PIPs and "Retirements": IBM Layoffs in Anything But Name
Grapevine, Texas, hours ago:
In recent months we showed that at Microsoft, even people in their mid 40s "retire". It's not really voluntary. They're hinted or signalled that if they don't pretend to be "retiring" with some "buyout" (about 6 months' salary, not much more in practice) they will likely receive a pink slip instead.
We've seen similar things happening at IBM. Many people "retire", some of them aged well less than 55. Their messages about it seem scripted so as to comply with the NDA(s) they signed.
Hours ago someone recalled what Gerstner did to IBM on the day that was meant to be for jokes and laughs. He or she wrote: "Met him at my first Golden Circle in 93 just after he joined. He was an arrogant pompous greedy bully who laid off over 150,000 great IBMers over 18 months."
It has not stopped since then. The bigger problem, however, is that IBM has run out of products to sell, so it is buying other companies (for their products and revenue) while marketing vapourware. McDonalds found this out the hard way. Wait till McDonalds "Swallows" or "Digests" some "Quantum" something... junk in, junk out.
As of hours ago, another thread speaks of "[a] personal anecdote..."
"I was RAed [laid off] in the 20-teens and had worked on several products. All were embarrassingly bad. Management only cared about product image, didn't give a hoot about quality. I was hired by an acquisition and stuck around because I was close enough to retirement to wait for an RA. If I had to update my resume again, after the dates, location, and positions I held at IBM, I'd write "Cringe" as the job description. The moral is: if you're still young, get out of that place or you'll likely regret it later."
And elsewhere we see the typical (and correct) accusations of censorship of reasonably OK comments in relation to PIPs (now they are de facto RAs or layoffs; they're misused to skirt the WARN Act):
IBM cannot forever censor the people it is hurting. If they speak anonymously the NDA is toothless and when they blow the whistle (many thanks to those who leak information to us!) they rely on source protection.
The truth about IBM is coming out. That former Red Hat (now IBM) staff threatens to put my wife and I in prison is worse than cruel. █
