IBM to Managers: Move Near an Office or Leave Company
IBM to Managers: Move Near an Office or Leave Company
International Business Machines Corp. delivered a companywide ultimatum to managers who are still working remotely: move near an office or leave the company.
IBM to Managers: Move Near an Office or Leave Company::International Business Machines Corp. delivered a companywide ultimatum to managers who are still working remotely: move near an office or leave the company.
Just determined to lose talent.
That's the intent - it's a layoff in disguise, with a discount on the severance package.
But not the talent they want to shed!
Look up "Dead Sea Effect"
They asked nicely. Then they abruptly started threatening termination. Keep in mind this is after they had to close a few offices when the regular employee RTO mandate resulted in a large amount of attrition.
So now there are people with 120+ mile round trip commutes because they live within the cutoff distance. Nearly all meetings are video calls anyway due to team members being scattered all over the world. When folks asked leadership why in a company-wide meeting months ago they basically said to suck it up.
This has morale pretty low, when it was already terrible even for folks that prefer in-person and live close. Some quit after the announcement. The brain drain is already causing an impact because there’s so much tribal knowledge and teams are silo’d as hell.
Never seen a company so out of touch or be so openly hostile to their workers. It’s just wild.
Never seen a company so out of touch or be so openly hostile to their workers. It’s just wild.
Everything you described in this comment happened at my org as well.
Ditto, I practically could've wrote that comment myself
I bet the board is heavily invested in commercial real estate.
Sure seems like a great way to avoid severance in those places it's required.
Amazing how the companies that "care about employees" don't care so much these days...
Not sure when anyone ever thought IBM cared about employees, except maybe 40-50 years ago. They have been steadily fucking people over. I wouldn't shed a single tear if that company went out of business.
IBM amplified the death and destruction of the holocaust by assisting the nazis with a more efficient process to find Jewish people.
The Nazis made extensive use of Hollerith punch card and alphabetical accounting equipment and IBM's majority-owned German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag), supplied this equipment from the early 1930s. This equipment was critical to Nazi efforts to categorize citizens of both Germany and other nations that fell under Nazi control through ongoing censuses. This census data was used to facilitate the round-up of Jews and other targeted groups, and to catalog their movements through the machinery of the Holocaust, including internment in the concentration camps. Nazi concentration camps operated a Hollerith department called Hollerith Abteilung, which had IBM machines, including calculating and sorting machines.
The guy that ran the company through this period was named Watson - their AI offering today is named after him... the guy that greenlit the nazi stuff - This world is a fucking joke.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
IBM Watson is a computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. It was developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's founder and first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson. The computer system was initially developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy!
I'll take "Die Judefrage" for 500.
Step 1: Enforce RTO mandates Step 2: Fire remote employees Step 3: Replace the fired folks with remote job positions, paying 10%-15% less.
Or not even hire replacements, so they cut workforce AND don't have to pay severance packages. Costs are reduced, earning are higher, shareholder are happy. Yes, it's a relatively short term plan, but that's what analysts and investors care about, short term returns.
What does IBM even do anymore?
They're furiously milking redhat to death, for starters.
To be fair, being milked to death doesn't seem that bad. I've seen those videos.
Makes bank on it's name from 60 years ago. That's about it. Genuinely.
They are very busy charging an arm and a leg for crappy software with shit support.
Patent trolling.
They're still a big name in mainframes and are also a cloud hyperscaler, and they offer software development and consulting. They do a lot of research in AI and quantum computing, and even blockchain a few years ago. But altogether just a shadow of what they once were. I used to work there when Lenovo took over ThinkPad production and the hard drive business was phasing out. I couldn't imagine being there now.
cloud hyperscaler
I know you're technically right, but their "cloud" is the weirdest offering I have ever seen
A lot of stuff but mostly software these days.
When other companies in my city have tried this move it just means more really, really good talent hits the market to start filling open roles at my employer!
So they have to move to an office, any office?
