IBM to Managers: Move Near an Office or Leave Company

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.

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.

I bet the board is heavily invested in commercial real estate.

Done. You’re fired.

I like that no-nonsense attitude. You're hired!

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.

They're furiously milking redhat to death, for starters.

They buy competitors with a good product and put their name on it.

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.

A lot of stuff but mostly software these days.

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.

Do you know punctuation ?

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!

^{to opt out, pm me 'optout'. article | about}

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.

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.

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.

There is no culture of unions in IT. But there should!

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.

But did you work there?

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.