#performance

Stuck in grade 8 since last 7years and salary is 170k in Bay Area. Performance rating is always good with stock options(30k) alternate years, but no promotion. How is it for everyone? I'm pretty demotivated to put the same effort another year!

Front page of the online version of the WSJ at time of article publication and still there as this is being posted -- 06:01 UTC, Wed., 15 July 2026.
There is no way in he|| that AK can remain as CEO after presiding over this absolutely catastrophic devastation. No CEO can (or should) survive presiding over losing 25% of the company's value in one day.
Perhaps this will spur another company to finally make and offer to buy it.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ibm-stock-profit-warning-earnings-software-8652c06e

Shares of the corporate stalwart plunged 25% as AI purchases crowd out traditional tech spending in many companies’ budgets

By: Robbie Whelan and Heather Gillers |
July 14, 2026 5:18 pm ET

The SaaS-pocalypse has come for IBM [IBM -25.21%]. Shares fell more than 25% Tuesday, the largest one-day drop on record after the company issued a rare profit warning, citing a shift in customer spending from software to artificial-intelligence hardware and memory chips. IBM is scheduled to release its official second-quarter figures next week and could offer a preview of the toll corporate America’s AI bills might take on software spending.

The selloff in software stocks like Adobe and Salesforce earlier this year was triggered by fears that AI companies like Anthropic would enable people to easily make cheaper copies of the software-as-a-service products sold by traditional firms. However, the selloff in IBM’s shares, which wiped out $69 billion in market capitalization, is being driven by a different phenomenon: worries that new AI purchases will crowd out more traditional tech spending in company budgets.

The rapid rise of AI has made chips more expensive, which in turn has driven up prices for everything from laptops and gaming consoles to AI data-center servers. That run-up in costs has squeezed tech budgets at big institutions including banks—a core customer base for IBM—that buy an enormous amount of computing power from cloud companies to run in-house AI tools.

IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said that in June, clients shifted their quarterly capital expenditures toward servers, storage and memory to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of anticipated price increases.

“These conditions require our teams to execute perfectly, and this quarter we faltered,” Krishna said. “While we anticipated some supply chain-related impact in our expectations, we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization.”

Firms like OpenAI and Anthropic are projecting massive upticks in revenues as more companies test cutting-edge tools for a range of tasks like coding, marketing and data analysis. To pay growing computing bills to those and other AI giants, companies are likely to shave down non-AI software and hardware spending sold by traditional firms, said Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson.

“This earnings season is going to be strewn with companies that fall in that category,” Luria said. “They are hearing from their customers, ‘We need to make room in our budget for AI.’ ”

IBM’s challenges aren’t limited to software. Sales of the z17, the company’s flagship enterprise mainframe designed for the AI age, fell short of its expectations. IBM said it expects infrastructure revenue to fall 7%, after previously anticipating a low-single-digit decline.

Unlike other major AI infrastructure providers and large cloud companies like Nvidia, Google and Oracle, which sell chips and networking hardware and rent computing capacity from their own data centers, IBM focuses on selling hardware and software systems that corporate customers install at their own sites. The company’s customer base is heavily concentrated in financial-services firms.

IBM’s mainframe computing and consulting businesses compete directly with AI models like Claude Code, and its infrastructure business faces threats from the rising deployment of massive AI data-center clusters, which offer enterprise clients access to the computing resources they need, often at more competitive prices.

In late May, IBM announced a $5 billion cybersecurity effort with subsidiary software firm Red Hat, known as Project Lightwell, under which the two companies will deploy tens of thousands of engineers and sophisticated AI tools to help secure software supply chains for enterprise customers including Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Visa and Morgan Stanley.

Chris Versace, chief investment officer at Tematica Research, said that IBM’s comments, paired with recent statements made by some of its major customers, including J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, represented “confirmation that AI adoption and usage are rising and companies are prioritizing it to drive efficiencies and productivity.”

IBM has also invested heavily in infrastructure for quantum computing, widely regarded as the next phase of advanced processing. In June, the company announced it was launching a unit called Anderon, seeded by $1 billion from the Trump administration, which will manufacture silicon wafers for quantum-computing chips, and that it will spend $9 billion more over the next five years to develop quantum supercomputers.