Meaning they can no longer be remote but don't have to be in the same office as the people they manage?
That makes a lot of sense.
This is similar to what most tech companies have aligned on. I work 200 miles from my co-workers, my manager is 100 miles away, and while I'm supposed to be 100 miles away our tracking software doesn't care if I badge in 2 miles away at my local office.
If you're a multinational company, you'll be on video calls regardless of what you do, so it's fucking stupid that they enforce these rules.
Well at least when I was there IBM managers where managing multiple teams across different cities.
They had the same made up issue years ago as well. I think I went to the office maybe once or twice a year, then all of a sudden, every Friday was "Think Friday" and we had to sit in a big room and hear some sales person talk nonsense about cloud, agile development and how soon field technicians would be ditching their clipboards for digital solutions (this was a good 20 years after every tech in IBM had stopped using paper fyi).
IBM just wants to get rid of more people and this is their plan.
Or as it was in the past, IBM is in the business of getting out of business, and that business is good.
Why aren't tech workers unionizing when this shit happens?
There is no culture of unions in IT. But there should!
If all the IT staff join an electrical union like the ETU then we would all have better conditions
Because we'd lose our jobs long before voting on a union. No way they'd care about the very tiny risk of very tiny fines as opposed to the huge cuts in wages to IT workers that have been made over the last decade and continue to be made.
Okay sure, but you do understand that's a risk witb every corpo, right? Anything big enough can shrug off fines. Worker protections by the government aren't what allows unions to exist, they were pushed for by already existing unions. The real strength is in numbers. They literally cannot fire all of us, or even 90% of us.
Cool, are they going to pay more, so people can move closer to the urban area where these offices presumably are? No? Then fuck off.
HA! They would not even pay $1 for moving expenses when they asked me to move across the country. This was 8 plus years ago and not only was the offer no extra money, it was the same money in a more remote, colder, and higher cost of living area.
IBM fucking around. Let's see if they find out.
They will.
I joined a company about eighteen months ago and was hired as fully remote. Advancement etc will depend on remaining so. Company looks good on my resume, and there’s no fucking way I’m moving to DFW in this political climate.
Might consider the MI office, big only as hybrid. We are settled comfortably currently. I’d be ok with driving wed night to be there thurs and fri, and make the entire trip at my leisure.
It you better believe there’s going to be a huge carrot in it for me if that comes to pass.
I don’t even have a reason to hate the MI town the company considers an office hub. For the right job I’d even consider moving, but SO has veto on that which I respect.
Not that MI sucks entirely. There just isn’t much there for us and it increases the drive to fam for holidays hy 4 hours or so.
Not averse to hybrid, could sort it out easily enough, but key is that it would be a new position or promotion.
Got the paperwork that says I’m perm remote and would happily go to bat with said paperwork, esp for the right job. Just bc the internal positions says DFW, does not mean I can’t do 3-4 days here in Kettlecorn, Ks, and another day or two at the actual office.
But - apologies to Barbara mandrel - I was remote when remote wasn’t cool.
Nobody is taking that away from me. Circa 2014 I learned how to be remote, for context, and executed well.
If hiring mgr doesn’t want to give a little on “mandatory” on office days, I’m out.
Checking in with a disability that benefits greatly from remote work, and all the paperwork on place. Just try and mandate “RTO” and see what happens.
Funnily enough I used to live very close to the office in the picture.
But did you work there?
Such a low effort way to reduce payroll. It actually made me laugh. The position of "People Manager" has to come in to work, but I didn't see a mention of the managed. So the people manager can be at home, working remotely with their team, or they can be on site...working remotely with their team? I wonder how many years it's going to take for corporate American to realize times have changed. Or for some organized crackdown from the other side.
They are forcing managers in first and then employees next. But the managers have to be in the office first or it doesn’t work.
Have fun with the labor shortage, you're not dealing with a bootlicker generation, you're dealing with the no-notice quit generation