IBM has a long track record of 'restructure and layoff' of it's Legacy Employees. I know many retired IBM Employees from the mainframe days up thru the early Desktop PC Era. Many convergent threads played a role in IBM's demise, along with CRAY and DEC also. In the majority of cases they each were told of their impending layoff due to 'corporate restructuring', always included personnel with 20+ Years in or were over age 50 and worst of all many had to endure the indignity of training their replacements, who in most cases were either 20-something pajeets from Bangalore or worse Chinese H1-B's. Many are still bitter to this day. There you go.
AT&T did the same. They fired virtually everyone that ever worked on the American telecom infrastructure whose job it was to make sure it worked in the event of a war or other catastrophe. For about 10 years there in the early to mid 90s to mid 2000s if the shit really hit the fan not only would the phone networks not work but military communication would have gone down as well which is why satellite communication technology really kicked off. Its only recently started to be genuinely upgraded because fixing all the cable splices that went undocumented and unmapped cables is too expensive (also copper is worth recycling today, it was cheap in the 90s) so fiber backbones are starting to be laid down.
There are still situations were major cities in the US don't have independent connections to telecoms backbones and are patched into another cities telecom backbone. Most of South Dakota for example is connected to Minnesota with no real major telecom backbone lines going north or west. If something were to happen to Minneapolis then most of South Dakota would go offline and be extremely difficult to send communications into or out of that area. I think the southern half of Alabama would have similar issues if Mississippi went dark.
Excellent info. Appreciate you sharing this. AT&T seems to be doing the same as Verizon is doing with their FiOS system in the Mid-Atlantic and New England. Ripping out all the legacy copper telephone circuits and replacing everything with fibre optics. Their so-called 'last mile' technology and they also claim it's 5G up-gradable compliant. Big problem however is if there is a power failure you lose all telephone, cable and internet service. Seems that the FiOS Network 'Helper-Monkey' Installers they are hiring are not installing Battery Backup units to go with the ONT's (Optical Network Terminal Interface) so when the power goes off say during a lightning storm you lose everything. Phone, Net and Cable TV. Of course 95% of Verizon customers will not expect their stuff to still work. Typical Verizon half-ass job. Almost as f-cked up as Comcast who has a proven track record of incompetence even worse in Customer Service than Verizon.
Its worse than that. I know for a fact that emergency service provisioning in many areas of the United States are on precisely the same provisioning networks as ordinary customers which is technically illegal because telephone services to police, ambulance, fire department etc can be life or death services people depend on.
Shit, that's not just IBM. That's American corporate culture.
I went though the same thing last year and the dumb fucking team of pajeets they hired to replace me couldn't do the job. I shit you not, they rehired me.
Good for you. Hope they gave you back your previous position salary and benefits. Sadly most places would rather cove up this thing when they hire "curry-stinks" and find out they don't know jack-squat.
I taught those fuckers every damned thing I had learned on the job, and they still fucked it up. I even wrote 100+ page guides for them explaining how to do my job!
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samy90a44 ago
IBM has a long track record of 'restructure and layoff' of it's Legacy Employees. I know many retired IBM Employees from the mainframe days up thru the early Desktop PC Era. Many convergent threads played a role in IBM's demise, along with CRAY and DEC also. In the majority of cases they each were told of their impending layoff due to 'corporate restructuring', always included personnel with 20+ Years in or were over age 50 and worst of all many had to endure the indignity of training their replacements, who in most cases were either 20-something pajeets from Bangalore or worse Chinese H1-B's. Many are still bitter to this day. There you go.
Gamio ago
AT&T did the same. They fired virtually everyone that ever worked on the American telecom infrastructure whose job it was to make sure it worked in the event of a war or other catastrophe. For about 10 years there in the early to mid 90s to mid 2000s if the shit really hit the fan not only would the phone networks not work but military communication would have gone down as well which is why satellite communication technology really kicked off. Its only recently started to be genuinely upgraded because fixing all the cable splices that went undocumented and unmapped cables is too expensive (also copper is worth recycling today, it was cheap in the 90s) so fiber backbones are starting to be laid down.
There are still situations were major cities in the US don't have independent connections to telecoms backbones and are patched into another cities telecom backbone. Most of South Dakota for example is connected to Minnesota with no real major telecom backbone lines going north or west. If something were to happen to Minneapolis then most of South Dakota would go offline and be extremely difficult to send communications into or out of that area. I think the southern half of Alabama would have similar issues if Mississippi went dark.
samy90a44 ago
Excellent info. Appreciate you sharing this. AT&T seems to be doing the same as Verizon is doing with their FiOS system in the Mid-Atlantic and New England. Ripping out all the legacy copper telephone circuits and replacing everything with fibre optics. Their so-called 'last mile' technology and they also claim it's 5G up-gradable compliant. Big problem however is if there is a power failure you lose all telephone, cable and internet service. Seems that the FiOS Network 'Helper-Monkey' Installers they are hiring are not installing Battery Backup units to go with the ONT's (Optical Network Terminal Interface) so when the power goes off say during a lightning storm you lose everything. Phone, Net and Cable TV. Of course 95% of Verizon customers will not expect their stuff to still work. Typical Verizon half-ass job. Almost as f-cked up as Comcast who has a proven track record of incompetence even worse in Customer Service than Verizon.
Gamio ago
Its worse than that. I know for a fact that emergency service provisioning in many areas of the United States are on precisely the same provisioning networks as ordinary customers which is technically illegal because telephone services to police, ambulance, fire department etc can be life or death services people depend on.
Now they are on the same networks as non vital communications is one thing but you can get your ass cut off if you use to much data or too many calls, the same shit has happened to emergency services. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttled-fire-departments-unlimited-data-during-calif-wildfire/ this shit is not meant to be possible and is criminally negligent. Coordination is vital to keep people, keep firefighters alive.
Fullmetal ago
Shit, that's not just IBM. That's American corporate culture.
I went though the same thing last year and the dumb fucking team of pajeets they hired to replace me couldn't do the job. I shit you not, they rehired me.
aCuriousYahnz ago
I hope your salary requirement went up for the rehire.
samy90a44 ago
Good for you. Hope they gave you back your previous position salary and benefits. Sadly most places would rather cove up this thing when they hire "curry-stinks" and find out they don't know jack-squat.
Fullmetal ago
Fuck yes they did, and a $5k/yr raise.
Low_Paid_Porno_Noob ago
Never teach your replacement enough.
wgtt911 ago
most are not competent enough to learn and understand it anyway... had to train my replacement 3 times...
Fullmetal ago
I taught those fuckers every damned thing I had learned on the job, and they still fucked it up. I even wrote 100+ page guides for them explaining how to do my job!
475677 ago
Openly buy the best performer of the month a prostitute. It'll cost under $100 and motivate the fuck out of them.
GapingAnus ago
Literally, in fact.