Another Discrimination Lawsuit Against IBM and Workers Say IBM Culls Older Workers (Just Like Microsoft)
At Microsoft, more so in the US this year, people are offered several months' salary to leave if they are "old" (over 40)
Nearly a new 52-low some hours ago: (IBM Common Stock)
People still leaving, e.g.:
We're still trying to get a whiff and/or sniff, seeing what IBM insiders think of the company. As one person put it yesterday: "As goes Kyndryl so goes IBM Consulting. Both rely on cheap labor to make a buck on unsustainable contracts. It’s a dog eat dog world in the commodity labor marketplace. IBM has a slight advantage here in that they can leverage their monopoly (mainframe) power, along with their recent SW purchases to enhance the contract engagement pool, but the handwriting is on the wall. Cut labor costs or face the wrath of wall street. Kyndryl is indicating that they need to reduce costs by 15-18% to essentially break even. YEP those costs short term come out of labor. IBM consulting will follow suit as they are graded quarter to quarter, and the AI labor saving initiatives only enhance automation thus reducing headcount. No matter how you slice it, labor will be reduced as automation takes over. [...]"
This was followed by criticism of slop at IBM (Bob as a mere wrapper for LLMs):
AI, AI…. What a joke! Especially for coding. I gave 10 different coding assignments to both Claude and Bob as I wanted to compare since Bob is supposedly based on Claude. They overall both failed miserably. Only for two of the assignments I got code that was actually working and the quality of the code was less than stellar.So, what is the point? Yet tech jobs in the US are dropping like flies.
I bet the CS degrees at the US universities are going to see a lot less enrollments going forward with that AI cr-p!
This was followed by comments entertaining an obnoxious troll who attempts to vex lurkers and posters alike. One response spoke of Gertsner in response to repeated provocation: "Matthew 16:26: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?" Gertsner did not save us at all - he sold our soul to McKinsey. IBM is now nothing but a garden variety WITCH company completely incapable of innovation, a company that lost its soul a long time ago, as vampires at the top feed off its forever dying corpse."
However, the more interesting comments spoke of this news about a new lawsuit. People were quick to point out that age, not race, was the likely issue:
The article in question focuses on race:
IBM has a "difficult history" with blacks: The Full Story (With References) of IBM's Role in a Purge of Black People and Mixed-Race Couples
The pattern there seems clear. Getting promoted or becoming more experienced (i.e. more expensive) is a "mistake":
If IBM fails to retain some of the smartest people, then what is the future of IBM? Trying to replace real workers with mediocre slop and then offloading those tasks to slop operators on a very small salary? A company cannot compete on those terms.
Hours ago there was gossip about a man who may have been "too smart to stick around":
This whole page might soon get nuked for containing the full name of a person. █