IBM is gearing up to slash thousands more jobs before year's end, targeting its consulting division in what's become a depressingly familiar ritual at the technology veteran.
The latest cuts—which follow roughly 5,000 layoffs earlier this year—represent yet another chapter in CEO Arvind Krishna's ongoing "transformation" of the company. (Has any word in corporate America been more abused than "transformation"?)
I've been tracking IBM's perpetual reinvention since the early 2000s, and there's something almost comical about the predictability of it all. Remember when IBM was synonymous with those navy suits and corporate loyalty pins? The company that practically invented the concept of lifetime employment now treats restructuring announcements like quarterly obligations.
Krishna took the helm in 2020 with a vision to remake IBM into a hybrid cloud and AI powerhouse. Makes perfect sense! These are genuinely hot areas. But Lord, the execution...
Turning a 260,000-employee company toward new technologies is like trying to redirect the Titanic with a pool noodle. You can point in the right direction, but getting there requires some, uh, dramatic weight reduction.
The company's been on quite a journey. They dropped $34 billion on Red Hat in 2019. Spun off their infrastructure services into Kyndryl in 2021. Acquired dozens of smaller firms. Divested countless others.
At what point, though, does transformation stop being a strategy and start becoming your actual business model?
This is what I call the "innovation treadmill paradox." IBM runs faster and faster just to stay in place, constantly shuffling the deck chairs on its corporate Titanic. (Sorry for mixing metaphors there, but you get the point.)
For IBM employees, the message is crystal clear: hitch your wagon to whatever tech is mentioned in the latest annual report, or update your LinkedIn profile. Your division could be making money hand over fist, but if it's not aligned with the buzzword du jour? Red shirt time, Star Trek style.
What's particularly odd about this round of cuts is the timing. Most tech firms have rebounded from their 2022-23 layoff sprees. Meta's hiring again. Microsoft too. Even Amazon is cautiously staffing up.
But IBM? Still trimming.
The conventional wisdom says these cuts are necessary medicine—painful but crucial for long-term health. I'm not so sure. After covering tech for fifteen years, I've noticed something: companies that repeatedly slash headcount create a self-reinforcing death spiral. Top talent in AI and cloud services—exactly the people IBM needs—tend to avoid employers known for regular "workforce rebalancing" (good grief, what a euphemism).
Look, Krishna isn't oblivious to this problem. IBM still maintains impressive research capabilities and holds a patent portfolio that would make most companies drool. Watson may have been overhyped initially, but it's found its footing in enterprise applications. And the Red Hat acquisition? Actually pretty smart.
But at some point... don't you have to stop transforming and start being?
The question hanging over IBM now is whether these latest cuts represent final adjustments to a successful reinvention or just another spin of the corporate restructuring wheel.
For IBM employees getting pink slips in coming weeks, there's one small comfort—tech unemployment remains relatively low. Your skills are in demand elsewhere, even if they don't align with whatever PowerPoint slide is driving IBM's strategy this quarter.
Which, when you think about it, might be the best transformation of all.
