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It never counts the execs they are older in a lot of cases. They just want the workforce to be younger. It’s the same as 55 year old man who won’t date anyone over 30.
OMG, you made me laugh so hard. Yes, and that 55-year-old also sees no shameful hypocrisy about it at all. Every morning he sees a god in the mirror, and assumes his subjects (trophy wife/gf included) see the same.
OMG, you made me laugh so hard. Yes, and that 55-year-old also sees no shameful hypocrisy about it at all. Every morning he sees a god in the mirror, and assumes his subjects (trophy wife/gf included) see the same.
I wonder how he feels about the types of ads he's probably been getting in the mail ?
Hearing aids, AARP magazine subscriptions, ads for cemetery plots. Soon the only image he'll see in the mirror will be that of the grim reaper telling him, " I'm ready when you are."
That was apparently part of a restructuring pla. But downsizing doesn't make it open season on older employees. If all the employees kept had more to offer other than youth they might have gotten away with it. Wonder if they were just gunning for the legacy employees with high pensions, and health care plans. Costs are 'an' issue but so is age discrimination.
IBM clearly had to pivot and it's quite possible that some of their entrenched workforce wasn't willing or able to go along with that pivot. But executives who're dumb enough to phrase it as a matter of what is a protected category - age - clearly aren't exactly the cream of the crop either.
As an older IBMer, we have pivoted many times in our careers and spend countless hours learning new skills on our own nickle. We do have a bad habit of asking upper management for a vision of where we are headed. They tend to not like that and want "digital natives" who don't seem to ask those pesky questions.
I have spent hours including my week ends setting up classrooms for new skills that upper management wanted us to teach. I and my fellow instructors spend hours including our week ends getting training and new certifications to be able to teach these skills. We hold two classes and are then told never mind. This has happened multiple times.
IBM has a long history of making stupid executive decisions.
Blame greed and short shortsightedness.
Back in the 1950s, the board originally refused to fund the development of hard disk drives, fearing they would hurt their punch card machine business. The engineers had to finish the design in secret, then they got approval from upper mismanagement.
In the 1980s, the board feared personal computers would make their expensive mainframes obsolete, so they set the industry back 20 years, with the "Piece o' Crap" (IBM PC).
Not only did they use the worst possible hardware, they gave the design job to their typewriter division in Boca Raton, FL . . . and then had to hire Bill Gates and Micro$oft to write the operating system (which Gates bought from another).
Whereas they had three major design groups who did know microcomputer design and programming, but weren't tapped to do the job. (Kingston, Owego, and Endicott)
And to make matters worse, no software that IBM had already developed could run on the IBM PC. (Cobol, Fortran, PL/I, Script, APL, CMS, CADAM). All had to be outsourced. . . in essence giving away the family jewels.
Their bad decisions helped make Micro$oft and Bill Gates very wealthy, and caused the sell off of IBM's own PC to Lenovo, and their hard disk drive division to Hitachi.
Of course, 'we' weren't aware of the behind scenes skullduggery.
Rumor has it that "someone" in the basement of Building 9 at the Endicott Lab, had built a mainframe on a desk using a specially microcoded Motorola M68000, running native VM-370, and all IBM peripherals (tape drives, DASD, printers, etc). And that it ran at 1 MIPS, while their own mainframes could only do 0.8 MIPS. (To be fair, the mainframes had to do page swaps and other overhead to deal with their multiuser multitasking OS, slowing them down)
To the engineers who saw it, thought "this was the future!" and waited with great expectations.
Then out came the "Piece o' Crap" - running an 8/16 bit Intel 8088, instead of the already available 16/32 Intel 8086, or the Motorola M68000 (the better chip).
Ironically, the MOS6502 used in Apple II, Atari, and Commodore 64, was FASTER than the PC. It ran one instruction per clock, so at 1 MHz, it ran 1 MIPS. Part of the reason was its RISC design (before the term was coined). The 4.88 MHz 8088 was half as fast. And the 8 MHz M68000 was a divide clock by 8, so it only ran at 1 MIPS.
And you can still buy "improved" versions of the venerable 6502. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WDC_65C02
Its clock speed can be from 1 to 14 MHz. Woo hoo.
The W65C02S is utilized in a vast array of products for the Automotive, Consumer, Industrial, and Medical markets.
IBM has been doing this for decades!
I know someone who was let go then hired back as consultant w/o benefits at lower pay in the 90s…
My former daughter-in-law had it happen to her dad about 5 yrs ago…nothing new
There is likely plenty of evidence if the Fed DoJ would prosecute but it won’t
IBM has a long history of making stupid executive decisions.
Blame greed and short shortsightedness.
Back in the 1950s, the board originally refused to fund the development of hard disk drives, fearing they would hurt their punch card machine business. The engineers had to finish the design in secret, then they got approval from upper mismanagement.
In the 1980s, the board feared personal computers would make their expensive mainframes obsolete, so they set the industry back 20 years, with the "Piece o' Crap" (IBM PC).
Not only did they use the worst possible hardware, they gave the design job to their typewriter division in Boca Raton, FL . . . and then had to hire Bill Gates and Micro$oft to write the operating system (which Gates bought from another).
Whereas they had three major design groups who did know microcomputer design and programming, but weren't tapped to do the job. (Kingston, Owego, and Endicott)
And to make matters worse, no software that IBM had already developed could run on the IBM PC. (Cobol, Fortran, PL/I, Script, APL, CMS, CADAM). All had to be outsourced. . . in essence giving away the family jewels.
Their bad decisions helped make Micro$oft and Bill Gates very wealthy, and caused the sell off of IBM's own PC to Lenovo, and their hard disk drive division to Hitachi.
Of course, 'we' weren't aware of the behind scenes skullduggery.
Rumor has it that "someone" in the basement of Building 9 at the Endicott Lab, had built a mainframe on a desk using a specially microcoded Motorola M68000, running native VM-370, and all IBM peripherals (tape drives, DASD, printers, etc). And that it ran at 1 MIPS, while their own mainframes could only do 0.8 MIPS. (To be fair, the mainframes had to do page swaps and other overhead to deal with their multiuser multitasking OS, slowing them down)
To the engineers who saw it, thought "this was the future!" and waited with great expectations.
Then out came the "Piece o' Crap" - running an 8/16 bit Intel 8088, instead of the already available 16/32 Intel 8086, or the Motorola M68000 (the better chip).
Ironically, the MOS6502 used in Apple II, Atari, and Commodore 64, was FASTER than the PC. It ran one instruction per clock, so at 1 MHz, it ran 1 MIPS. Part of the reason was its RISC design (before the term was coined). The 4.88 MHz 8088 was half as fast. And the 8 MHz M68000 was a divide clock by 8, so it only ran at 1 MIPS.
And you can still buy "improved" versions of the venerable 6502. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WDC_65C02
Its clock speed can be from 1 to 14 MHz. Woo hoo.
The W65C02S is utilized in a vast array of products for the Automotive, Consumer, Industrial, and Medical markets.
Is there an english translation for the above nerdspeak available?
IBM clearly had to pivot and it's quite possible that some of their entrenched workforce wasn't willing or able to go along with that pivot. But executives who're dumb enough to phrase it as a matter of what is a protected category - age - clearly aren't exactly the cream of the crop either.
People will say anything if they believe their correspondence to be private.
If anything the "dinosaurs" are the executives themselves with outdated thinking.
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Yes, and that 55-year-old also sees no shameful hypocrisy about it at all. Every morning he sees a god in the mirror, and assumes his subjects (trophy wife/gf included) see the same.
