IBM is a huge company and at any point in time one group would be doing layoffs while the other one will be hiring. It’s a constant pull and push, the company is trying to adjust as we move along. Having 100s of thousands of employees, this often requires mass layoffs, and IBM is not the only large tech company that’s doing this.
With this being said, we do things in a bit more brutal way, with less sensitivity around who’s getting cut and how things are executed. Over the last two decades, people adjusted to this – there is very little loyalty to IBM by it’s workforce. IBM has not loyalty to its workers – so I guess this is mutual.
I think we’d be better off (all of us including IBM) if the company was to switch to a model where everyone would be a contractor, in that case they can get rid of workers easily but at the same time they would have to pay them more – I think everyone would win. Also, our performance evaluating system is so outdated and rigid, this model would require that such a retrograde setup vanishes.