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.
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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.
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.
What does IBM even do anymore?
They buy competitors with a good product and put their name on it.
And then they don’t know what to do with the product for decades. E. g.: Notes.
Hang on, they said good products
Notes was OK, besides the shitty UI.
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’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
They are very busy charging an arm and a leg for crappy software with shit support.
Patent trolling.
A lot of stuff but mostly software these days.
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.
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”
IBM… That’s the company that is never mentioned anymore.
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.
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.
Cool, are they going to pay more, so people can move closer to the urban area where these offices presumably are? No? Then fuck.
Fire me.
I like that no-nonsense attitude. You’re hired!
Woohoo!
Enough of that. You’re fired!
Done. You’re fired.
we did it,
redditlemmy!You’re fired too
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
I’ll report you to HR for throwing tables.
┬──┬ ノ( ゜-゜ノ)
\o/
“Why are we spending so much on data security and oversight?”
“What…? What the fuck are you asking…? Those are integral for our work.”
“Can we reduce the need for added security measures by putting a physical layer in place? Like in the old days.”
“No? Especially not while everybody works from home, ha ha ha… ha…”
“…”
“…”
When other companies in my city have tried this move it must means more really, really good talent hits the market to start filling open roles at my employer!
Do you know punctuation ?
Some, apparently.
If your life is so sad you feel the need to point this out on a casual web forum, please seek therapy.
If you feel the need to say such things on a public web forum, to a total stranger, please seek therapy.
I couldnt make sense of your long, long, long sentence. That’s all.
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.
Why aren’t tech workers unionizing when this shit happens?
There is no culture of unions in IT. But there should!
I’ve often wondered how the world would cope without 24 hour IT support.
All I know is I would love to see the chaos unfold, sadly, I think more than a few lives would end as a result so I can’t condone that for all fields.
Funnily enough I used to live very close to the office in the picture.
But did you work there?
