[HN Gopher] IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts...
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IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older
workers
Author : LinuxBender
Score : 268 points
Date : 2022-06-14 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| cardosof wrote:
| Companies after achieving huge success and growth become finance
| companies, in the sense that it isn't about technology or
| products and services anymore, it's just about balance sheets and
| stock prices and cash flows. Everything becomes money problems
| and money solutions, like buying smaller players, selling non-
| core business units, hiring cheaper workers, firing expensive
| workers, paying more dividends, buying back stocks, etc.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| How many times has IBM been caught discriminating against older
| workers? Can they be declared a habitual offender and put under
| court supervision until whatever culture inside the company keeps
| spawning these incidents gets extinguished? This goes back at
| least to the late 80s and maybe even further back than that.
| matrix12 wrote:
| As an ex-ibmer it always felt the stalls were due to short
| sighted management decisions. That and the rampant nepotism. Age
| was never an issue, far less so than working in SV afterwards.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Yeah, in my time there it was clear that everything was about
| quarterly targets set by some unseen person with a spreadsheet.
| dakial1 wrote:
| Being an ex-IBMer let me say that the old timers are part of why
| IBM has stalled. But I don't mean that happens because of their
| age, but because of how long they are in the company and also how
| comfortable they are with all the non-sensical processes and red
| tape that company has (internally we called it IBM -
| International Bureaucracy Monster).
|
| Being a "business operator" really has a value there and most of
| the leadership is made of old timers simply because of how they
| know how to navigate (and circumvent) all the millions of gates
| and layer-over-layer of non-value added processes.
|
| Maybe if IBM worked to remove the "Old timers" from the
| leadership while, at the same time, bringing in older,
| experienced professionals, but without the vices that 15/20 years
| at IBM brings, it could be justified.
| mullingitover wrote:
| How are you defining 'stalled'? They're still the single
| biggest recipient of patents in the world as of last year.
| bin_bash wrote:
| It's funny you see filing patents as evidence of innovation
| when I see it as precisely the opposite.
| mullingitover wrote:
| I'm not sure how else you can really define innovation in a
| concrete fashion. Patents aren't exciting, but they're the
| end product of employing thousands of researchers and and
| spending billions equipping them.
| rfrey wrote:
| Researchers, or lawyers?
| alisonkisk wrote:
| sbf501 wrote:
| > how comfortable they are with all the non-sensical processes
| and red tape
|
| That's a good way of putting it. There is this "managerial
| comfort zone" that goes straight up the org chart. I have
| observed managers evolve to optimize the environmental
| constraints, delivering the correct messaging, delays, and
| target zone realignments, just but knowing how to apply the
| correct templates. On the other side, this has caused top-down
| management to evolve to push back on these constraints,
| creating unreasonable landing-zones knowing they will not be
| hit. It is a crazy passive-aggressive arms race.
|
| Maddening. It is these boondogglers who should be excised due
| to nepotism and failure to deliver, as well as their enabling
| upper management. However, the knives-out behavior of the early
| 90's has changed to "you pat my back..." as competition has
| vanished leading to monopolies who are free to stroke each
| other.
|
| Sources: my experience at IBM, Intel, and Microsoft. Among
| other companies that weren't as large.
| lumost wrote:
| This is the nature of large organizations. If you bring in
| fresh leadership, they will often stumble on the internal
| process. If you try to hire leadership/engineers who have been
| with the org for a while, they'll often struggle as they built
| skills dealing with large, entrenched organizations which don't
| translate to more nimble environments.
| hintymad wrote:
| > because of how long they are in the company and also how
| comfortable they are with all the non-sensical processes and
| red tape that company has
|
| This seems the fate of every company. As a company grows, the
| stake for making a mistake becomes higher to some employees. So
| they install processes. They add red tapes. They slow down
| everything in the name of preventing disasters. In the
| meantime, a company can't innovate or grow all the time.