The race is on to secure memory and storage chips, especially those known as DRAM and NAND flash memory, that transfer data and store information on devices. AI companies use those chips to help train and run large language models, coding agents and other tools.

The industry that makes those chips, meanwhile, which includes South Korea’s SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung Electronics, is contending with a memory crunch. The problem has already started to drive up the cost of consumer electronics, from Macs and iPads to Xboxes.

Declines for software companies like Workday, Adobe and ServiceNow were less pronounced Tuesday than IBM’s selloff, but the idea that AI spending is crowding out other parts of companies’ tech budgets rattled software stocks.

Salesforce, Workday, Adobe and ServiceNow all fell more than 5% in the first few minutes of trading before rebounding to end the day down 2.1%, 3.5%, 4.3% and 5.8%, respectively. Investor fears about software budget crowdout likely lessened upon a close read of the IBM warning, Luria said, which cited a key driver of the weakness as a shortfall in demand for the z17 mainframe. Most software companies don’t sell mainframe computers.

This will be a giant black (or brown in his case. . .) mark on the AK regime. Thankfully, there's no way they can keep AK in-charge for much longer after this historical disaster.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/ibm-shares-sink-18-on-earnings-warning-d115d564

Weakness in infrastructure arm was worse than anticipated, as clients shifted spending to hardware and memory

By: Robbie Whelan and Robb M. Stewart |
Updated July 14, 2026 10:52 am ET

International Business Machines shares sank as much as 25% in morning trading after the company issued a profit warning citing a shift in customer spending from software to AI hardware and memory chips.

IBM said the performance of its software and infrastructure business fell short of expectations in the second quarter, and the company didn’t react quickly enough to changing market conditions. Tuesday’s share decline was the largest intraday percentage decrease for the company on record.

Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said in a letter to investors that the weakness in IBM’s infrastructure arm was worse than anticipated, driven by a shortfall in demand for the z17, the company’s flagship enterprise mainframe designed for the artificial intelligence age. The company expects infrastructure revenue to fall 7%, after previously anticipating a low-single-digit decline.

The rapid rise of AI caught makers of memory chips, especially the building blocks of high-bandwidth memory known as DRAM and the short-term flash memory known as NAND, off guard. That led to a capacity crunch that has pushed up prices on a wide variety of products—from laptops and gaming consoles to AI data-center servers—as much as 20% to 40% over a short period of time.

Big enterprise customers like banks—a core customer base for IBM—are particularly susceptible to fluctuations in chip prices because they buy an enormous amount of computing power from cloud companies to run in-house tools.

Consumer-facing companies are also feeling the crunch. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said price increases for its devices, including the iPhone, were unavoidable. “There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook told The Wall Street Journal in an exclusive interview.

IBM said it plans to report revenue of $17.2 billion and adjusted earnings of $2.93 a share for the June quarter. Both figures are short of analysts’ expectations of $17.9 billion and $3.01 a share.

Its pretax income margin is expected to have contracted 90 basis points, to 14.4%.

IBM is scheduled to release its official second-quarter figures next week.

Krishna said that in the past few weeks of June, clients shifted their quarterly capital expenditures toward servers, storage and memory to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of anticipated price increases.

“While we anticipated some supply chain-related impact in our expectations, we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization,” Krishna said.

“These conditions require our teams to execute perfectly, and this quarter we faltered,” Krishna said. He explained that IBM didn’t adapt and move quickly enough, and a number of large deals failed to close on the timelines expected.

“IBM got hit with a triple whammy,” Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said in a note to clients Tuesday. “The AI buildout is concentrating capex in hardware like memory chips and diverting spend from software and services. Markets are going to punish legacy players showing signs of losing ground in the AI race.”

Bourne predicted that as more customers shift away from software as a service to more enterprise AI, investors could see more quarters like this one: “But I think it’s a disruption story, not necessarily an extinction one for legacy software companies. Spending patterns will shift from the present focus, and the vendors that adapt their products to the changing market will stay competitive.”

