As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff
- Reference: 1727182992
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/09/24/ibm_layoffs_ai_talent/
- Source link:
That view of Big Blue was offered to The Register after our [1]report on the IT giant's latest layoffs, which resonated so strongly with several IBM employees that they contacted The Register with thoughts on the job cuts.
Our sources have asked not to be identified to protect their ongoing relationships with Big Blue. Suffice to say they were or are employed as senior technologists in business units that span multiple locations and were privy to company communications: These are not views from the narrow entrance to a single cubicle.
[2]
We’re going to refer to three by the pseudonyms Alex, Blake, and Casey.
[3]
[4]
"I always make this joke about IBM," said Alex. "It is: 'IBM doesn't want people to work for them.' Every six months or so they are doing rounds of [Resource Actions – IBM-speak for layoffs] or forcing folks into impossible moves, which result in separation."
That's consistent with CEO Arvind Krishna's [5]commitment last year to replace around 7,800 jobs with AI.
[6]
But our sources say Krishna’s plan is on shaky ground: IBM’s AI isn’t up to the job of replacing people, and some of the people who could fix that have been let go.
Alex observed that over the past four years, IBM management has constantly pushed for automation and the use of AI.
"With AI tools writing that code for us ... why pay for senior-level staff when you can promote a youngster who doesn't really know any better at a much lower price?" he said. "Plus, once you have a seasoned programmer write code that is by law the company's IP and it is fed into an AI library, it basically learns it and the author is no longer needed."
[7]
But our sources tell us that scenario has yet to be realized inside IBM.
The truth is that Watsonx isn’t even available to employees. It's so far behind OpenAI and ChatGPT
"The whole outsourced to AI thing is a myth that somehow our upper echelon of execs believes exists right now,” Casey told The Register . "The truth is that Watsonx [IBM’s generative AI offering] isn’t even available to employees to attempt to try and help automate some meaningless task. It's so far behind OpenAI and ChatGPT that it’s not even close."
"A WatsonX chatbot is years behind ChatGPT," Blake said. "Its web interface was horribly broken to the point of being unusable until July 2024, and no one in the entire organization uses it.”
" [8]Watsonx Code Assistant technically knows PHP, but it is very inferior to GitHub Copilot,” Blake told The Register . “Still, it's better than nothing. The CEO keeps imploring developers to use it. No one does, except maybe one or two people."
Big Blue’s developers have little experience with other code assistants, or even ChatGPT, thanks to an internal ban on using externally sourced LLMs, Blake added. He rated IBM developers’ knowledge of LLMs as likely “substantially less than at other major tech firms.”
We're told that in [9]IBM Cloud Legacy (formerly SoftLayer), only around one percent of developers who work on the product deal with AI and LLMs.
Hollowed out
Yet by getting rid of experienced technical staff, IBM is making itself dependent on the very technology that eludes it.
Blake argues that IBM's focus on cutting experienced senior staff – those who are well-paid and close to retirement – is an act of self-harm because fewer developers, in his experience, are entering the job market.
"Senior software engineers stopped being developed in the US around 2012," Blake said. "That’s the real story. No country on Earth is producing new coders faster than old ones retire. India and Brazil were the last countries and both stopped growing new devs circa 2023. China stopped growing new devs in 2020."
Blake pointed to Stack Overflow's developer survey data to support the contention that the average age of software developers is rising and the proportion of those with junior-level experience (zero to four years) is shrinking. That's [10]a concern in [11]the open source community too. Tech companies [12]slowing down hiring , and laying tens of thousands off in the US, isn't helping grow the number of coders, either.
"If it weren't for LLMs, there would be a serious lack of programmers in the next five years as Gen Xers started retiring," said Blake. "I had planned on coding 'til the day I died, but now I think I’ll be talking to LLMs primarily instead."
But at IBM, he fears the LLMs aren’t ready to pick up the slack.
[13]IBM quietly axing thousands of jobs, source says
[14]Chinese spies spent months inside aerospace engineering firm's network via legacy IT
[15]Europe to force Apple to help rivals connect to iOS, iPadOS
[16]Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, going gray
Casey told us that accessing automation tools is also hard. He recounted asking other teams for their scripts. Code was finally provided, but it was still necessary to open tickets manually in the workflow platform ServiceNow.
