Although I know people who wished to be cut, unfortunately, there are many who hoped to keep their jobs and are very worried about how to find a new opportunity on the job market in the near future.
9 replies (most recent on top)
I'm relieved and happy. Full disclosures:
- - While I just wanted another 2 years (so would have put up with it)
- - I was preparing to look outside anywway late last year
- - I was - luckily (!) - re-deployed late last year
- - I found a new job
- - I am recently converted to RA and will be (a) overlapping) and (b) collecting "severance".
For those without the emotional and functional smooge time of re-deployment - yeah 30 days sucks internally and externally (my usual external is ~90 days to re-hired)
As the company slowly sucks the last bits of joy from my job, the fear of being RA'd has basically vanished.
I feel bad for the folks in the US that just got RA'd for no reason with such a poor severance package. Those of us in countries with better labor protections can be less stressed, if I get cut I'll have time to wait the market out a bit.
I'm relieved. Cannot wait to finally be done with this sh*tshow and move on. I feel like I just went backwards in time working there, it felt like it was 1989 all over again.
IBM is farming the branch (marketing their existing offers to the same customers) When you farm the branch, growth is very very hard to come by. Given the 5% growth that IBM is modeling, they will come up approx 3.5-4.0 billion short of their FCF IF they choose to stay with the 35 billion over 3 year projection. So how do you close that gap
- RA’s (save your way to prosperity)
- PIP’s (cull the herd)
- Spin off’s (Sell existing or under performing assets) (Note this is a two for as you get cash BUT also reduce expense (mostly head count), BUT at the cost of reduced revenue)
- Partner off (reduce costs via sharing the load)
- Increase sales (growth) (Note IBM has already told you 5% is the best they can do)
So what’s a CEO to do? I expect a combination of RA’s (approx 10-20k ) PIPs (on going until utilization reaches at least 70% for all involved), and sell offs / partner off where head count reduction advantages the selling price (note weather, non-mainframe storage, non-enterprise Power and their associated cloud and TSS offerings)
We have reached the second phase of the restructuring (eg non GTS decisions). Some hard choices have to be made. Expect IBM to stick to their knitting (eg mainframe and enterprise solutions)
Good luck to all as IBM restructures
They have to keep cutting. Company is severely underwater.
It is all about FCF... IBM's goal is 35B of FCF over 3 years (2022, 2023 and 2024). In 2022, the FCF was 9.3B when IBM said it would do 10B... so, already a bad start... So, now IBM has to do 25.7B over two years or 12.85B each year. Who is keeping their fingers crossed?
What does that means? Unless revenues all of sudden skyrocket (lol!), then the only way to meet the FCF is to cut costs, which means massively laying off. Laying off is fine, but unfortunately IBM always lays off the wrong people (ie. the people who are making the money for IBM). This is a culture thing, where management are just of bunch of tyrants who always take the quickest short-cuts to achieve their goals.
Note that the same cr-p happens in all major corporations that are no longer growing their revenues because they don't invest in anything.
I would say still a big concern for people not included because the way things are right now they may easily be let go next month or after that based on the updated metrics being enforced . Infact they might not even RA because PIP'ing would be easy based on unachievable metrics recently announced. It will be even harder for people coming later as the recession deepens this year. Senior management is only protecting themselves so anybody at the bottom is getting thrown under the bus.
And your point is?