Following our report last week on IBM’s ongoing layoffs, current and former employees got in touch to confirm what many suspected: The US cuts run deeper than reported, and the jobs are heading to India.
IBM’s own careers site numbers back that up. On January 7, 2024, Big Blue listed just 173 open positions in India. On November 23, 2024, there were 2,946 jobs available in the nation. At the time of writing, the IT titan listed 3,866 roles in India.
American jobs listed for these three periods are 192, 376, and 333, respectively, though at least among those being laid off, there’s doubt those roles will be filled with job seekers in the States.
A current IBMer who won’t be there much longer said that after being told to teach recently hired workers in India “everything I know,” the reward was a resource action, or RA – Big Blue’s euphemism for a layoff.
After receiving an RA notification, employees typically have a set period of time to apply for open roles elsewhere in the mega-corporation. But just because there are open positions listed in the US doesn’t mean IBM is making much of an effort to fill them, we are told.
“Everyone I asked internally for ‘transfer’ all said the same thing … ‘I can only hire in India,'” our source said, echoing sentiments expressed by numerous other former employees who have spoken previously to The Register.
Everyone I asked internally for ‘transfer’ all said the same thing … ‘I can only hire in India’
Shifting jobs to India appears to be a theme at IBM, which we referred to as Indian Business Machines back in 2017 in a report about the tech giant’s enthusiasm for offshoring.
“In Q4 [2024], there were widespread layoffs rumored to be in the thousands, yet over a thousand job openings were created in India,” a former IBMer told us in a recent interview. “The favoritism was blatant.
“Many of those laid off had extensive cloud experience, only to be back-filled with individuals who had little to none. The most concerning shift was the complete outsourcing of QA [quality assurance] to India.”
“This resulted in near-daily escalations, as they attempted to replace highly experienced Quality Engineers – some with over a decade of expertise – with new hires trained in just six months. The consequences were predictable: a massive decline in quality and efficiency.”
We’re told that the focus on India-based workers extended beyond hiring practices. Our source described participating in an internal project that required the inclusion of team members from India, regardless of their interest in participating in the endeavor.
“Meetings were moved to accommodate their time zones, completely disregarding what worked for local teams,” we’re told. “I stayed up late several nights with just one other colleague, and together, we built a working product – only to watch it fail due to the forced inclusion of individuals who didn’t contribute.
“At this point, IBM might as well move its headquarters to India since it no longer prioritizes the US. The company has made it clear where its focus lies – at the expense of experienced employees, quality work, and overall performance.”
At this point, IBM might as well move its headquarters to India since it no longer prioritizes the US
The IBMer who spoke with us last week about the Cloud Classic layoffs also said jobs have been moving to India. “In January, they pretty much doubled the headcount for a lot of teams with personnel from India,” this individual said.
The outgoing IBM staffer told us that those layoffs extended beyond Cloud Classic to other groups, a claim supported by recent reports of job cuts in North Carolina. There is word of layoffs in Canada, too, this week.
“Management keeps pushing to look for opportunities for growth and future clients, [but] nothing is really showing promise,” this individual said.
IBM did not respond to a request for comment.
In February 2024, an IBM spokesperson told The Register, “In 4Q [2023] earnings last month, IBM disclosed a workforce rebalancing charge that would represent a very low single digit percentage of IBM’s global workforce, and we expect to exit 2024 at roughly the same level of employment as we entered with.”
The word “roughly” here is doing a lot of work – IBM shed almost 12,000 jobs in 2024, a period in which close to 3,000 open positions were added in India.
IBM in its 2024 Annual Report [PDF] said it had finished the year with 270,300 employees within the company or at wholly owned subsidiaries, plus 8,900 at partially owned subsidiaries, and another 14,200 temporary workers. CFO James Kavanaugh in January this year said Big Blue expects “workforce rebalancing” in 2025 to be “fairly consistent to prior years.”
In its 2023 Annual report [PDF], those figures were 282,200 employees, 8,700 at partially owned subsidiaries, and 14,400 temporary workers.
Just looking at the employment total for IBM and wholly owned subsidiaries, that’s a headcount reduction of 11,900, or 4.2 percent for 2024. Our prior estimate of 9,000 job cuts in 2025 may need to be revised upward. ®
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