Ancient code and offshore angst
Some of IBM’s infrastructure is not in great shape, Casey told us.
“Our network firmware code is so out of date. We're talking stuff that was [end-of-life] in 2020, that even the vendors have stopped supporting,” he said. “There were lots of meetings between the way-higher-ups and Cisco, Arista and Juniper. I don't know what deals were made but the vendors ended up providing full support for code that was EOL. The whole network is basically hung together by duct tape and hope."
IBM tried to keep things ticking over by hiring network engineering contractors in India, but that didn’t pan out, we're told.
The whole network is basically hung together by duct tape and hope
The contractors were supposed to handle basic network maintenance tasks so the senior engineers would be free to work on more impactful projects like upgrading firmware across datacenters. But the contractors were bad and were let go around eighteen months back.
"Since then they have not hired anyone," said Casey, noting that six years went by without a US-based full-time engineer being hired. "But they continued to cut staff yearly. Even as management begged them that we couldn't lose any more people."
We're told US-based network engineering staff will be reduced to two or three employees per shift during US business hours, representing a 33 percent loss of staff per shift. That's monitoring and maintaining all of IBM’s global datacenters. The EMEA and APAC teams remain at full strength - at least on the networking team – with five to eight workers on each shift.
Workers in the situations faced by Alex, Blake, and Casey are unlikely to be in the mood to offer a rosy view of their employer.
But at IBM, forming a rosy view may be even harder because Krishna's stated plan to replace people with AI appears not to have had the desired impact.
IBM told The Register that despite taking a $400 million workforce rebalancing charge reflecting the loss of "a very low single digit percentage of IBM’s global workforce," the company still expects to end the year "at roughly the same level of employment as we entered with."
In the opinion of the IBMers we spoke with, it's not AI replacing jobs but cheaper employees who join an org that can’t walk the talk and doesn’t have the tech or the plan to turn things around. ®
Get our [17]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/ibm_job_cuts/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZvLiJJ9tE5Fpir5r-4Zj7wAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZvLiJJ9tE5Fpir5r-4Zj7wAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZvLiJJ9tE5Fpir5r-4Zj7wAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/02/ibm_ai_back_office_jobs/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZvLiJJ9tE5Fpir5r-4Zj7wAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZvLiJJ9tE5Fpir5r-4Zj7wAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx-code-assistant
[9] https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/get-support?topic=get-support-legacy-managed-services-transition
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/15/opinion_open_source_attract_devs/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/open_source_maintainers_underpaid/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/08/700_it_jobs_us/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/ibm_job_cuts/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/chinese_spies_found_on_us_hq_firm_network/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/19/apple_ios_ipad_os_eu/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/open_source_maintainers_underpaid/
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
So if we ask chatGPT....
AI is unlikely to fully replace experienced technical engineers, but it can complement their work and enhance productivity. Here's why:
1. Complex Problem Solving
Experienced engineers possess deep knowledge, creativity, and intuition, which are essential for solving complex, non-routine problems. AI excels in data processing and pattern recognition but lacks the human ability to understand broader contexts or think innovatively. For highly technical and novel engineering challenges, human expertise is indispensable.
2. Adaptability and Contextual Understanding
AI relies on training data and specific programming to function, while experienced engineers can adapt to changing requirements, ambiguous situations, and cross-disciplinary challenges. Engineers can handle unexpected issues, which AI might struggle with due to a lack of contextual flexibility.
3. Soft Skills and Leadership
Engineers often need leadership, communication, and collaboration skills to lead teams, mentor others, and manage projects. AI can't replicate these interpersonal dynamics, making engineers valuable for team-oriented tasks.
4. Ethical and Safety Judgments
In fields like aerospace, automotive, or infrastructure engineering, ethical and safety decisions are critical. Experienced engineers bring years of accumulated judgment to ensure designs and systems are safe. AI lacks the nuanced understanding of these considerations.
5. AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement
AI can automate routine tasks (e.g., simulations, data analysis, monitoring) and assist in generating designs or optimizing processes, freeing engineers to focus on more creative or strategic work. AI enhances efficiency but remains a tool that engineers use to improve outcomes.
In conclusion, AI is a powerful aid to technical engineers but lacks the creative, adaptive, and human aspects that experienced professionals provide.
