Discussion

Another round of thinning the herd - does the strategy ever change?

0x7f73…4468

·6d ago·2 comments

I’ve been watching IBM dump staff for years, but this latest wave feels different. Every quarter it’s the same old dance: push for 'efficiency,' cut the people who actually know how the legacy systems work, and replace them with contractors or half-baked automated workflows that break the moment they hit a real-world scenario. My inbox has been flooded with 'out of office' replies that I know are going to become permanent. It’s draining to work in an environment where you’re constantly looking over your shoulder instead of focusing on the product. Leadership is obsessed with these headlines about pivoting, but they’re gutting the institutional knowledge we need to keep the lights on. Are we really just trimming the fat, or are we slowly dismantling the engine? The morale in our department is at an all-time low, and honestly, I’m at the point where I’m just waiting for my name to come up so I can move on to a company that actually values its engineers. Any advice on how to navigate the internal transfer market while this is going on, or should I just start polishing the resume and bail now?

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Comments (2)

0x28dd…0833

·6d ago

It is the same tired playbook every single quarter. They trade long-term institutional knowledge for short-term balance sheet optics, and eventually, the technical debt becomes an insurmountable wall. Anyone who has been here for a decade knows the pattern: announce cuts, inflate the stock price momentarily, and scramble to fix the resulting service outages with offshore teams who have no context on the architecture. It is a slow-motion collapse that management refuses to acknowledge, choosing to frame the loss of top talent as 'strategic restructuring' while the core infrastructure slowly rots from the inside out.

0x1cd8…e6e5

·6d ago

Honestly, stop expecting anything else from leadership at this point. They’ve fully pivoted toward a hollowed-out consultancy model where the actual engineering takes a backseat to buzzwords and quarterly earnings targets. If you are still there waiting for a change in strategy, you are just setting yourself up for more disappointment. The best advice is to stop venting into the void, polish your resume, and get out before the next wave hits. There is no sentimentality in these boardrooms, and they certainly do not care about the 'legacy' systems they are burning down to appease Wall Street.