Posted on 08/30/2019 12:35:43 PM PDT by rintintin
IBM has been accused of firing thousands of older employees over the past few years as part of a rebranding strategy to appeal to millennial workers.
Some former employees have filed lawsuits against IBM. In one civil case, former VP of Human Resources Alan Wild said IBM had "laid off 50,000 to 100,000 employees in just the last several years" in order to make itself seem like "[a] cool, trendy organization," like Google or Amazon, and not like "an old fuddy duddy organization." These statements were obtained court document filed Tuesday in Texas
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
It was originally done to get around government-imposed wage controls.
Well before then, in the energy and refining industry. This was one of the big name engineering/procurement/construction firms in the early 1990’s.
This IBM story simply proves the wisdom of their positions.
Given how things changed I can understand it.
To a degree. At one (lousy) gig the guy kept the thing in such a mess, and undocumented (absolutely no standards at all) that no one could fix the thing.
After he got cancer, they were left in a mess. I tried to help. Not one of them, locally, could understand why it was such a problem. They just wanted it fixed. Great idea guys. Unfortunately the problem started going wrong over four decades ago. Couldn’t reason with them at all.
My Vice-President of I/T had at least 20 years with the company. He couldn’t fix it either.
ANYBODY here recall how the IBM PC came about?
That’s right ... IT WASN’T stodgy old staid New York-based IBM that developed it, it was the creation of a new startup unit ...
ANYBODY have any ideas why?
“Any final year pension growth can then be waived.”
They killed off pensions over a decade ago, just like everyone else. Well, everyone except government and government schools.
Back in the 80’s when local government tax offices started offering public access via green screen terminals. The inquiries had to coded and have perfect syntax to pull up a request.
Along in the early 2000’s counties were changing to Flash driven GIS which were simple to access and offered 10x more data that the old green screen systems.
One county I used to work in still had green screens until 10 years ago or so. I found out the guy who designed the system was the head of the tax dept. and was the only one who knew how to fix it when there was an issue.
The first thing the County did when he announced his retirement was to move to a modern GIS system.
“And the young ones don’t feel motivated to go to shopping malls or to buy things at local retail.”
I don’t know where you live, but here in Texas the malls are basically gang hangouts, thanks to some Democrat-appointed judges who won’t allow mall owners to get rid of the trash.
The last place this relative worked was so entrenched in legacy systems that it will take millions of dollars to upgrade it.
It’s a family owned biz and he’s convinced that once pops passes on they’re gonna sell the client list and real estate instead of fixing the problem.
Who needs a mall when you have Nebraska Furniture Mart?
Feel sorry for you and yours. Keep fighting. Trash removal is a good idea and become possible someday.
There comes a time when you just say, “Screw it, I’ll just rewrite the damn thing.”
My company, a smaller competitor to VZW, does great with older folks. They often hire people over 50. Some of the stuff is so technical, it takes forever to train a new person, that they are glad to get older people that know their poop. My new boss just got hired, I think he is a 58, and doing a great job.
Learned a WHOLE new programming paradigm at 50+ ... a graphical language known as LabVIEW (by NI) ... of course, having a solid grounding in what is possible in programming today (especially “events”) made it more a matter of getting used to their ‘form’ for the usual programming constructs (if-then, loops and iteration, variables and data structures etc).
That’s what should have been done. Unfortunately they did not upgrade to even mid-size legacy architecture.
The system need a total swap-out. Then my soon-to-be-former-boss announced was their solution.
Thanks for bringing that up after I resigned. Yeah, I would have helped. They weren’t going to allow it.
I spent over an hour then, on the phone, with their new CEO (he started the day before me) telling him all the things that were wrong at that local operation. I guarantee you he would have never learned about it, otherwise.
[announced this was to be their new solution]
Never brought up to me, never offered to me, never presented to me as a possible solution. I would have been 100% on board.
When I asked the CEO why they were still processing payroll, across multiple states, he gave me an emphatic “YEAH!” seeing how that should have been outsourced long ago.
HP tried this under Carly.
It nearly sunk the company and frankly it will never come back.
Those who have the skills refuse to work for HP.
It will follow Tectronix into oblivion in another 20 years.
“HP tried this under Carly.”
I take it you’re not one of the freepers who thinks she’d be a great (take your pick) president/senator/governor ?
Yep. My uncle used to build robots for IBM. He would talk about the older guys being let go or forced into retirement, until eventually he was put in a similar position. He had been planning on retiring anyway, but even so, they did away with the older workers who were being paid more in order to hire younger people and pay them less, on top of providing fewer perks I’d imagine.
I am guilty of a bad attitude toward the young. Probably people with children and grandchildren (I don’t, sadly) would have a built in Positivity Bias (new book title) and be able to see examples of good young ones.
I am the cynical crabby older guy now and I should improve on that.
All young people are not like AOC. She really should get off my lawn.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.