25% of Merck IT just laid off

The biggest cuts to the IT organization I've seen in 10 years. All sites affected.

 

25%.....low ball number. More around 40-60% of US.

 

I think it is only the beginning. Most of the IT staff that were laid of were in the bottom of the food chain. They still haven't gotten to the bloated middle management.
I hear many jobs moved to East Europe. Cannot verify.

 

Absolutely not the end. Open your eyes, people, it is very easy to see where this is going. Nothing but account and program management will be left in US before long, and after Prague gets enough decent client oriented people even that is gone. This is not over by a long shot.

If I were a business area I would never even try to hire internal IT for a project unless absolutely necessary. Spend your money elsewhere if you can.

 

very broad brush comment - some IT areas are amazing

 

You want things that work or things that are cheap? I bet you do all your shopping at the Dollar store

 

Good, fast or cheap...pick two of the three.

 

WERE amazing. Hard to be amazing with nobody left. This round cleared out most of the remaining pure-technical folks who had years of knowledge of the systems.

 

The only one you're getting is cheap, and that's before you actually consider the lost opportunity cost of whatever the business initiative actually is, then it's not even cheap.

 

You're getting cheap for now, but it will be very costly down the line... hope they enjoy pinching their pennies now, it will bite them in the arse later

 

Like many decisions to offshore MRL activities, in about 18 months management will decide to reverse itself and then realize that they did not retain the necessary expertise to do so.

 

Greetings. My name is Sabu Prakesh and I will be your new IT manager. If you notice any funny busyness with your computaters please inform me at your earliest conveniences. Thank you.

 

I think this is great idea!

Clark

 

It's a good start. Merck has the worst IT in all of big pharma. Completely useless!

 

Merck's IT department's motto should be "Nothing works!" Because nothing works. Things that should take 30 seconds to do (book a room in Resource Scheduler anyone?) end up with you calling The Desk, rebooting 3 times, and then being told your problem will be "escalated" as you wait 2-4 days for someone from India to IM you, which they do at 3:00am.

I'm truly sorry that so many people have lost their jobs. And if Merck is true to form they likely laid off the cream of the crop rather than who deserved to go. But it is one of the worst IT orgs of any industry. We are leagues behind everyone else as far as technology implementation goes. We implement systems a minimum of a year after everyone else on the planet has adopted them.

IT Chat feature? Pfizer's been doing it for a year.

It just shouldn't be this way. Technology marches on around us and we struggle to run meetings on loaner laptops from the year 2000.

Sorry, it's frustrating. And fixable.

 

R&D needs to go also.

 

Why? You realize without R&D you won't have new products to sell...oh wait that's right you don't sell

 

Prague needs more time to get on board. There will be additional rounds of cuts after Prague gets up to speed. There will be additional impacts to the middle management team. Their positions will either go to Prague or go to one of the outsourcing partners. Please remember what Clark said in the Town Hall meeting. "Everything used to be managed in the US. Going forward that will not necessarily be the case." My personal prediction is that within a few years it will only be upper management left for IT in the US. Everyone at the Director level and below will be impacted. GTO, Service Delivery, and Client Services will either be at the offshore hubs in Prague or Singapore. Otherwise, any Director level or below positions remaining in the US; will be outsourced to companies such as HCL or Accenture.

 

Take note of this post it is essentially the 18-36 month roadmap.

 

The scary part is that all those who survived this round are well aware of this reality.

Too bad Prague doesn't pay well...