| Sometimes they get into a plateau. And behold, when there's no
| grow, those who are good at grabbing land will win, and they
| are the incumbents who do not care about or are not capable of
| innovation. The results? The company dies, its talents going to
| other companies, and a new generation of companies rises.
|
| That's why it's so much important for people, at least for
| most, to chase growth. Growth begets real meaningful projects.
| Growth makes turf war less relevant (you can't get rid of it
| entirely). Growth sweeps most of the ugliness under the carpet
| until, well, the growth stops.
| qorrect wrote:
| Who do you think has done this _well_ ? It does seem after a
| certain size most companies succumb to this.
| bin_bash wrote:
| Apple. Of course they're not as nimble as a startup and
| they release a dog now and then, but by and large they
| continue to innovate at a remarkable pace for their size
| and age.
| hourago wrote:
| Apple was dying and it was only saved because Bill Gates
| could not afford for Microsoft to become a monopoly so he
| put the money. Apple lives out of it's duopoly with
| Google on mobile phones. Or is Apple TV so successful?
|
| Apple may not be a bad company but it has survived out of
| pure luck.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Apple survived out of pure luck _that one time_. It 's
| executed really well since then, though.
| hintymad wrote:
| Apple and Microsoft? 3M too. Nokia used to invent itself
| multiple times too, but I guess not any more.
| hourago wrote:
| > But I don't mean that happens because of their age, but
| because of how long they are in the company and also how
| comfortable they are with all the non-sensical processes and
| red tape that company has (internally we called it IBM -
| International Bureaucracy Monster).
|
| Blaming all the people that has been long in the company
| without individually evaluating their performane is bad and
| lazy management. To target people by age, as only older people
| can have been so long in the company, it's discrimination on a
| protected class.
|
| Are you really justifying firing people indiscriminately based
| on age, or other proxy parameters like decades working for the
| company?
| rexreed wrote:
| IBM has stalled because it stopped innovating, and instead
| pushing highly cumbersome, expensive, consulting-centric
| "products" that are nothing more than expensive services tied
| to proprietary technologies. Where IBM isn't proprietary, it
| rests heavily on open source offerings that it has acquired
| (RedHat). Ironically, it's IBM itself that is every much the
| sclerotic "dinobaby" that it seems to dislike. Simply hiring in
| a younger pool won't change that dynamic. If anything, that
| approach is deeply cynical, and only makes sense when you
| realize that IBM sees its growth in services and "solutions"
| offerings that depend on large numbers of lesser-paid, non-
| family bound "early professional hires" that they seem to
| desire.
|
| IBM placed bets on highly speculative "moonshot" programs like
| IBM Watson (especially Watson Health) that failed, while
| simultaneously failing to effectively compete in the growing
| cloud-centric market. IBM could have been a realistic contender
| in the Enterprise against AWS, Google, and Microsoft cloud
| environments, but it instead opted for large-scale vendor lock-
| in style approaches.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| I think you two are looking at two sides of the same coin.
|
| IBM has stalled due to poor business decisions. But those
| decisions are a symptom of bureaucratic system of IBM and
| those who know how to navigate it.
|
| You can't divorce the actions of a company from the people
| who constitute the company.
| rexreed wrote:
| It's true you can't disconnect the decisions of the
| business from the ones making those decisions. But you also
| can't hire your way out of current problems, especially
| hiring lower in the organization and hope for change. To
| completely reboot a company's decision-making culture by
| way of importing new people without a complete reboot of
| leadership is very difficult. And even if you could
| completely replace everyone in the organization from the
| very top to the very bottom (which is an impossibility),
| you're still left with the legacy of existing customers and
| technology as well as your brand and reputation and
| relationships. Simply put, changing people is not a
| solution to these problems. People and decision-making
| relate to each other, but as time goes on, the ability for
| one to impact the other without regard to the existing
| impedance in the organization and market is limited. This
| is part of the Innovator's Dilemma
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)
| humanwhosits wrote:
| They could flip the relationship with Red Hat and let
| them run the show
| [deleted]
| rusticpenn wrote:
| Current employee here. They have identified and are focused
| on changing this. IBM is moving towards technology provider
| role (from consulting focus). This is also reflected by the
| new CEO who comes from research background and was the main
| person pushing towards buying of Redhat.
| tbihl wrote:
| I'd be very excited to see any such change come to pass, as
| an employee of a significantly larger, older, and even more
| bureaucratic organization.
| rexreed wrote:
| The US Government?
