better offer.
2. Anyone within IBM will stay away from Global Technology Services knowing this could happen. It's already pretty well known that you are readily laid off in Global Services whenever there are economic contractions.
Such a short sighted move to make end of year numbers look better.
What is IBM still doing anyway? Last product I remember from them is the cell processor which turned out to be a huge flop. But other than that? I'm surprised there haven't been more layoffs or salary cuts so far.
I just talked to one of my friends who is still with IBM. He received an email from his immediate manager identifying him as one of the folks who need more education. There was no prior objective assessment done of his skills/education in any area, nor did he have any input on the adequacy of his skills for his job. He does not think that his manager knows in details what he was working on. For those who are not familiar with IBM today: telecommuting is routine, and sometimes you'd go for months or years without a face-to-face meeting with your manager and colleagues as they could be in different states or countries. So, for his manager to unilaterally say that he was lacking skills in area X was simply laughable.
Stay tuned, I will talk to other friends in IBM over the next few days/weeks.
Its not unusual in companies like this for managers to actually have NO clue what their employees are actually doing. And this will probably roll out to other companies, then a couple years later disappear....the dropping of the bottom 10% was a good example.
The funniest was the "tiger team" of the best and brightest at the company being forced to drop 10% of their team every year.....we lost some truly incredible people.
What is IBM still doing anyway? Last product I remember from them is the cell processor which turned out to be a huge flop. But other than that? I'm surprised there haven't been more layoffs or salary cuts so far.
IBM is trying to remake itself as software/services company where margins can be in the 30-40% range. Hardware is lucky if it makes 10%. They've shed the last of their x86 products this year. So the company that invented the PC no longer makes one. The z System(aka Mainframe) is still a cash cow, and the Power servers are still doing OK, but not as dominant as it use to be.
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