I've been struggling with motivation lately and I think I know why. I've been seeing the people who work the hardest get laid off while the ones who barely contribute get to keep their jobs. It doesn't matter how well you perform, you're just as likely to be cut. Why should anyone care about doing a good job when effort isn't rewarded?

Enhanced severance for legacy DFS ends at the end of Q2 2027. From what I have read, the legacy severance plan pays the same regardless if reason is restructuring or poor performance. Regular COF severance for poor performance is only 12 weeks. So do we all try to get low ratings/put on PIPs during annual review cycle? I’m trying to hold onto hope I will be laid off because I also happen to be remote, but every day I hate my job and this company more and more 🫩

That means we’re all getting fat raises next year because we’ve done a great job. Right? Right…

Oracle is very poor in its operations. The management is filled with oldies who don't know how to steer . Every one travels like they boarded a flight or train rather than sitting in driver seat. Need lots of layoff at the top. All EVP's, VP's, Senior Director roles need to be evaluated for transformation they did for the company in past 3-4 years and be removed if not.

Warnings of Earnings miss.

IBM shares slipped double digits in premarket trading after the firm released preliminary second-quarter results that fell short of expectations.

CEO Arvind Krishna blamed the shortfall on weakness in the software and infrastructure business because clients shifted money toward hardware purchases like memory chips.

I'm guessing that ML has continued his practice of short work days and long weekends - no work ethic.

Fonts and Colors. And has an army of yes people to crack the whip. Spent more time walking the line activities than driving OI there. Total knucklehead operation.

PPDM was the biggest steaming pile of horse shiiiiit from day #1. Everyone who worked on it should be fired on the spot!

My customers are ripping it out of their test environments, which they could never get to fully work, in droves. What a complete joke of an Enterprise software product. Pathetic.

Same old one Pearson project. Same old story. Different stupid trollop hiring her mates to underachieve.

One of the biggest mistakes this “leadership” made was creating a 5x RTO policy for everyone because of the actions of a few.

The understanding has always been that the push toward 5x RTO was driven, at least in part, by concerns about a small number of people who weren’t meeting expectations under the 3x8 policy. Whether that’s true or not, those people are largely gone. The ones paying the price today are everyone who complied and remained.

Instead of holding poor performers accountable, leadership rolled out a blanket policy that treats everyone like they need to be monitored. High performers, average performers, and low performers all get the same treatment. That’s completely a$$ backwards.

Good people managers manage performance. They don’t replace performance management with one size fits all policies that punish the majority because of the minority.

So, the unintended consequence is the new 8 & skate culture.

People who used to go above and beyond now focus on just checking the box. Badge in, sit for eight hours, badge out. Time that once went into extra work is now spent commuting. Discretionary effort has simply been replaced by compliance.

The irony is that the policy intended to improve accountability has actually reduced it. When you stop rewarding results and start emphasizing attendance, don’t be surprised when people optimize for attendance instead of outcomes.

If someone isn’t doing their job, you deal with that person. You don’t build a policy that discourages the very people you should be trying hardest to keep.

Hey everyone. Through all the myriad of changes at AT&T since John Stanks reign of incompetence he is still underperforming terribly. His ego has him delusional and he speaks like he is the smartest person to walk the earth. The company will flourish when he leaves. John you haven’t been doing well !

In the US, we cannot see where we stand on SCORE so we have no idea how we are progressing towards our quota. We cannot see all of our backlog. Is this the same globally?

Dell kickin a-s with a third of the market, 40% y/y growth
Powerstore
PowerMax
PowerVault
PowerScale
What's there not to love?

NA Pre Sales, my Q4 bonus is down over 60% Year over Year. Down well over 100% compared to prior fiscals. they work you to the bone. No raise in 4 years. What are other Q4 like?

