Among the ways you can do layoffs, this is one of the better ones for sure. People who are kind of checked out already anyway can get a nice paycheck on their way out and start looking for something new, while people who still have something important to get out of the job get the option to stay.
Consent matters!
I’m 4 weeks away from my voluntary redundancy. I was planning on leaving the job this year anyway, as I wanted to move, so to get a nice paycheck with it was a definite bonus.
Of the people that chose voluntary redundancy, it was mostly those without ties to the area, those that could move, young enough to re-skill, or old enough to retire. The ones that were forced into redundancy have families, mortgages, history in the area, enough baggage to cause inertia. Part of my reasoning to take the voluntary redundancy was to help save at least one person from that.
So absolutely, consent matters. It just sucks that this is happening at all.
The company’s stated reasons for redundancy was to move skills to other locations in the country. This is after a year’s long effort to co-locate in order to facilitate collaboration. What it really seems to be is that our location has very high staff retention, and therefore high salaries, and the company thinks it can hire younger and cheaper elsewhere. The skill and knowledge lost with this move is staggering, everyone can see that, but profit is the most important factor the company cares about, so it’ll inflict its own wounds to get profit up. Capitalism is weird.
I got laid off a couple of years ago by a large tech company (rhymes with Brisco). It sort of sucked, but it was part of a mass layoff of about half the employees who had come into Brisco when our original small company was acquired by them. Interestingly enough, everybody who was laid off was single and childless - all the people who were married and/or had kids were kept on. At least until this new round of layoffs, because fuck everybody we’re going with AI.
My work did this a few years ago and one guy who was planning on retiring took it. He got a full extra year of pay and 2 or 3 years of medical insurance out of the deal.
Absolutely, I’d happily take a redundancy payout from my current job.
I mean if there are severance packages, I wouldn’t say no.
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Damn, wish I could get fired by ibm
Yeah, being laid off by a huge company can be a lot less awful than a smaller one because they pay you off pretty nicely.
I was laid-off in 2022 and got a pretty nice severance, and my new job pays 40% more. I wish I had known how relatively quickly I was going to find another job because I would have enjoyed my time off a lot more. I personally don’t know anyone who has been laid-off and ended up worse off.
Hope that’s true for me! I’m 2 months in and no strong leads. Trying to work my network though.
Hang in there… It took me 3 months to find a job and I worked my ass off every day of those 3 months sending out resumes, reworking my resumes, doing applications, having interviews with headhunters (which I’m retrospect was likely a waste of time since they really didn’t do anything for me).
I certainly didn’t want to come off as sounding like getting laid-off was easy, because it was an extremely stressful time of my life, buy I do think back on those 3 months and how I would have liked to have been doing literally anything else other that marketing myself.
And I will say that as a social network LinkedIn is shit, but it does seem to be a good place for job hunting. Make your profile look like someone they’d want to hire, and then try to be that person on the interview (and maybe even the first few months on the job, of you can).
I was laid off from a big company in 2023, after being with them for 5 years. They told us in March, had it hang over our heads for 2 months, while they did rounds of layoffs. My coworker and myself got laid off finally at the very end. So did the guy I got hired, and had been with the company for like 3 years.
When I tell people I got laid off, they give me sympathy, but I tell them it’s not that bad because due to a contract they had to give me 3 months notice in order to lay me off. My boss said I didn’t have to work those 3 months, so it was a paid vacation. I also got like 12 grand in severance, and possibly 25 grand in benefits in an investment account. I can still get unemployment, which I’m on, and will run out soon. I’ve moved cities and haven’t worked a day since the end of May 2023… I did live with my parents for 4 months though, I’m 38.
my friend was laid off last june by ibm and still hasn’t found a job
Yeah, sorry if I came across as aloof, I do know that it’s tough out there, but I do believe that most people come out ahead after a layoff. But there are still many others who don’t, and I do recognize just how lucky I am.
no you didn’t no apology necessary, it’s a very subjective experience and I wanted to share another side of it :)
This is called a VRIF, Voluntary Reduction in Force, and usually comes with a sizable severance. Lots of people close to retirement at my last job took the offer because it was worth it.
