IBM turns panto villain as The Reg tells readers: 'It's behind you!'

Re: "the company is hiring expensive consultants and discarding their opinions."

Wait, are you talking about IBM, or the companies which hire IBM?

Re: "the company is hiring expensive consultants and discarding their opinions."

Consultants are just that: consultants. They're not managers. They can advise and suggest and recommend, but in the end the decision belongs to the management. Who are the ones who will have to live with it.

Of course a lot of recommendations will get binned. Otherwise you might as well get rid of the management team entirely, and just hire consultants to make every decision.

And what about the carrier pigeon? Have you checked its perch recently?

arrogant disks?

Do they look down on all the other disks?

Solution

Fire Ginni. Cancer gone in one stroke. This is her strategy.

It's discs. IBM had their own spelling.

Re: You would think, wouldn't you?

@ecofeco

IBM's workforce, particularly in front line field services, should be the company's crown jewels. They are its feet on the street.

When I started in the company, for a client facing group, I was told by one of my colleagues that our manager would only hire externally or internally from other client facing groups. Reason? "North Harbour mentality" was the term that was used. North Harbour being the UK HQ at the time (nominally, it still is). He was also proud of the fact that we bought in revenue for the company, whereas the "internal account" spent what we bought in

Re: How long would IBM last if

.... "India's Best Men" start demanding pay rises?

Re: How long would IBM last if

This sort of shit has become so common, across the world and in almost every sector. It just gets worse, especially as bigger companies absorb smaller ones. Barely a week, or at best a month goes by without hearing about another huge bunch of poor bastards being spat out of the grinder.

There's likely to come a time soon, maybe we're very close as automation increases rapidly, where most people have nothing to lose (except debt) and fuck all to look forward to. In fact by far the majority of the worlds population is already in that position, the difference to us is it is coming to the west. Some will probably just get depressed and take enough smack, alcohol or whatever and fade away, but there WILL be a very sizeable and very angry mob with a lot free time and ingenuity to be exercised.

Re: How long would IBM last if

@ Shadow Systems

"rugby sacking dummy."

You seem to be mangling 2 different variants of English, games involving a non round ball.

Sacking as a term is common in US Football, not in UK / commonwealth rugby AFAIK (with possible exception of N. America where the term may well have crept in from US football)

Re: offering nothing but statutory minimum

"Presumably, since statutory minimum redundancy terms are somewhat miserly, and they refuse to do better, it's easy to form an opinion that what they actually would want to offer is nothing at all."

That is a strategy that has been seen before. Creating a rotten working atmosphere will get rid of those who can find jobs elsewhere, meaning their payout is zero.

Even at the UK statutory minimum of 1 week per full year's service, consider how much dosh that is for someone who has been there for 20 or 30 years.

Don't forget that for folks TUPEd in from elsewhere, relatively young companies can find themselves with staff whose effective length of employment is greater than the age of the company.

Re: "Reskill"

Oh, a new obnoxious buzzword! I'd not seen the term "reskill"

You can "re-skill" your workforce by running training courses, or internal projects to develop experience before offering it as a service to customers. But IBM have redefined it to mean saving on the costs of this by simply ditching people with skill X and hiring people with hot new skill Y (and in 3 years, skill Y and become skill X so repeat). They also call this "remixing".

The real mystery to me and everyone else is, why do people with skill Y flock to work there still? If IBM literally couldn't hire anyone, they would be forced to treat their existing workforce sanely.

Re: "Reskill"

It's not new, it was certainly in use in the early '70s when I was first advised to do so ... If you hate "reskill", you'll probably positively abhor "upskill".

Re: "Reskill"

I thought it was a new pronunciation - "rez-kill" - meaning to get rid of ('kill') 'resources' deemed superfluous for the current day-to-day operation.

Actually providing training at the company's cost to make someone more employable in this day and age sounds like fantasy.

Re: IBM is proud to be in the forefront of workforce training and development

Current IBM cloud seller here. I have to respond as although working for ibm sucks in many ways, one way it doesn’t suck is training. IBM has some of the best training on the planet, and if they consider you worth the investment they’ll spend big bucks on your development. In the last 12 months I’ve been to Interconnect in Vegas, Cloud Fast start 2017, Top Gun, Global Sales School (4 weeks face to face, plus loads of curated and coached theory), and end of this month I’m off to Madrid for the 2018 cloud fast start. I and most of my colleagues have the opposite problem to you - we’re swamped by ‘mandatory’ training and have to fight to find time to do our actual jobs.

Think40 is paid, you can do it in work time (and most do). Acclaim badges are a useful addition if you want to profile yourself to management (they love that stuff)...

In short, your experience is not typical. Unless the training you wanted to follow was unrelated to your business, in which case I can well imagine your manager didn’t want you following it.