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Please, no one who works at IBM is going to go hungry at night over a temporary 10% pay cut. It's utterly ridiculous to suggest that some people will not be able to survive half a year with 10% less pay and that they will quit instead.
They should have kept up with their training, now they are paying the price. Seems fine by me. If you make it you get your old pay back, if you can't hack it you are out. Performance based compensation. If anything we need more of that.
It really affects whether quality candidates will apply in the future or not.
It really affects whether quality candidates will apply in the future or not.
the quality employees are not the ones getting the slight cut, the people getting the cut cannot pass their tests and have fallen behind on technology, that is not a quality employee.
You have to at least make reasonable statements when trying to defend your position. IBM as a whole employs 400,000+ people. There is dead wood.
You can walk into any professional setting anywhere in the world and you will find dead wood if there the workforce is large enough. It's simple statistics. Any large enough group of people will have underperformers who for one reason or another haven't been separated yet.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Emigrations
It really affects whether quality candidates will apply in the future or not.
That's one way to look at it for sure.
Another way is that those who are top performers are happy that finally someone does something about the people who are sloths.
You have no idea what is going on at IBM. If you did you would realize exactly what a load that statement is. There is no dead wood at IBM anymore. They've been hacking and slashing for over a decade. Trust me, if these people were dead wood they would have been out the door years ago. This is a company that has been pulling a smoke and mirrors game with Wall Street for years and it is now starting to bite them. They finally came to the realization that they can't cut more people and they can't sell off divisions without seriously compromising their remaining business(not that it already hasn't been). This is nothing more than a desperate attempt to by IBM to buy themselves another good quarter or two before the IT hits the fan.
(No, I do not work for IBM and I never have. I do however work very closely with them, often on a daily basis)
You are correct, I don't know what's going on at IBM, but per the article YOU posted (did you read it?) the employees selected were no longer current in their feild. In a technolodgy company that's a BIG problem!
IBM offered them a 20% reduction in work time and a 10% reduction in pay for a specified period of time to get their skills up to speed. This sounds a lot like a bad performance rating, with a chance for the employee to correct the deficiency.
Still don't see IBM as the villian here. A job (especially at a fortune 500) is earned and retained by performance. It's not a life time award/reward.
[quote=RarelyRelocating;36523320]You have to at least make reasonable statements when trying to defend your position. IBM as a whole employs 400,000+ people. There is dead wood.
You can walk into any professional setting anywhere in the world and you will find dead wood if there the workforce is large enough. It's simple statistics. Any large enough group of people will have underperformers who for one reason or another haven't been separated yet.
/QUOTE]
400k world-wide. Guess what, IBM isn't cutting in India, China, and Brazil. The US once had over 250k employees. That numbers is now likely down below 85k. State-side they've been cutting 10-15% a year for over a decade.
400k world-wide. Guess what, IBM isn't cutting in India, China, and Brazil. The US once had over 250k employees. That numbers is now likely down below 85k. State-side they've been cutting 10-15% a year for over a decade.
So IBM is expanding employment in growing product markets, and maintaining or contracting employment in mature/declining product markets.
Seems reasonable to me, but I just have an MBA and have managed large organizations for the last 25 years. Maybe things have changed since I moved into consulting 2 years ago.
400k world-wide. Guess what, IBM isn't cutting in India, China, and Brazil. The US once had over 250k employees. That numbers is now likely down below 85k. State-side they've been cutting 10-15% a year for over a decade.
Just to confirm, your argument is that there is no dead wood among 80k people (give or take a few k)?
- 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.
So IBM is expanding employment in growing product markets, and maintaining or contracting employment in mature/declining product markets.
Seems reasonable to me, but I just have an MBA and have managed large organizations for the last 25 years. Maybe things have changed since I moved into consulting 2 years ago.
It isn't a secret. IBM is on the skids and has been for years (especially since 2000). At one time they were THE place to work, which is no longer true. But now it is a company to avoid. Smoke and mirrors are all thats keeping it going.
People defending its practices think of it as the company of old, it isn't that and hasn't been for many years. It is dying.
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