Some US positions (specifically SSR/Customer Engineers) that historically paid 50K-80K entry are now starting at a near minimum wage 30-40K. What happened here? Is this widespread?
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One thing any good manager knows: There are sh--ty employees at all age groups. Maybe if management was better at their job they would know who to retain and who to let go instead of using the number game.
It's a pretty wide-spread practice in IBM. It's been awhile since I've been a manager, but usually IBM tries not to do a 1 for 1 replacement where a younger person comes in and takes on the title of an older person who's been let go. IBM knows that that kind of 1:1 swap k--ls what's left of morale, can come back to bite them later on in a lawsuit, and puts the new hire in a very uncomfortable position. So, usually what happens is the new hire will come in with a marginally different title so IBM can assert they're filling a different skill OR IBM will wait a number of months before doing a like title hire.
The other tactic, of course, is to move the job to a high cost city such as New York City, San Francisco, Boston. The older employees have family, schools, community ties and can't fathom moving to one of those cities. A lot of new hires are happy to pay exorbitant rents and have a roommate or three or four.
I joined in the age where "respect for the individual" -- one of Thomas Watson Jr's core principles -- really meant something. I might have been wearing gray suits, white shirts, and red ties and going to work inside a plant with the nearest customer 100 miles away, but you couldn't argue with the core values. Now, we wear khakis and are so many disposable resources.
F--- IBM... let’s all go find job elsewhere...
Some cloud companies don't bother to replace dead machines - they just leave them dead in place - not worth the expense and disruption of swapping.
Also robots can do this kinds of job in the future.
Of course it’s wide spread. It’s not just IBM, BUT the whole server industry. As the industry moved from diagnosing and fixing servers, to replacement of components, they realized they could pay their CE’s less. This is a direct result of HW going commodity.