A couple days ago, I had a thought about my job at IBM. It was a pleasant thought that went like this: Even though I'm stressed out about work and insanely busy, I genuinely enjoy my job!
Now, I know people rarely keep loving their job after the initial novelty period, but for now, I'm going to enjoy it. Even better? I actually feel like I'm good at my job! I'm getting progressively more responsibility. Unfortunately, I haven't actually gotten everything done on time that I was supposed to, but because I've been taking time out to fix some other very important stuff, no one blames me.
Which brings up another good thing: I found the cause of a bug that's been nagging me for the past while! I think this should make next week just manageable enough that I can get some more moving done.
Unfortunately, this post can't be all happy.
This Slashdot article and the article linked therein (Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?) talks about possible upcoming layoffs in IBM's Global Services division. The consensus at Slashdot is that Cringely have overly speculative columns, and that 150,000 layoffs would be 40% of IBM worldwide, not IBM's US workforce.
Still, it does make me a bit nervous. I don't know which comments are fully truthful, but there are some good points in general. Global Services consultants are who customers deal with. When they get laid off, customers don't appreciate having to walk a new person through their setup. If it's also true that our sales force has been making unprofitable contracts to up their numbers, then we have a bigger problem than Global Services having slow growth.
Software, though, is amazingly profitable for IBM. Thus, I'm not directly concerned about my job. I'm more concerned about the future of IBM as a whole. At this stage, though, I don't have enough information to really comment intelligently. So, I will wait to worry about this until more information is released. And in 10 years, when I'm CEO, I'll see what I can do.
1 comment:
To add to the frustration and sadness of this, IBM is investing 6 billion dollers in India. Why invest so much money when they have all these skilled workers here? We all know that 1 skilled american work can do the same work as 3 unskilled overseas workers. Not that overseas people are really bad, but they have no experience, it would cost IBM in terms of time spent on projects and in quality to hand over significant projects to unexperienced teams. This could destroy IBM's image if the quality goes down.
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