That’s what I was looking for in the article but nothing is mentioned.
Severance package? Unemployment? References?
Yeah, I’d take it.
Unemployment and references should be the norm, nothing to request.
Well unemployment is. Severance isn’t.
That’s probably why the person you replied to specifically left that one out when mentioning just the other two out of the three.
Was given the option about 6 years ago at IBM. Jumped at the opportunity, unfortunately wasn’t approved. “no, we still have a lot of work for you”
Ended up leaving 3 months later, ah well
Didn’t know Henry Cavill works at IBM.
🎵Throw some severance coin to your Witcher🎵
Can we all agree that photo was created by ChatGPT and not an artist. Maybe they ought to put their money where their mouth is.
Absolutely not! ChatGPT is a large language model and cannot generate images.ChatGPT can have a little image gen once in a while as a treat.
It’s awful at text in images though. Pretty sure it draws the text rather than writes it, if that makes sense lol. I had it try 4 times and it got it wrong every time
That’s GPT talking to DALL-E though - GPT is just the messenger, and has no idea what’s in the image, other than the prompt it generated for you.
ChatGPT talks to GPT something (3 or 4 with or without turbo) and Dall-e, and ChatGPT isnt generating anything at all but that is just being pedantic for the sake of it. We all know what the OP meant.
I certainly didn’t. I had no idea it was hooked into an image generator now.
Nice! Shows what I know. I had no idea it was hooked into an image generator now.
To be fair, it is limited to GPT4.
I beg to differ.
The llm is executing a function on a diffusion image model. The llm does not generate the image itself
This doesn’t contradict what the OP said. ChatGPT is now an interface to both an LLM and a diffusion-based image generator.
You’re being pedantic—and confidently ignorant. The product is called “ChatGPT” and through that you can access multiple models. Like ChatGPT 3.5, or DALL•E.
ChatGPT is just a front-end that maintains a session that gets fed to an LLM each time you add a reply, and now has access to image gen, too, so I was wrong.
I mean, the GPT model is a LLM and ChatGPT uses DALL-E in the background to create images. So depending on definition you’re both correct :-)
Depending on how I define anything means I’m always correct I guess. 🤷♂️
Girl on the right probably killed a Spanish swordsmith back in the day.
Yeah, but the model that does the images is actually Dall-e, you are just using gpt’s interface to create them
So, I’m using ChatGPT.
Thank you for agreeing with me.
Sure, sure, was not desagreeing, technically you are using ChatGPT. Just pointing out that the model itself handling the image creation is not chatgpt
Pedantic.
Imbecile.
The picture is bullshit, most people taking voluntary severance would be giving each other high-five’s and pumping the air.
Except if the severance package is BS and they don’t find enough volunteers (but hey! They tried!) and people get volunteered
IBM already silently reduced more tan 5000 positions globally two years ago, creating a separate independent company called Kyndryl. Ernst and Young did the same before that, three years ago outsourcing half of the IT department. Silently.
Wow, IBM is still around?
Our tech leans heavily on AS400s, if you can believe that. And we have 98% market share in our space. They’re complex, but they work, and don’t fail.
I worked with that and COBOL lol. I’ll never be without a job I guess.
DB2 isn’t terrible tbh but of course I want to use something like postgres if I had the choice.
Yeah but they don’t do anything anymore. They create nothing, they innovate nothing, they build nothing. They’re a “service company” now. It’s not at all a shock that they’re failing to anyone but them themselves. IBM should never have green lit that brainless brain drain shift of focus.
That’s entirely untrue. IBM does mega projects and research for things the average consumer wouldn’t know or care about. Their customer base is industries, not people.
An IBM Power9 supercomputer built in 2018 is #7 on the top500.org supercomputer list. That’s not nothing.
Dunno if they’re going anywhere now though or if that was their last hurrah.
they don’t advertize it because they don’t think its sexy or whatever but their mainframe business is still going strong if only because they’re the last player left in the market
Having worked for a couple chip design shops, and now at ibm… ibm is the one of a few companies pushing the envelope in chip design. You just don’t need what they make, so you’ve never heard of it.