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| Or AT&T.
| tbihl wrote:
| That's the one.
| mech422 wrote:
| yeah - we were accquired as part of their 'cloud services'
| shopping spree... so far, it seems like they're TRYING to
| drive off the very people they acqui-hired. Contracts seem
| more like a Tata level staff aug. then a 'professional
| services' play.
| rexreed wrote:
| The forces of resistance to change and the pro-services
| culture at IBM are strong. Very strong. See how far the
| desire and will to change goes when placed up against the
| marketing and sales culture at IBM and pressures from the
| market.
| jldugger wrote:
| > The forces of resistance to change and the pro-services
| culture at IBM are strong. Very strong.
|
| Well yea, most of their headcount is consultants now,
| right? Corporate America might not be a democracy but
| neither can executives change the culture by edict.
| tims33 wrote:
| Agree that there is a way to have a healthy company with
| motivated, engaged staff without targeting employees based on
| their age. IBM has been broken for so long. They'd be best off
| spinning RH back out and just selling everything until they're
| just a mainframe company.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > contains emails that discuss the effort taken by IBM to
| increase the number of 'millennial' employees.
|
| This _could_ be OK if your workforce is fewer millennials than
| you 'd expect. I know the federal government has issues with this
| for tech workers because pay is lower than industry and its
| policy on cannabis.
| dangus wrote:
| IBM should be on everyone's "never work here" list along with
| companies like Amazon and Oracle.
|
| In my opinion, IBM only cares about patents, not actually solving
| any problems or accomplishing anything.
| jobu wrote:
| According to a coworker that had worked at IBM for a couple
| decades it was a great place to work until sometime in the mid
| 2000s. It was like they suddenly noticed how shitty Oracle was
| and decided that was the business model they needed to follow.
| Labeling older employees as "dinobabies" is a perfect example.
| floren wrote:
| I visited IBM Austin a few times circa 2009-2011 to
| collaborate with an IBM employee on a project. Huge campus,
| absolutely completely dead at all times. I would come in
| through the main entrance, go past the security guard, and
| see nobody at all until I arrived in the lab space. The lab
| itself was a large workspace with all sorts of desks and
| project space, but the only employee in there was the guy I
| had come to see. Absolutely bizarre and an incredibly
| depressing place to be.
| diob wrote:
| On the flip side, I had fun just walking around the giant
| empty buildings during my coop. But yeah, very bleak.
| green-salt wrote:
| Exact same thing in their Boulder, CO office. Dead. Middle
| of the day on a weekday.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I used to work at IBM in the UK in the mid 2000s and this
| was fairly accurate at the UK offices too.
|
| We'd joke that IBM stood for I'm By Myself as people
| would work from home 90% of the time - many would be
| mysteriously uncontactable/AFK during that time due to
| "unforseen circumstances" (theat seemed to happen _all
| the time_ ) ... it was very hard to get hold of people
| when they were WFH.
|
| No regrets - it was a great start for me, but I am glad I
| left.
| vpb wrote:
| Remote working was quite common in IBM when I worked
| there, ten-ish years ago. I stepped foot in an office
| only a handful of times.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I co-oped at IBM Austin from 1986-1987, there were some
| pretty vacant spots then, too. One time a fellow co-op and
| I followed some full times around to explore and got stuck
| getting snacks in a break room because our keycards didn't
| unlock the door to the rest of the floor (kind of a fire
| issue there in hindsight) and we had to wait 10 minutes for
| someone to let us out.