So, if an AI (which isn't actually intelligent at all) can work out it can't replace experienced technical engineers, then why the hell can't C-Suite????
Re: So if we ask chatGPT....
Because investors have been rewarding companies who trim staff by raising their equity values. Since C-level executives only expect to stay in their positions a year to three, Wall Street and it's associated private wealth system are creating a moral hazard.
Oddly, Elon Musk, whose experiment with de-staffing Twitter has served as this model, has lost a ton of equity value on Twitter. I wish we could see approximately how much he's lost.
Krishna's stated plan to replace people with AI appears not to have had the desired impact.
Unsurprising when your plan is to use something miraculous that can do everyone's jobs without bothering to find out whether it actually works well enough to do so.
IBM could be the first company where everybody loses their job to AI though - but only because the company's gone bust due to their stupid bet that it could do technical jobs better than a human.
OMG their firmware is 4 years old!!! I take it Casey has not been in the industry long.
Four years is nothing. I'm sure most of us have a tale about an office or comms room with a decrepit PC running DOS, Netware or some other ancient OS that was vital to the company and could not be upgraded or replaced even after decades in service.
I remember running an MS Mail Postoffice (for the children present that's email from before Exchange, Outlook, GMail, etc) on an old IBM PS/2 in 1999. That's a 1987 computer running IBM PC DOS 3.3 on an 80286 which had the main status screen permanently burned in to its green screen monitor. If someone attached documents or presentations that were too large it would bring down the system, there was one manager who did this every quarter. Yet there was no money or impetus to upgrade despite the compnay being an IT services provider who installed NT4 and Exchange for our clients.
AI in IBM lingo
Means "All India"
Moving jobs to India means it's being done by AI
"As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff"
... and are there any companies that are actually replacing staff with AI?
I mean, I'd like to replace my Bertie vacuum cleaner with an AI robot, but I'm not taking Bertie to the tip just yet. Just because I want something, doesn't mean that thing automatically exists.
It's a bit like BT announcing that they are going to replace 40% of staff with AI. It's simply not going to happen in the short to medium term. They might be able to insert AI into some low level functions, where it can help to diagnose network faults for example, but the people won't be replaced, they will just be supplanted. You'll still need just as many people to feed the AI in the first place, probably many more.
As an aside, I can imagine at some point in the future we certainly will have an AI which is capable of doing a better job of vacuuming (and washing up, cooking, clothes washing) than I currently manage. Obviously the words "we" and "some point" are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. "We" could mean my great-great grandchildren, and "some point" could be way after I'm pushing up daisies. But it'll happen eventually.
The fall
of civilisation.
Where we fire the senior/experienced engineers and try to replace them with AI, the result is increased profits than benefit C-level folks and shareholders and leaving the company to wither away as the expertise drains out of it.
And why do they do it?
Well its simple really... they dont have a clue to increase profits otherwise. cutting costs is all they know.
Its rather like Asimov's Foundation series, where the empire had a problem with its atomic power plants caused by lack of skilled people to staff them. the solution... shutdown the power plants because it was quicker than training new staff
Re: The fall
Yeah, as [1]Kelsey Hightower suggested (broadly), IBM's " over-reliance on AI coding assistants might choke off that pipeline in the future, removing the next generation of engineers ". And, as Blake says here (essentially), it's made worse by the sorry state of " Watsonx Code Assistant ".
Looks to me like a lose-lose situation for Big Blue.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/23/kelsey_hightower_interview_part_2/?td=rt-3a
Sooooo IBM
This vapourware is sooooo IBM. Nothing new there.
IBM can teach a "master class" on this.
IBM is a true master of knowing how to get people to "quit" instead of the high cost and high visibility of "layoffs".
They know how to push your "I hate working here" buttons when desired. Saves them a ton of money and paperwork.
Eat your own cooking
I was always in favour of eating your own cooking. Eg run your payroll on your companies code. If it doesn't work - you don't get paid! Can they replace the AI strategists with an AI system?
I remember someone saying they had a fully automated smart system, which didn't need any human intervention. Till there was a power cut, and someone had to turn it on!
A customer gave a talk at Share and said "we can do easy coding, we want IBM/Oracle/mIcrosoft to do the hard stuff. AI can "do" the easy stuff, but not the hard stuff such as deep operating system level.