A ‘rebalancing’ of the workforce seems to be underway at IBM if media reports are to be believed. The company is quietly letting go thousands from its workforce, and that too at the senior level. Those affected reportedly belong to the sales, programmers and support teams.
The Register has reported that employees are bound by a non-disclosure agreement or NDA to keep the details of the job cuts to themselves.
While $300 million is what IBM incurred in the workforce rebalancing exercise carried out last year in Q1, the company expects to spend more this year, that is, about $400 million on the exercise.
Reports say that IBM has been filing public notices through Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) letters in the US. About 54 employees were struck off the rolls on 24 September, in Santa Clara County, while 57 permanent employees were laid off in San Francisco, including a data scientist and an artificial intelligence (AI) engineer. In Washington, 63 were let go in the second week of August.
Apparently, all impacted employees will be informed by November 2024. The exact number of layoffs is yet to be officially known.
In August, the American tech multinational had announced its intention to trim its workforce in China, putting a stop its research and development (R&D) activities in the country. It revealed its plans to shut down its China Development Lab and China Systems Lab. At the time, reports said that the move would affect at least a thousand employees across Beijing, Shanghai and Dalian.
Layoffs have rendered about 27,000 people jobless in the tech space worldwide. This can be attributed primarily to falling demand and the increasing adoption of AI and cybersecurity tech.
