[ElDiablo666]

You do seem insensitive. Fuck their missed projections. Let all the managers quit for their failure. Did you look at the financials? Why are you pretending that you have the slightest clue what's going on in their business? If the employees were in charge like they ought to be, they could deal with their business properly and almost certainly avoid this fucking travesty. Tens of thousands of people losing their jobs is fucking bullshit.

[eitally]

What the heck are you going on about? IBM sold a division of their hardware business to Lenovo, who apparently didn't agree to absorb all of the personnel IBM had supporting it, so they're -- poof -- redundant. IBM obviously wasn't making much, if any, money selling x86 servers, and it's perfectly reasonable that they couldn't find obvious positions for xx,000 people whose jobs and specializations suddenly don't exist anymore. This is as cut & dried as these things can be. Compare, for example, to the preemptive huge cuts many technology & manufacturing companies made in 2007 (the smart ones, foreseeing what their soft 2007 market would turn into in 2008++) and 2008 (the either less savvy or more empathetic/hopeful companies). "Sorry, we're cutting a large portion of our workforce because we're pretty sure the market is going to tank and we need to mitigate our risk exposure to the downside." That doesn't go over nearly as well with employees as "Sorry, we sold the division you work for and the buyer didn't want you."

I work in contract electronics manufacturing, for Sanmina, and in Oct-Nov 2007 we laid of 16% of our global workforce of ~50,000. Compared to our competitors who waited until 2008 (Jabil, Celestica, Flextronics, Plexus, Benchmark, etc), this ended up being a very smart decision. Just compare the stock prices of each company over the past five years. In 2003 we won the PC & Thinkpad manufacturing business from IBM, which accounted for about $3b/yr in revenues over each of the subsequent five years. Revenue, not profit. We only made about 1-1.5% profit on that ridiculously tight margin commodity hardware business. In 2008 we sold it to Foxconn & Lenovo, much like IBM just sold their x86 server division to Lenovo. It is a smart purchase for Lenovo because they have ready access to cheap manufacturing capacity and they operate at a scale that allows them to negotiate much better deals throughout their supply chain than IBM could. This is the same reason Foxconn, Pegatron, Compal, & Quanta are [roughly] the only ones making money hand over fist building consumer products: either they negotiate exclusive deals on high-demand, high-margin products (e.g. Apple) or they just operate on such a huge scale that they get optimal prices on direct material and freight. It's impossible to compete, which is why the smaller (say, $3-10b/yr revenue) EMS companies have intentionally focused on low vol / high mix / high margin areas over the past 5-7 years. This includes things like defense goods, medical products, network infrastructure (especially microwave & optical/fiber), robotics, and similar complex or highly regulated products.

In our deal, we had to layoff a few people, but not too many and mostly direct labor (factory workers) and lower level business management. We "sold" a full 10% of our global IT staff to Foxconn in the deal, and they took over a high percentage of the business folks responsible for the business, too. Why? Because they wanted to ensure continuity in the marketplace.

This just isn't something Lenovo needs very much of from IBM for server support. They're already a hardware company and already have the same or similar functions in their existing org. If these people being laid off are good, they'll be in demand and easily hired elsewhere. It's not like the Indian domestic market is suffering lack of demand, and it isn't like US companies aren't still clamoring for an increase in the H-1b limit (not to mention all the L-1/L-2 visas out there).

[cones688]

Maybe you should read the article

> "Announced today including managers"

This is the failing X86 based server business (STG) which IBM has sold off to Lenovo, most likely duplicate test/support staff which Lenovo already have. They aren't just trimming - the departments are closing down.

[MichaelMoser123]

IBM has sold the XSeries division, STG is a different division (storages and systems), and is not up for sale AFAIK.

[cones688]

Systems and Technology Group is the hardware wing and within contains X-Series Division. IBM is keeping the other power, storage and Z (mainframe) IIRC.

[reversethrust]

You're forgetting about networking and the STG software divisions (e.g. firmware, some cloud software, the products that they acquired when they bought Platform Computing..)

[smoyer]

Did you ever notice that when someone says "I don't want to seem/sound/look XXXXX", they follow it with a statement that can be perceived that way.

You do seem full of hatred. If the employees had started IBM, bought out their division or otherwise owned the business, I'd agree with everything you say. In this case, management should also be sacked - On the other hand, maybe part of management's failure was hiring too many employees?

[razzmataz]

You never know, maybe they will be sacked after these layoffs are taken care of. One place I worked at, two managers were each told to select one of their underlings for layoffs. After they made their selections, the managers were then laid off.

[smoyer]

IBM is selling, consolidating and closing whole lines of business ... there's nothing that says anyone has to be employed when they're done. I saw a layoff similar to what you described once ... a few of the managers laid off everyone in their groups, then the next day, HR came in from corporate, laid them off and closed the building down.

[tluyben2]

Well yeah; that's the eternal issue generally; top managers are considered doing well because they dared to reorganized. That's great, but they also messed up; if they didn't there would be no need for the lay-offs; IBM is big; they can put those people to work in another division. So after the re-organization I would suggest the responsible managers are fired with a few weeks severance as well. That never happens though and no matter what people come up with as excuses, they never sounds very valid. Giving some guys a few million bonus (don't say that happens here, but probably will, learning from the past) basically for firing 10.000 people is a weird concept in my eyes and it will always be. The bonuses and other incentives for the responsible parties should be put towards re-educating and re-hiring the affected people in other parts of IBM (and whatever other company you put here). IMHO.

[fennecfoxen]

Who says they messed up? IBM sold their server business and Lenovo didn't want all the employees. IBM made money off the sale, IBM saves money not employing everyone anymore, profits and shareholder value.

For a variety of other layoffs, adding management punishment would make some sense. This one, not so much.

[tluyben2]

Like I said; not messing up would be making sure they have other jobs either at IBM or elsewhere. Not calling laying off 13000 people messing up sounds strange to me; you have a social responsibility here. People are not things you can discard when you don't need them anymore. If you have no other way, then ok, but IBM is not close to any kind of bankruptcy or situation like that.

[fennecfoxen]

> not messing up would be making sure they have other jobs either at IBM or elsewhere.

Oh, I see. You're a Communist and think IBM exists to provide jobs, not to provide shareholder profits. That'll necessarily lead you to a different conclusion than it led me.

[bifftannen]

This is exactly it. The people that are responsible never pay the price.

[fennecfoxen]

The people responsible for selling the business to Lenovo?