IBM Sued Over PIPs
PIPs are "performance improvement plans"
We've just discovered that "IBM faces age bias lawsuit alleging impossible performance improvement plan" (they're almost always unfulfillable, that's by design).
This is already being discussed in thelayoff.com:
Microsoft is allegedly doing the same now. It's a practice for invisible or silent layoffs.
Someone said: "I wish the plaintiff good luck. He is going to face a machine of lies and deceit. IBM refuses to release data about age distribution for its recent layoff in 2025. I am hoping someone will IBM to the cleaners."
"The news comes just in time when 15% low performers would potentially be put on PIP," said the OP, perhaps referencing comments in another thread as covered in "Claim That IBM Marked 15% of its Workforce for Potential Layoffs" (this includes Red Hat).
IBM's site in "Albany has had serious integrity issues for many years," somebody wrote a short while ago, "and meaningful change will require replacing Huiming and his team."
There's a long discussion there. It's about stack(ed) ranking(s), PIPs, and now nepotism as well.
A lot of this is leveraged by IBM (also by Microsoft) to remove a lot of 'expensive' staff without formally reporting it. When framed in a nationalistic context or a less subtle way, such as "jobs going to India", IBM can dismiss the whole thing as "racism" (as somebody put it last night, "it sounds like you’re the racist sc*m here.") even if there are patterns people can observe demographically. █