Some of these leaders only have 4–5 direct reports, yet they carry themselves as if they're God's gift to the program. Instead of leading, it feels like their job consists of asking Gemini to write emails and forwarding them.
What's even more concerning is that some Assistant Directors seem to lack fundamental leadership skills. It appears they earned these positions through politics and bootlicking rather than proven performance, yet they're still trusted to make important decisions.
Even worse, several have never consistently come close to hitting quota, but instead of taking accountability, they blame the frontline teams. Leadership is about owning results, developing people, and setting the example—not shifting responsibility.
If someone can't effectively lead a team of five, it raises serious questions about the standards for leadership.

Advisor Gateway blowwwwwws. I give them credit for trying to upgrade, but when you just put lipstick on a pig, well the original pig looks much better. By the way Envision was 100x better than eMoney. Saaaawing and a miss!

I lost count how many times ISG engineering would openly brag about overinflating estimates for work and intentionally leaving features partially finished as an "insurance policy" for future job security. How's that working out for ya'all?

BNSF utilizing drones to track worker performance and efficiency, while operations testing as a secondary measure…. “In the event a violation of company policy or safety violation is viewed” during the process of rail and equipment inspections in yard and mechanical facilities.

Procedure of getting fired after Less Than Meet?

This announcement from Kelly Beatty yesterday is curious. Evidently, Scot Yarbrough is heading this. Who is he. Brent LaRosa is leaving, he got the usual performative, we wish him well. Anyone else know more?

1. The Segment leaders have been over promoted. Most have never delivered at Fiserv and then we put them in more impactful jobs hoping for different results!

2. FIG is heavy in the SVP area (ex - Core Sales, 3 SVPs managing a handful of people running Core migrations. Same in the RM area.. lots of Chiefs and then lots of Chiefs that have Zero knowledge of the business. Clients are frustrated!

3. Net new logos SE team logs a lot travel expenses... where are the new sales? (ZERO because they are visiting existing clients because the leadership is measuring T&E as productivity!!!!!) - Measure SALES and Golf, Steak and Wine dinners - so much waste in that group.

4. If you REALLY care to know where the skeletons are... call / interview the tenured SVP and VPs that exited in the last 6 months since Divya got there. They will tell you why they left and what rocks to look under! The institutional knowledge lost is mind numbing and the clients are suffering.

5. Lots activity and no results. FIG is never a double digit growth business. But, it is also not a negative growth business. The people you have left there will sink it further.

And.. yes, I have tried to speak up... no one cares! The SVPs are merely trying to get to the next paycheck and vesting... they are not driving CHANGE!

Good move on Travis V. He was obvious, d-mb as dirt.

However, you need to do the same for the rest of the clowns in ISG - Directors, VPs, SVPs. A couple are okay but most have no business doing what they're getting paid to do. Just look at their track records. Their failed records speak loud and clear who should hit the bricks.

How Dell managed to bring in so many incompetent dipshiiiits in high ranking positions is a mystery.

How will reductions affect the numbers?

Anyone who has gone through it have the pay? I've heard multiple things.

I am astonish to discover after some research, how many of those middle management people at Centene have just a high school or just or just a CNA. I cannot reasonable understand how they can provide with real leadership and evaluate people in a real balanced way. What can we expect from people without any education to The Cost-Efficiency Model: Corporations often prioritize the ability to "do more with less." A manager who can reliably enforce corporate mandates and keep the department functioning within budget—regardless of their academic credentials—is often viewed as "effective" by the organization, even if they lack the capacity for the systemic, empathetic leadership. I understand now, why the government is checking and following the health care organizations....

SV was concerned and confused about the fact that 105 people voted on the Slido question...ELT will lie to our faces and call us crazy for questioning them

Quote from earnings call:

"While we continue to drive ASV growth, we are focused on capitalizing on our scale to deliver long term sustainable and profitable growth. To that end, we have launched a range of strategic projects aimed at running FactSet with greater discipline and efficiency. Sanoke outlined multiple productivity, but from an operational standpoint, I will highlight 2 items we initiated during Q3 and completed in the past few weeks. We recently rightsized certain engineering teams as we standardize how we build and run software and take advantage of AI assisted coding. Additionally, we entered into an arrangement with RepRisk to support our clients' needs as we discontinued the signals attribution service FactSet provided following the 2020 acquisition of Truvalue Labs."

