In Sales org. Probably mostly hitting marketing after the merger earlier this year. Never made any sense. Only point was to destroy marketing which they’ll now do. I’ve heard US and for once I’ve heard india is targeted too. Emea probably in the new year. Happy holidays from IBM.
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You are spot on. Thumbs 👍 up.
@ts it’s a little crazy how brainwashed we all are by IBM. Like it’s the end of world and our managers and leaders are god like. News flash they aren’t. In fact most of them are mo--ns even at the highest levels. They couldn’t manage or lead a team out of a wet paper bag. Their choices and decisions big and small got us all into this mess. If they were managers or leaders anywhere else we wouldn’t respect them in the slightest.
@qe You guessed wrong on all accounts. I have a kid, a mortgage, car payment, and we had to go on COBRA. It absolutely $ucked for awhile - but its 3, 6, maybe 12 months of your life, and then life goes on. You bounce back. I'm not trying to be a j3rk here, but guess how much IBM will care about your situation? Guess what they will say on your Liberation Day when you tell them "but I have children who depend on me for healthcare and food and a roof." If you're not actively job hunting now, you probably should be. Leave on your on terms, because IBM's terms are sh1t.
@hv I appreciate your post but…I’m guessing you are youngish, don’t have children who depend on you for healthcare and food and a roof. Everyone hates this horrible company. But the job market is atrocious and our children need to eat.
@j2 Same type of work I did for IBM but for less pay. Better health benefits though, flexible WFH, and my new company actually believes in 401K matches and real training. None of that extra blue nonsense like having to earn an L4 badge that teaches you about 5% of what you really need to know about a product while they expect you to be an SME. IBM is as bad as everyone says it is, and I didn't truly realize how badly it was affecting my mental health until after I left. It's been months since my Liberation Day and I STILL get PTSD thinking about that f'ing place.
If you're PIPed & fired (aka you were let go for a manufactured performance issue) or RA'ed, rejoice! It's one blip in your life and yeah - it might be financially tough for awhile, but IBM is an irrelevant sorry sack of a has-been technology company, its C-Suite and executive team are a bunch of clueless self-serving sh1tbags, and it's meaningless compared to the rest of your life and career.
Many on a month long PIP since nov. yes there will be a mass layoffs. They do that so we dont get the commission we worked full year and they finally help to close dec 31. They have been doing that every year. 30 DAY PIP - make you work extra your a-s off and fire in a month. This will be DEC 5TH.
I have PTSD every nov dec jan.
@hy They are slimy and slimier ...
@hv may I ask what did you do after? I am miserable working for this company, but I’m also terrified of the limited opportunities beyond
@hv when the sress of the job is worse then the stress of not having a job, that's your sign
For all of you concerned about an RA, just a word of encouragement...being let go from IBM was the best thing that ever happened to my career. Even when it first happened and I had no job prospects at the time, I felt instant relief. The stress of "what will I do going forward" was far less stress than dealing with the day to day nonsense, all of the useless blue tape that did nothing to actually help us achieve our goals, and all the BS spewing from the mouths of arrogant executives who love the sound of their own voices as they run the company into the ground (looking at you, Arvind, Rob, Kareem, and Adam). IBM is a culture of fear. They use that fear to take as much energy from you as they can until YOU either have enough and walk away, or they decide you're no longer useful.
Nobody is saying IBM cannot do a sub threshold RA. They can, and they do. Keep a site under 50, or under 25 in New York, and there is no filing. That part is right.
The problem is the word massive. A massive Q4 cut is not 49 people at one site. It is hundreds or thousands, concentrated in sales and marketing hubs, in a few weeks. You cannot spread that across enough sites, with enough managers and HR paperwork, without tripping a site.
Remote work does not fix that either. Under WARN, a home based employee's site is the office they report to, where their work is assigned from. IBM cannot just reassign people on paper after the fact to a different site to dodge the count. That is exactly the kind of thing that gets litigated.
And the 90 day rule cuts the other way. Layoffs at the same site inside 90 days get added together unless IBM can prove they were separate and unrelated. A November wave plus a December wave at the same site is one layoff for WARN purposes, not two resets. You only get a reset by waiting more than 90 days between waves, which is not a Q4 blitz.
So yes, IBM can quietly cut dozens at a time and never file. That is a rolling RA, not a massive one.
@ew those WARN numbers are only when they exceeded thresholds - greater than 50 per culling per site. You can get rid of a lot of people every 90 days and never trigger WARN. They only exceed thresholds like that when they get greedy, licking their lips for getting rid of more people.
@es baloney. IBM is a pro at evading WARN. It isn't even that hard. They don't have to report at all if they keep numbers under 50 per site.
If someone is work at home it may even be easier as they are not associated with a site. They can move those employees around on paper by just claiming that a different site is the one providing guidance; it isn't the closest site.
Spread those sub-50 RAs all around and you can hurt a lot of people.
Layoffs or employment losses occurring over a 30-day period (or combined across a 90-day period) are evaluated together to see if they meet the numerical thresholds for a mass layoff. So they get to reset again in the same calendar year. Not exactly a high bar.
@ev Last IBM filings on record: all 2025. San Jose, CA, 75 workers, Nov 4, 2025; Coppell, TX, 59 workers, July 2, 2025; Winston-Salem, NC, 72 workers, March 25, 2025
@es there was no warn filings last years layoffs
Worth a reality check on the timing here. If this is a real US mass layoff in Q4, the WARN notices would already have to exist.
Under the federal WARN Act, an employer with 100 or more full time employees has to give 60 calendar days written notice before a covered plant closing or mass layoff. A mass layoff triggers it when, at a single site in a 30 day period, 50 or more people go and they are at least 33 percent of that site's workforce, or 500 or more go regardless of percentage. Some states are even stricter.
Notice does not just go to the employees. It also goes to the state dislocated worker unit and local officials, and the state filings are public. So for a Q4 action, the math is simple. A layoff effective Dec 31 would have needed federal notice by Nov 1 and New York notice by Oct 2. A layoff effective mid December would have needed notice even earlier.
That leaves three possibilities. One, the notices are already filed and anyone can check their state WARN list. Two, the dates are actually in the new year, which fits the EMEA timing in the post. Or three, this is not a covered mass layoff under WARN at all, because IBM counts per single site, not company wide, and spreads cuts across sites and dates to stay under the thresholds, or labels enough of them as performance separations.
India is not covered by US WARN at all, so nothing about India tells you anything about US notice timing.
So before treating this as a done deal for Q4 in the US, ask where the WARN filing is. If there is no filing and no one has a notice in hand, either the date is later than rumored or the numbers per site are smaller than the headline suggests.
@b5 probably just marketing. RT has salivated over getting his hands on marketing for years. He’s about to finish it off. But who will be left to punch when sales still can’t sell shoes to a shoeless man? Pathetic company trying to cut its way to growth. Will get what it deserves.
IBM's gonna finally get what they deserve: AI copy throughout all assets. Should "enhance" the image of the company and show it's true colors. Management the last 20 years hasn't cared about creative execution despite an early history of breakthrough visual and typographic treatment and moving prose. Today's senior management would never have approved the 8-bar; "We need it BOLD, BIGGER!". Glad to be gone. Sorry for the hard-working but always disappointed marketers still trying to fix stupid.
Can you comment further? Will this impact global
Sales in TLS?
What about quantum purchase of HRL? Will they get rid of redundancy?