| jmspring wrote:
| I knew researchers at IBM Almaden. They would avoid going in
| or duck out when the bean counters were around. The idea was
| to not draw attention to one's self and one's project for
| fear of being cut.
|
| At the time, IBM also had a very strong focus on either
| hiring from east Asia or outsourcing / rerouting work to
| such.
| rexreed wrote:
| That's when they went all-in on professional services as
| their primary go-to-market, chasing high buzzword quotient
| stuff that was meant to capture services revenue and lock
| into proprietary software. Remember WebSphere?
| georgeburdell wrote:
| I had a professor in the mid-2000s who always had to get a
| jab in at IBM because he had worked there in the 90s
| (somewhere in Florida) and hated it
| diob wrote:
| I did a coop there during college. They took a month to get me
| a laptop. Then gave me 0 direction or tasks. At graduation they
| offered me a full-time position. Yeah, nah.
| bedast wrote:
| I have extensive experience with IBM products, and I can say
| their products, these days, are garbage. My last experience
| (with PDTX) was so bad, I literally removed all mentions of IBM
| products from my resume. It's been almost a decade and I still
| get recruiters with old copies of my resume hitting me with
| stuff for management of IBM stuff, and I immediately delete
| those communications. Never again.
| GuardianCaveman wrote:
| Plus the whole Nazi / holocaust thing
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Consider adding a link [1] as many people may not know what
| you are referring to.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Having worked there, I disagree.
|
| Even if it's only to learn what it's like to work at a big
| place like that, it is highly instructive. Let alone the number
| of connections you can make that will pay dividends down the
| line.
|
| They also do a lot of research, which remained a mainstay of
| the company years ago when I was there and I don't see that
| having changed. I think people underestimate how much that
| contributes to the perceived slowness and stuffiness of the
| company. When you have an entire research division working on
| the edge of physics, that means a lot of academics, and your
| company by necessity doesn't fit the mold of other tech
| companies. Indeed, most of the newcomers seem to have tried to
| copy this model.
|
| IBM "only cares" about its investors. Patents are a means to an
| end there for sure but while I was there they claimed the
| patent portfolio that was primarily aimed at being defensive.
| Whether this is true or not I have no idea but I don't see a
| ton of IBM in the news as the plaintiff in patent lawsuits.
|
| As a company they have a lot of captive clients and are deep
| into some areas other companies just can't get into reliably,
| so you sometimes get work opportunities you wouldn't elsewhere.
|
| The red tape and bureaucracy is awful and the way they tighten
| the belt every time they underperform for a quarter left a bad
| taste in my mouth; definitely felt run more by accountants and
| business people than engineers.
| Justin_K wrote:
| Oracle pays great and has great benefits.
| subsubzero wrote:
| agree, those are good ones, I would add facebook as well to
| that list.
| ido wrote:
| I have a few friends working (or having worked) at amazon and
| quite happy (especially at AWS). I don't think they're in the
| same bucket as IBM and Oracle.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| they make a lot of money
|
| they pay pretty well
|
| there are worse companies to work for
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| They have been earning less and less profit for the past 10
| years, a time during which almost everyone else experienced
| explosive growth. That is going to make for poor quality of
| life at work.
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/net-income
| bestcoder69 wrote:
| The patents that they showcased when I was there were so funny.
| Truly quantity over quality.
|
| My favorite was a patent for a mobile phone password input box.
| The innovation was that as you type your password, your phone's
| rotation (I think it was just 4 possible rotations) was
| recorded per-character as you typed. So hunter2 might be
| encoded as "h-0deg u-90deg n-270deg..." etc.
|
| I love imagining Apple starting to develop this for iPhones
| until one of their lawyers delivers the bad news.
| mattlondon wrote:
| They did this by proxy in the UK by ruining the dinobabies'
| (decent) pensions unless they quit - if they quit they get to
| keep the pension, if they stay they'd be throwing away
| significant sums in pension.
|
| Only the older IBMers had these decent pensions, so there was a
| huge loss of older IBMers who understandly just quit rather than
| miss out on their gold-plated pension.
