Tough at the top: IBM CEO Ginni Rometty troughs $10 MEELLION+ It may not be the best time to be one of the great unwashed at IBM but it certainly pays to be on the exec team, particularly if your name is Virginia Rometty. At a time when Big Blue is cutting its cloth according to the new era of cloud, mobility, social, analytics and security by chopping thousands of job, the CEO got a …
Tell you what, Ledswinger, lets start appointing CEOs based on looks - it does wonders for the world of music, after all.
Also, Dorian Gray was famed for being eternally youthful. You may not be saying what you're trying to say.
(Paris - so Ledswinger can look at something to resettle his nerves after the shock of a non-youthful woman).
"Tell you what, Ledswinger, lets start appointing CEOs based on looks"
Why not? That's been tried with the white causcasian male contingent by many US corporations, and it turned out that the ugly and the handsome had equal quotients that were utterly incompetent, so we might as well settle for the less painful to look upon (let's enjoy that form of discrimination until it too is banned). Wouldn't you rather we had a few Chippendales in Parliament? Lets face it, they couldn't be any more more inept than the grizzled, ugly old farts in there at the moment? And judging by the Labour party, they are positively discriminating against nice looking women. Is that what you're in favour of?
"Also, Dorian Gray was famed for being eternally youthful. You may not be saying what you're trying to say."
You have a point, but equally you knew what I meant. And it would have been rather long winded to have said "looks like Dorian Gray's sister's portrait, if he'd had one and she'd had one, respectively.
But anyway, I've decided it's Zelda.
>>"Why not? That's been tried with the white causcasian male contingent by many US corporations, and it turned out that the ugly and the handsome had equal quotients that were utterly incompetent, so we might as well settle for the less painful to look upon (let's enjoy that form of discrimination until it too is banned). "
Well seeing as you want to support discrimination (looks, racial and sex - what you don't want to throw in orientation while you're at it?) then you need to brush up on your statistics. Assume your hypotheses to be correct - that incompetence is equally distributed between looks, race, sex, etc. You conclude that it is therefore irrelevant if you appoint based on one of those things. Statistically, that's invalid. In any sample where the relevant selection criteria are equally distributed without regard to other qualities, discrimination on those other qualities will reduce the proportion of competent people. Think it through - any inclusion of irrelevant selection criteria must be at the cost of relevant selection criteria. There are few things I like less than physical discrimination, but bad statistics is one of them. Well done you on getting the double.
>>"Wouldn't you rather we had a few Chippendales in Parliament?"
No, not really. Parliament is showbusiness enough without pandering to the cameras even more. It's a very supportable position that Nixon lost to Kennedy because television had become common. Al Gore reportedly lost (if you accept that he did) to G.W. Bush in significant part due to physical image. When he fell off a stage, his rating dropped several points. Are you sure you don't think your attitude is damaging?
>>"And judging by the Labour party, they are positively discriminating against nice looking women. Is that what you're in favour of?"
Well no, rather obviously from my point that looks should be irrelevant to such careers, I'm not. I think you could have worked that out from my first post.
>>"You have a point, but equally you knew what I meant."
I'll remember that next time I review someone's code. Doesn't compile, but I knew what he meant.
I have run out of energy trying to figure out, and at the same time criticizing, whatever it is that's going on at IBM. Rometty is getting bad advice, and isn't up to the challenge, either technologically or inspirationally.
I feel the principal CEO mission at IBM is to swat Finance around and keep them in their place, while moving forward in lock-step with everything the 70 or so IBM Fellows bring forward. Rometty is doing just the opposite. The Fellows are retiring and leaving in droves, and Finance is running the place. Awesome.
I always thought it was the responsibility of the CEO balance the needs of the company with those of the investors, by planning strategically, so the company avoids pitfalls which require a reduction in force. The fact that she felt the need to RIF all of those employees not only demonstrates that she is an utter failure as a leader and strategic visionary, but that the folks on the board don't have an ounce of god damn common sense by rewarding such a incompetent CEO and her vice booger eating morons.
Given IBM's divestiture in all things profitable, why any investment firm or stock speculator would voluntarily invest with IBM now is completely beyond me.
"Given IBM's divestiture in all things profitable, why any investment firm or stock speculator would voluntarily invest with IBM now is completely beyond me."
When your central bank is lending to Wall Street at 0%, has socialised all past losses, why wouldn't an investment firm invest in a loss making blue chip? If the losses are small but not business destroying, then you stuff it to the pension funds and retail investors who you're supposedly investing for. If the losses threaten to wipe you out, you go and cry to the government, and they wipe away your tears, and stick the public for your losses.
This has been such a success for the taxpayers on Main Street that the UK's central bank did the same thing, and Europe are just starting on the same route. That Japan ended up in perma-recession after doing this in the early 1990's has eluded the architects of these stupid policies.
Last year (when I was still doing time on the inside of IBM), there was a ballyhoo of "nobody is getting a PBC bonus". But that was a sham: use-less Ginni and her cronies picked up massive bonuses through other routes, whilst the brains and the workers grafted on, thankless.
And this year - worse than ever, and greedier than ever. Glad to be gone.
"IBM currently has about 15,000 job openings around the world for new skills in growth areas such as cloud, analytics, security, and social and mobile technologies”
Skill is not the word I would apply to what I have seen of IBM lately. Past feats of engineering are replaced with slap dash shoddiness. IBM is a name that once represented something meaningful. Unfortunately too many suckers, I mean stockholders, and the disconnected people of the C-suite think it still does. It is just a label that you affix to something to justify the higher price.
I'm one of those skilled people. Still there, for now. And yes, the work I produce is completely substandard and a fraction of what I could do. Why? Because I couldn't give a fuck any more. The more customers desert IBM the quicker I get redundancy.
As for Ginni and her pals, why would they give a shit either? They're driving the company into the ground and getting the payouts from doing so. Do you really think they're going to care that there's going to be no more IBM at the end of the decade?
".....1%......" Oh puh-lease, stop with the "1%" nonsense, most of the Western population is in the 1% globally (http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business-tech/120331/global-pay-scale-international-labor-organization). The fact you are tryping on a PC probably puts you in the global 1%.
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