"Internally Important, Externally Irrelevant": IBM in a Nutshell

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 22, 2026

"Someone on the app described IBM Execs as "Internally important, externally irrelevant". Perfect description. Literal nobodies outside the four walls of IBM." This past weekend (comment)

2 hours ago:

IBM is rotting. It really is rotting. Ask people who work at IBM. Speak to whistleblowers (we have). Some are more open about it than others - there seems to be consensus that IBM fakes many things and lies about most things, not limited to "quantum" potential and capabilities. Years ago it did the same with "blockchains" and other things. Where are we now?

Some hours ago an anonymous poster spoke of "IBM’s strategy going forward." The page is intentionally defaced by a very vocal troll (the thelayoff.com moderators have tolerated this for weeks), but there's some signal left in the page, e.g.:

Ask yourself what is IBM’s strategy going forward. I would speculate it’s two fold.

1. Lower costs to rock bottom. (Outsource, partner, offshore, PIP, and layoff exploit this strategy)

2. Farm “enterprise” as they own the Monopoly (this is accomplished via “buying innovation in SW, developing chip technology in Infrastructure, and using AI in consulting)

Everything else the 3 divisions do is just a tangent and reverts back to “lower costs to rock bottom”

In more recent hours somebody mentioned how silent layoffs in "PIP" form allegedly impact the more "expensive" workers - i.e. those who may have worked for IBM since decades back (or the previous century).

People who bemoan the company speak about morale, e.g. "I don’t feel any enthusiasm starting my work week at IBM. I have to make 6 colored presentations for intellectually impaired executives. I feel embarrassed when, witnessing these fools spew all the nonsense i put in these presentations."

4 hours ago by Anonymous with decades' worth of experience, apparently:

Very easy. Called The Peter Principle and been around forever. When I joined IBM in the early 80s it was awesome. I cannot begin to tell you how great it was vs the %^&* hole it is now. All self inflicted and started by everyone's favorite troll's man crush Gerstner.

The Peter Principle, a satirical 1969 book by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, argues that in a hierarchy, employees are promoted until they reach their "level of incompetence," where they can no longer perform well, leading to widespread inefficiency. The book humorously explains why incompetence seems rampant in organizations, suggesting that people are promoted based on success in their current role, not for the skills needed in the next, such as a great salesperson being promoted to a manager with no leadership skills.

Core concept
The principle: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence".

The process: An employee who is good at their job gets promoted. This continues until they are promoted to a position where they are no longer competent, and there, they stay.

The result: The organization becomes filled with people who are not good at their jobs, as the competent ones have been promoted out of their effective roles.

Key takeaways from the book
Satirical but insightful: It uses humor to critique management and organizational structures, but its observations about promotion and incompetence are considered classic in management theory.

Examples: It provides examples like a competent teacher becoming an incompetent principal because the skills for the new role (dealing with school boards) are different from the old one (teaching).

"Final Placement Syndrome": The book also describes symptoms of being stuck in an incompetent role, suggesting "distraction therapy" (finding competence in hobbies) as a remedy.

IBM is the sort of employer everyone wants to leave, provided there is a job offer elsewhere.

When companies become just "bus stops" like these, and moreover there's no motivation to excel (because PIPs happen irrespective of performance, according to insiders), they are domed to vanish.

IBM and its precursor have been around for 115 years, but that does not mean it has a "life insurance". Right now its debt spins out of control and its stock spirals down the drain. █