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An ongoing age-discrimination lawsuit against IBM by one of its former star cloud salesmen has this week blown the lid off Big Blue's inner struggle to reinvent itself as a hip'n'cool place for millennials.
Buried in court paperwork filed by lawyers acting on behalf of ex-IBMer Jonathan Langley, is, among other explosive insights, the revelation by one-time IBM HR veep Alan Wild that 50,000 to 100,000 Big Blue staff have been axed in the past five or so years. In their place, adults in their twenties, who typically flock to the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Salesforce, Apple, Adobe, Oracle, Intel, LinkedIn, SAP, Uber, Boeing, HP, and so on, rather than IBM.
The enterprise tech titan fears it is therefore missing out on top emerging talent, and is battling to make its workplace more enticing for uni grads. Older employees are bearing the brunt, it is alleged.
Langley, who was let go from IBM at the age of 59 in 2017, last year sued the venerable computing giant in Texas, USA, accusing it of unfairly ditching older capable staff to replace them with so-called early professional hires, which is IBM code for people who obtained their degree within the past three years.
IBM denies any wrongdoing, and says it does not discriminate on age – however, when testifying under oath for the court case, Wild, who left Big Blue in late 2018, appeared to contradict the IT giant's position.
Wild said in his deposition that IBM wanted potential hires to see Big Blue not as “an old fuddy duddy organization,” but as “cool and trendy” instead. “To do that, IBM set out to slough off large portions of its older workforce using rolling layoffs over the course of several years,” he said, again under oath.
As a result, IBM has laid off between 50,000 and 100,000 employees – a little under a third of its global workforce – while aggressively hiring as well. As a result, around 50 per cent of its new hires have been hired in the past five years, and now half of its total workforce are millennials, according to Big Blue’s CEO Ginni Rometty.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 02 2019, @02:43PM (1 child)
At 118 years old, and the veteran of BOTH SIDES of more wars than most employees have seen birthdays, "hip'n'cool" is going to be a bitch to pull off. The octogenarians at the nursing home may have more success.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 02 2019, @08:37PM
When was Microsoft started? How many decades ago?
Why is their OS the only one on the planet that has a C drive? What is a C drive? (rhetorical question, I know the CP/M answer) Can you still execute MS-DOS apps on Windows 10 at a command prompt? PCs start up in 8086 real mode.
IBM mainframes can still run ancient IBM OS/s.
See any similarities?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.