|
| Ironically many were rehired as freelance contractors (by their
| individual projects, not "centrally" if that makes sense) on
| significantly higher rates, so they got to keep their pension,
| keep their job (as a contractor) and get a pay rise too. The
| millennials meanwhile were kept on low salaries (it was the main
| reason I quit )
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Has IBM changed? My cohort of graduates in the 90's found them
| stuffy, extremely cautious and change-resistant. One fellow in my
| graduating class was chastised for wearing a shirt that wasn't
| IBM blue - "I understand you're trying to make a statement," (he
| wasn't) "but you won't fit in around here unless you make an
| effort."
|
| He was told when he quit to join a startup "You know you will
| never work at IBM again?"
|
| What a dinosaur.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| Has it changed? You're talking about the 90's. That's 30 years
| ago. Of course it's changed.
| theplumber wrote:
| I have a hunch though that IBM employs more old people than any
| other big tech company (i.e apple, facebook, google etc). At some
| point the old generation should step aside to make space for the
| new or the company itself will die just like its employees.
|
| It's no secret that after a certain age you stop chasing big
| dreams and just want to do more of the old things/job which is
| not a competitive strategy for a company.
| speed_spread wrote:
| > after a certain age you stop chasing big dreams
|
| I have "certain age" and must strongly disagree here. Those who
| stop never were big dreamers in the first place, or had their
| morale crushed by eternal bad management. "Age" itself is not a
| factor. If anything, age gives confidence, wisdom, focus and
| autonomy to pursue one's goals.
|
| Age also means you also realize that you're gonna die one day
| (soon) and that you'd better get your shit together if you're
| gonna have any kind of meaningful impact within the short
| timeframe you're alloted on this ball of mud.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I'm an old fart and I embrace new ideas assuming they have been
| well thought through, allowed for documented feedback from old
| stodgy curmudgeons like me and are not putting the company,
| customers or investors at risk.
|
| That said I can understand why you are saying that. Some
| organizations do permit people with high tenure to paralyze a
| companies innovation and I do not know how to fix that short of
| creating competition and importing the good employees at the
| new competition.
| downrightmike wrote:
| They should extend protections to younger workers too. IBM has a
| lot of dirty tactics that wouldn't be legal if the workers were
| slightly older.
| kube-system wrote:
| That's more difficult, practically speaking, because youth
| often correlates with inexperience.
| bee_rider wrote:
| There are real business reasons not to invest in younger and
| older employees, why should we just protect one group? (we
| should protect both! Or better yet, everyone, no need to have
| some ever-narrowing gap around like 35 of unprotected
| people).
| kube-system wrote:
| I'm not saying you shouldn't. I'm saying that you might not
| be able to practically do so. Anyone who doesn't want young
| employees will just `s/young/inexperienced/g` and thwart
| your law.
| geodel wrote:
| Also for middle aged workers. They are quite vulnerable lately.
| paxys wrote:
| Age discrimination laws in the US only apply for older people.
| A company can legally discriminate against someone for being
| young and they can do nothing about it.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| I think that's exactly why the parent commenter would like
| those protections extended to other age groups.
| swagtricker wrote:
| Define "slightly older". The US Equal Opportunity Employment
| considers you part of the protected class against age
| discrimination if you're over 40 (see https://www.eeoc.gov/age-
| discrimination). Let's be honest, 40 is pretty much considered
| the entry point into "middle age".
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| If IBM have done what every other major business seems to have
| done when GDPR came into effect, they will have burned anything
| and everything.
|
| This will be interesting.
| tyingq wrote:
| Interesting, as they went through this before, in 2006, with a
| memo calling experienced workers "oldheads".
|
| https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a...
| nwsm wrote:
| I don't know anything about that case, but "oldheads" is
| typically a term of endearment
| [deleted]
| _jal wrote:
| Seems like you need to run a herd of McKinsey suits through
| your paper trail once a decade or so to really get away with
| this.
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