What the IBM Layoffs Look Like
Disclaimer: I am a (US) IBM employee, but my opinions are 100% my own<p>Shipping jobs overseas sucks. I live in the Midwest where most cities were hit by manufacturing going overseas, and my own family was impacted hard by it, like most people&#x27;s were. I work in IT, so of course I know how much offshoring sucks. And I know what I&#x27;m about to say is going to be controversial. I&#x27;m not saying it to be glib or to downplay the pain that losing your job inflicts upon the whole family. What I&#x27;m saying is a warning.<p>Because this kind of stuff isn&#x27;t new. It&#x27;s not like this is the first time anyone has ever heard of sending jobs to other countries. And in terms of layoffs in general, IBM has 500,000 employees and is constantly restructuring itself to stay competitive in the ever-changing tech market. When mainframe and storage had a big layoff last year, my response as an IBMer was &quot;we still have mainframe and storage people?&quot; We spun off (or spun down) those parts of the business a long time ago, you had to have realized that your days were numbered.<p>I work for a hot part of IBM. A part of IBM that makes the company a lot of money. My job is fairly secure. But I know it won&#x27;t be like that forever. Hell, it won&#x27;t be like that for more than a handful of years. Because things change constantly. Right now I&#x27;m working on a project that will automate quite a bit of my work. And I&#x27;m hoping to take the skills from I&#x27;ve learned from that and using them to launch into the next hot thing.<p>Yes, when it&#x27;s my turn to be laid off I will complain so loudly that they will hear me in whatever offshore country happens to take my job. But to be honest, by then I will be working somewhere else, doing something else. Because this isn&#x27;t a new thing. Everyone knows that companies offshore and outsource and lay off employees they don&#x27;t need anymore. And if you read the article, it seems like these people knew it was coming, but stayed until the end anyway.<p>Layoffs suck. Offshoring sucks. But have you seen IBM stock lately? I&#x27;ve never gotten a bonus and I&#x27;ve never gotten a raise, because those two things only happen when we&#x27;re making money. There is no way in any universe that you could look at your job at IBM and think &quot;yeah, this will hold me until retirement&quot;. That&#x27;s not a reality in today&#x27;s job market. My grandpa worked at the same factory his whole life from the day he graduated high school to the day the factory moved to Mexico. Between that and the five more years he worked until he retired, he had five different jobs. That&#x27;s the reality of today&#x27;s job market.<p>It sucks, but you have to just accept it. Two years, maybe three. If you&#x27;re still at the same job after that, you&#x27;re probably cheating yourself.