responding to tough market conditions
Or inability of any of their ridiculously highly paid execs to come up with anything that resembles a growth strategy other than flog staff and assets to fund share buybacks.
IBM is taking the knife to the UK Labs team with more than one in eight staffers expected to get the chop, insiders have told us. The “Resource Actions” are expected to see 123 out of 900 divisional employees get made redundant following the start of a 45-day redundancy notice period. An Employee Consultation Committee has …
In the UK, IBM Analytics is also facing the axe - with 45 out of 500-odd jobs to go. And Analytics is supposed to be one of the things IBM is pinning its future on. What is really a kick in the teeth (and confirmation that IBM is essentially Evil-corp, lest we occasionally forget) is the fact that this is - like elsewhere in the company - involuntary and statutory minimum only. Thanks guys for your 20+ years service - have £14K - but only after completing your 12 week notice period (and yes we are expecting you to work it).
IBM had showed some signs of sanity this past year - for example finally getting rid of the PBC system in favour of something that they assure us isn't forced-distribution. This is a very regressive step, and shows that the beatings will continue until morale improves mindset is still strong in the company.
Personally, my skills and performance history mean I'll be unlikely to be selected for this involuntary round but that doesn't stop me being pretty sickened by how and why this is being done.
That's why you get headlines like this...
IBM added 70,000 people to its ranks in 2015, and lost that many, too
At least Watson's safe, until it gets the wrong batch script run on it by accident.
What struck me when I first started working there was the very low revenue per employee compared to the obvious competitors. What struck me when I left after 10 years was the very low revenue per employee...
So I expect that yet again they are letting the doers go and keeping the talkers, thus maintaining the same level of revenue per employee.
There used to be an office in Staines. It was the old Lotus office, but I think it went a while ago. Bedfont used to be a fairly big site, with two buildings. The larger of the two (which was in Tomorrow Never Dies) was vacated by IBM a few years ago and the remaining building is a few offices and no open areas, so is never used for customer meetings as the other building was. Farnborough's much the same; open plan office with not that many people there.
Most people either work from home or have left the company one way or another. Customer meetings (what remains of them) are all done at South Bank.