Many long-serving employees at IBM have been laid off. That’s according to numerous reports online. Although IBM CEO Arvind Krishna made no bones about the fact that thousands of jobs would be lost at his company over the next few years, this fresh round of layoffs has commenced without notice.
Evidence of this could already be found on the online forum TheLayoff.com, often a bellwether for large layoff rounds. However, The Register received confirmation through anonymous sources that this is more than a sporadic development. Thousands of jobs appear to be disappearing, even though such figures amount to single-digit percentages among IBM’s employee base of 288,000.
Not announced, or was it?
According to the source, employees had to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) regarding the specific circumstances of the layoff rounds. Still, much is already clear. These include the fact that mostly experienced programmers, sales employees and support staff are being let go. Meanwhile, IBM continues to hire, albeit in India and not in the U.S., where there appears to be a hiring freeze. The dynamic seems to be of replacing older Americans with younger Indian employees. Although IBM has been sued several times for age discrimination since 2018, it won such lawsuits.
The total number of layoffs is unclear, but if an earlier statement by CEO Arvind Krishna is any indication, it could be close to 8,000 employees. Indeed, last year Krishna stated that AI would cut 7,800 IBM jobs over the next few years. We have noted before that AI will often be cited to explain a round of layoffs to the outside world. Many times, tech companies are rewarded in the stock market for cutting costs, even as shareholders factor in an initial cost increase due to layoffs.
Not idle
IBM is actually expanding in other areas. For example, in April it acquired HashiCorp, which should be finalized by the end of this year. It also recently bought Kubecost, another addition to its FinOps Suite built up through acquisitions.
Read more: IBM continues acquisition drive with Kubecost acquisition