IBM Cuts US Staff, Hires Low-Experience Workers in India

After The Register reported last week that IBM plans to cut about 9,000 jobs in the U.S. by 2025, it was contacted by current and laid-off employees who confirmed that the U.S. job cuts are even deeper than reported, and the company is gradually moving jobs to India.

This is confirmed by the vacancies posted by IBM on its website. If on January 7, 2024, there were only 173 open vacancies in India, then on November 23, 2024, 2946 vacancies were posted for work in this country, and at the time of publication of the article – 3866 vacancies.

An IBM employee who has already been notified of his job cut (Resource Action, RA) said he was told after being tasked with training newly hired workers in India. After receiving an RA, employees have a set period to apply for open positions elsewhere in IBM. But just because IBM has open positions in the U.S. doesn’t mean the company is hiring here. “Everyone I’ve approached internally about a transfer has said the same thing: ‘I can only hire in India,’” a source told The Register. Others have had similar experiences.

Image source: Yogi Atmo / Unsplash

A former IBM employee said there were a lot of layoffs in Q4 2024, rumored to be in the thousands, but in India, by contrast, there were more than a thousand job postings. “The favoritism was blatant,” he said. He said many of the people who were laid off had extensive cloud experience, but they were replaced by people with little or no experience. IBM also outsourced its quality assurance (QA) to India.

«They tried to replace highly skilled QA engineers — some with more than a decade of experience — with new employees trained in just six months. The consequences were predictable: a sharp decline in quality and efficiency,” the source said. “IBM may also move its headquarters to India at this point, since it no longer prioritizes the US,” one of the sources half-jokingly suggested.

The person who spoke to The Register about the cuts at Cloud Classic said layoffs are also taking place at other IBM locations, a claim that is supported by recent reports of job cuts at the company’s North Carolina branch and in Canada.

In February 2024, an IBM spokesperson told The Register that the company expected to end 2024 with roughly the same employment levels as it had at the start of the year. However, IBM cut 11,900 jobs, or 4.2% of its total headcount, in 2024, while adding about 3,000 open positions in India. Therefore, The Register believes that IBM’s 2025 job cuts of around 9,000 are an underestimate, as the cuts are expected to be much larger.