Last I read IBM was one of the big companies pursuing R&D in quantum computers and such plus they have some software stuff like crimestat and the weather channel under their umbrella.
As a IBM developer - ouch man, that hurts. I guess I’ll just go back my job doing… nothing (actually sounds like a sweet job)
You’ve experienced the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory in practice. For all you know that statement could have been made by someone who’s never needed an IBM product/solution, or is 16, living in mummy and daddy’s basement. For those of us with 20+ years in software, we know what you do and contribute. While I may not always agree with the philosophies of IBM’s solutions, you fill a super important need in many areas where not that many people have the capability to play. I’ve hired from and lost people to IBM and have nothing but positive things to say; there’s very much a customer-focused execution culture.
Exactly. I’ve been referencing this comic for nearly 20 years (2 weeks off) and it’s still just as relevant.
For the uninitiated:
Now that’s a classic.
Fucking ignorant innuendo enjoyers, the lot of em. Badmouth IBM for enshitifying CentOS but “making nothing” … yeah, no.
They also do quite a bit of engineering r&d stuff.
They just sell the licenses for their solutions and research now rather than directly making products from it.
Fedora —> Red Hat —> IBM.
They are actually quite an innovation company and while their culture can be quite moribund in some of their offices, others are extremely buzzy places with lots of proud employees. It’s complicated, thus.
Innovated CentOS into uselessness.
They do things like ruin CentOS and buy up and screw up smaller data center companies.
You just have no idea what they do, clearly. That doesn’t mean they don’t do anything.
IBM is still just as active, just not in the consumer markets anymore. They’re big into industry research and more specialized computing these days.
You really, really should inform yourself before you make statements about things you know jack shit about.
Yeah. And they have 3% market share of the cloud services.
AWS has 34%.
IBM is a law firm masquerading as a tech company. Anyone who has experienced their “partnerships” already knows this. Jesus Christ their contacts are insane. Once they get their claws in you’re fucked.
Source - 10+ years dealing with them in various capacities.
Just like Oracle lol, sOfTwArE aS a sErViCe is a plague on the tech world.
My new fun one is ServiceNow. You know how off-putting it is for a sales rep to tell you the customer how amazing their stock is doing as if it’s representative of the relationship you have with the company?
“We hear you now let’s sell you XYZ”
“Oh wait we failed you on something? Guess you need ABC!”
IBM appears to be returning to its roots - mainframe engineering.
If someone volunteered to be laid off wouldn’t that invalidate their unemployment?
Generally it is proffered with a severance package that invalidates the unemployment. The package is likely better than what you’d get with unemployment and saves the company money by not increasing their unemployment insurance.
Depends on the jurisdiction. I got a decent severence and was still eligible for unemployment in WA state USA.
AIBM Corp is a few years early in this timeline
AI BM
Open the door HAL
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Resource Action, as Big Blue likes to euphemistically refer to layoffs, shouldn’t be a massive surprise to anyone with more than a passing interest in IBM as it was signaled last month in a Q4 earnings call.
Insiders told us this latest process is not considered to be financial but “transformative,” although IBM was quite clear in January when CFO James Kavanaugh discussed achieving “$3 billion annual run rate in savings by the end of 2024.” This is a third bigger than the initial ambition.
As if often the preferred route, IBM is seeking employees that are happy to take voluntary redundancy, rather than ditching someone that doesn’t want to leave.
Slovakia, we’re told, is to feel the tightest squeeze with around a third of IBM’s cuts in Europe landing on its International (shared services) Center in Bratislava; the Center in Hungary that supports EO&S/ Q2C, as well as the Finance function in Bulgaria are also going to absorb what our sources described as the most dramatic staff reductions.
We asked IBM to comment on the points raised above, and a spokesperson sent us a statement, insisting this is not a cost saving initiative.
This rebalancing is driven by increases in productivity and our continued push to align our workforce with the skills most in demand among our clients, especially areas such as AI and hybrid cloud."
The original article contains 488 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 53%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
