Workers Fly Away From IBM's Red Hat (This Year a Lot of Red Hat Staff is "IBM")
"I’m looking forward to having today off, and going back in Monday to see where the Pipmunks have shuffled the deck chairs on the titanic while I use my paychecks to build up my “just in case” fund more and will spend IBMs time job hunting while they pay me for it. F this place." -Two hours ago
Some opine the axe will drop again next month:
Performance and salaries aren't the sole factors when it comes to IBM layoffs, contrary to intuition. Even some "cheap" staff gets laid off and insiders assert the company gets rid of some of the most productive people (not in spite of their productivity, maybe because of it). At the end of last year there were many cuts at IBM in Brazil. Layoffs got "implemented" (IBM calls them "RAs") and whole facilities were ended. This impacted several cities, including Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Someone made a video about this last month. From the video's description: "IBM announced the closure of its research laboratory in Brazil, the company's only one in Latin America. The decision, communicated to approximately 100 employees last Tuesday (18), affects teams distributed between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and marks the end of a unit created in 2010 to develop artificial intelligence, cloud computing and quantum computing technologies."
The video contains slop, so the text too is suspect.
This was just 2 hours ago: (from Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Not only the labs in Brazil are impacted (they're marketed using buzzwords like "fields of artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud, and quantum computing"), there are also these prior incidents:
- IBM Closes Offices and Labs in the United States to Open New Ones in India
- Many IBM Layoffs, Centred Around Expert Labs US in Atlanta (Offer of "Relocation" Where No Such Option Exists)
- IBM Research Shutting Down Labs, Lots of Workers Laid Off (Even Days Before Christmas in Devout Catholic Country)
There's also Albany and other facilities.
IBM likes talking about "innovation", but it seems to be getting rid of those most likely to come up with something new, novel, exciting.
Similarly, having destroyed CentOS, nowadays IBM reduces Fedora to rubble with slop. Then they wonder why people lose interest?
Matthew Miller has been virtually 'vanished' [1, 2] and we hear from people who dump Fedora as it was reduced to buzzwords and negative (as in, harmful to the users) gimmicks. Almost all the prominent people in Fedora (Ben Cotton also) were brushed aside. In recent days, Planet Fedora barely produced one story per day (some are not in English, some are from Microsoft staff).
The stock (share price) of IBM says nothing about what actually goes on. █
Image source: Blackwork print of Apollo sitting with his lyre against a leafless tree