Bonum Certa Men Certa

IBM Reduces the Thresholds for Acceptance (and the Salaries)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 16, 2026,
updated Feb 16, 2026

Are chatbots good enough as IBM staff?

IBM ChatBot

In recent hours:

 Last Friday marked my last day at IBM after 4.5 incredible years.

There is pushback and talkback, backlash and dissent from inside IBM. Workers feel like the company is consciously and deliberately morphing into a circus with a glorified (century-old) brand.

Ridiculous puff pieces (targetting the Cheeto regime with phony "job creation" narratives) tell us that IBM is "tripling" something something something...

The insiders at IBM rightly debunk that nonsense (avalanche of fake or misleading "news") and the latest comment we saw said: "This reminds me of the "New Collar" initiative under Ginni. "Turns out we do need some people onshore in the same time zone who can speak English." Sounds like this time they're hiring people with actual degrees though, since Band 6. Sadly, they will be treated as disposable, just a crutch for the main employees in India, discarded after a couple of years."

Someone shared a mindless slop-boosting puff piece from Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal or WSJ (long-term booster of IBM's false accounting; anything for Wall Street!) and somebody else soon responded: "wsj is a joke... the first thing so-called 'ai' can replace is those insidious clowns" (either IBM management or the people who publish such ridiculous slop-boosting fluff).

In another page someone wrote about the layoffs that never end: ""Back in the day" (when I was still an employee), dismissals took place quarterly. January, April, July, October...over and over again."

Someone responded: "Except when they snuck in that bonus RA last November. I bet they enjoyed taking everyone by surprise."

Hours ago somebody added: "the layoff in November 2024 was not a surprise to many. The Indian id1ot at the top and his cabal need more cuts than the 15/70/15 performance scheme and cook the books to stay in the grace of Wall Street. The AI and Quantum Computing charade does not fool anybody."

They use the "I" word (not "International") a lot. But it's not untrue that IBM moved a lot of its jobs to India or brought in Indians on visas to work in the US. It's tempting to dismiss all these commentaries as racism. Such dismissiveness helps IBM's Board. A decade ago they collectively dismissed dissenters as "sexist".

Perhaps IBM does not intend to replace workers with slop but with workers who rely on slop to write English or to produce code. Those workers have much lower salary expectations.

IBM needs to read what happened to the Tower of Babel. Especially the why/s. █

Tower of Babel

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