IBM has not been prolonging the fixed-term contracts in Q2. As per internal procedures, all IBM-ers in Slovakia are given fixed-term contracts with the duration of 2 years which may or may not be prolonged. in Q2 some 150 employees have been affected.
Are other IBM-ers around the world affected in the similar way?
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Hi to all my fellow IBM ISC employees from Bratislava, the following measures have been taken so far: all the fixed-term contracts in Q2 were not prolonged. It means that if you had completed two years with IBM in Q2, they would not prolong your contract regqrdless of your previous performance. There is not further information yet about Q3 and Q4 (but given the current situation in IBM, I am inclined to believe that the trend of not prolonging the contracts will continue). Any promotions, salary raises and new hirings have been put on freeze as well.
Is it just that the fixed contracts were not extended or were the layoffs already announced? IBM SK here.
I think the fixed term contract thing is more a European thing, due to job protections, than elsewhere. If you are a contractor for IBM in the USA, it is more the expectation that there will not be a job when it finishes (or we will hire you permanently, but that is fairly rare, we have to pay the contracting outfit a fee (which is silly, as IBM frequently finds the person, but labor laws/practices)). Some USA areas get addicted to contractors, but generally those are the first to go when times go bad. But in Europe, once on regular employment, you have more protections than generally in the Americas or Asia, and so a lot of companies, like IBM, try and avoid that.
Let us face facts, the world job market is not too good, due to the pandemic, so I would probably advise staying with any job that looks like it will stay around for a while. My experience at IBM with Software engineers from Eastern Europe is that they are generally quite good, it is a cost-effective location for IBM to hire from, though the move to Cloud models (and potentially AI, though that mostly remains to be seen, but it is getting close) has put a lot of IBM Services jobs into jeopardy, long term. This probably applies to Services type jobs, even outside of IBM. Try and stay with jobs that computers cannot do. So keep your skills current, stay on the safer but newer projects, things where it looks likely to be around for a number of years, but with your resume and contacts in place in case things do not work out.
SK here too, lost a lot of good people. Hoping it doesn't continue into Q3 & 4