Claims of Tens of Thousands of 'Silent Layoffs' at IBM (and Red Hat)
Like we stated earlier this week, it's getting hard to keep track of PIP discussions at this point. It's overwhelming as there's such an abundance or just so much stuff about it! At first it seemed like a few canaries; now the whole coal mine is trapping all the workers inside, no canaries are coming out, or many are sent out before the collapse so as to alert outsiders, calling for a rescue operation.
Regardless, in a nutshell, this was in Reddit yesterday:
We keep seeing this claim, 15% marked in each team (any time) as "low performers". We assume some middle managers blow the whistle about it, as they feel somewhat guilty having to compile a list of people to basically lose their jobs when higher management "pulls the trigger". As some say, they must even mark good performance as "low", as this quota (about 1 in 6 people) is being imposed on them from above.
The discussion was caught and discussed 3 hours ago in thelayoff.com:
Looking at recent activity in thelayoff.com, about 80% of the comments and posts are about PIPs, with emphasis on them happening in Europe as well:
We saw people say that this is IBM managers trying to push out workers ahead of a large round of "RAs" (layoffs); they hope that PIPs can help subtract from the "RA" tally, e.g. take 20,000 to be laid off, throw PIPs at all of them, hope that ~15,000 will leave or retire, then tell shareholders that 'only' 5,000 (or 2%) of their staff is laid off. █