If you are a bona fide revenue- and profit-machine rock star, IBM makes it rain for you, because you're drenching them in a Biblical deluge. Beyond that, the compensation cliff drops steeply indeed, though it really is no different than many other companies, and arguably substantively better than the people engaging in "share the scraps"-style employment Robert Reich characterized recently. In the darkest weeks of Apple, I've read of worse treatment of employees in some departments. No company is immune to human nature, especially a company under more pressure than it is used to. I've seen better, I've seen worse; IBM gets buckets of ink no matter what it does so all perceptions are magnified, and it takes time to percolate to the reality.
A lot of comments I've read around the Net from RA'd IBM'ers alluded to an enormous executive management push last year to get employees retrained into the CAMS (Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Security and Social) areas, but that didn't seem to really have much uptake. So I wonder if this RA is a doubling down by the executive team on the focus into CAMS, with the intent that the focus will turn out to be similar to the tectonic turnaround shift Gerstner made to embrace services (the attendant employment losses at the time were bitterly criticized).
A lot of comments I've read around the Net from RA'd IBM'ers alluded to an enormous executive management push last year to get employees retrained into the CAMS (Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Security and Social) areas, but that didn't seem to really have much uptake. So I wonder if this RA is a doubling down by the executive team on the focus into CAMS, with the intent that the focus will turn out to be similar to the tectonic turnaround shift Gerstner made to embrace services (the attendant employment losses at the time were bitterly criticized).