JVB demoted because she couldn’t meet target in MM sales. Now Shelly Goodman ‘retiring’ because she couldn’t unravel the destruction JVB left behind. For those of you outside of sales that complain about RTO, sales has the most valid reason to complain. Sales is forced to office 5x just like everyone else. Think of the time on the road we could be in front of customers. Instead, we have to come to office daily to meet an in office badge swipe quota while sales attainments circle the drain. We can go into the field to meet customers and try to sale fiber and mobility but the hours we lose daily by commuting instead of acquiring revenue is astounding. Yes, we are in the field but the hours commuting eats up some of that time and we see it in quarter after quarter revenue decline. When sales is set up to fail, we all will.

I’m younger. I don’t have a pension. I’m here because the job makes financial sense for my role. Call that “market-based” if you want. But if a better opportunity comes along, I’m gone.

Most of the employees around me everyday are much closer to retirement than I am. Some are already beyond the Rule of 75. If a voluntary package comes along, they’ll likely take it. If not, they can afford to wait it out.

The irony is that the current strategy is pushing out the very people the company should be trying hardest to keep.

As the job market improves, us younger employees with transferable skills will have more options. Five-day RTO, presence reports, and constant uncertainty make it easier to say yes to those opportunities.

Replacing us won’t be cheap, and it won’t be quick. Hiring costs are higher, onboarding takes time, and it can take years before a new employee reaches full productivity. Then, if the culture hasn’t changed, they’ll leave too.

The solutions is straightforward - - Offer a voluntary separation package to employees who are already considering retirement instead of waiting for attrition.

Return to a 2–3 day hybrid schedule to improve recruiting and retention. If leadership insists on five-day RTO, then compensation will have to become much more competitive.

Hold individuals accountable for performance. If someone isn’t doing the job, manage that directly. Don’t build policies around the assumption that everyone needs to be treated the same because a few people aren’t performing.

The company talks a lot about being “market-based”… The labor market is about to remind them what that actually means.

The poor performers are being removed from the company

The people who don't do any work and don't comply with RTO policy are gone

We can now move forward and thrive without the dead weight

As the title says. its WFRs with no relation to performance

fire vps and directors of all levels. get serious about earning your bonus Dan!

Nike will report its full fiscal year earnings today. Analysts predict a two percent revenue decline and a 21 percent operating income drop. CEO Elliott Hill faces mounting pressure due to continuous negative sales growth. Nike's stock has fallen 34 percent this year, reaching an 11-year low. Investors are impatient despite Hill's long-term turnaround strategy.

https://sportsverse.substack.com/p/a-fateful-day-ahead-for-nike-ceo

So Travis was shown the door this week - and rightly so - but when are we ever going to clean up the rest of his management downline? They are every bit as incompetent and inexperienced as he was. You all know the names.

We continue to fall further and further behind in PowerFlex, PowerMax, PowerScale, and PowerStore. There's just little to no innovation or development velocity with any of these groups.

What there is, however, is a lot of excuses, missed deadlines, missed deliverables, and quality control issues. That's a management problem (lack thereof) that needs to be addressed immediately. How long you going to sit on your thumb JC?

Capital One's CEO, Richard Fairbank, received $40 million in total compensation for 2025. His unique pay package does not include a traditional cash salary but is instead entirely performance-based, consisting primarily of performance share units and a one-time stock and cash award tied to the company's acquisition of Discover Think they really care about any of these post ! Nope

I keep asking myself when things started going wrong. I've been here long enough to remember a time when this company actually valued its best employees, when merit actually meant something, and when the people who worked hardest and produced the most were the ones who got rewarded. That feels like a different lifetime now. These days it's all about who can talk their way into favor and who knows the right people. That's it. That's all that matters. The ones who actually do the work are either ignored or shown the door.

We now have more Vice Chairman's than business leaders - we have a Chief Growth Officer who NEVER grew anything ever and a Chief Performance Officer who presided over the largest DECLINE in performance in the companies history. You can't make this up. Isn't the CHRO supposed to be in charge of organization structure? Time for Takis to clean house with all of this overhead.