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Workplace Privacy - IBM Hot, Lilly Not
Brahmastra writes "Reuters has posted an article about the best and worst companies for workplace privacy, passing on information from the forthcoming issue of Wired Magazine, and IBM comes out on top. How does your workplace compare?" According to the summary, Eli Lilly was rated "the most notorious Big Brother boss", after "...its invasive background checks of workers after Sept. 11, 2001, some of which led to dismissals."
At least they're an equal opportunity privacy violator, as happy to spill the beans on their customers as their employees. People just have no respect for corporate consistency these days.
Disclaimer: I no longer, but once did work for Big Blue
Of course they can't spy on you, you are't allowed to do anything. FACT: Leaving a single penny (or any change) in your desk at IBM is considered a security violation because someone seeing it may make them want to steal it, and they wish to keep an honest person honest.
Ford and Sears aren't based in California or Europe, but have decided to use their data-protection laws as a model, even though they don't have to and could be much bigger wangs if they wanted.
Frankly, I'm not surprised a major drug company scrutinizes it's employees more closely than Sears does.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
yeah, and they're giving all those foreign people great 5k/yr programming jobs!
no comment
They can be real PITAs...before 9/11 as well as after. And forget doing contract work and thinking about wanting to work there. The contractors have to walk almost 1/2 mile to get to the building. That's real fun in the rain. It gives a whole new meaning to "software whore". If you're careful, however, you can try to "make a break" for the visitors' garage, although before you even get your car into Park, they'll be at your door. Then you just have to hope they'll believe you when you claim to be a visitor.
Walking around inside remindes me of when I did contract work for defense contracts - if you lose or cannot find your badge, stand in the middle of the hall and put your hands up in the air. Lilly's not quite that bad, but you get the impression that every time someone passes you, you're being scrutinized and everytime you're sitting at the keyboard, you almost get the feeling the keystroke manager "Lilly1984" is hard at work.
Remember when IBM was The Man? Not as in "You The Man", but as in "You've sold out to The Man, man!" The Evil Empire? Big, corporate, bad guys? Now, they love Linux, they don't snoop on employees, they fight SCO-style crap, and so on? When did they get all nice-nice?
It was either that or die, as I recall. They didn't have the greatest of times in the dot-boom.
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Not to troll or anything, but after Bush Sr. left the CIA in '77, he became director of Eli Lilly.
Different parts of IBM, maybe? I joined IBM in 97, so I was there through most of the boom. In IBM Global Services we had tons of work and couldn't get enough people (at one time there was a $5000 reward for employees who got their buddies to come to work for IBM). Meanwhile the stock price was going up, up, up (from ~$30 in 97 to ~$130 in mid 2000). It even split once. I think that was in 98.
The pension plan change did happen during the boom, but that change wasn't made so much to cut benefits and save money as it was to make it more attractive to dot-com era employees. The new plan pays less than the old one, but the money is portable, so someone who doesn't plan to make a career out of IBM will still see some value from it. IBM was having a hard time attracting talent during the boom, and realized that the pension plan as it was didn't mean anything to employees who planned to change companies every few years. As it turns out, the new plan will probably save IBM a lot of money because it pays less to long-term employees than the old plan, and the crash has meant that short-timers aren't leaving and taking their money with them (in the current environment, if you've got a good job, you keep it). Of course, the net effect on the company depends on the outcome of the class action suit.
As far as layoffs go, I know the *major* layoffs were in late 2000/early 2001, after the bust. I'm sure about that because I remember which project I was working on at the time, and I just looked back at the timestamps on some of my project files. There may have been some smaller layoffs earlier, during the boom, but they weren't big enough to get my attention.
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Are you sure that wasn't $10/hr? I had a manager accidentally distribute a printout of the salary ranges for the various bands. The overlap was substantial up into the middle bands. It narrowed in the top three.
Last time I checked, the phrase "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." pretty much is what gives us the right to privacy.
'Course, that's a restriction on the government, not private business.
I work for IBM which is why this will be anonymous. IBM may be fine as long as you only work at an IBM office but the majority of their workforce is in the field and IBM will bend over backwards for clients no matter how agregious their policies. For instance I work as a field tech and one of our clients for Point Of Sales equipment is GAP Inc. Well the Gap and their other retail stores has a policy of routinely searching the bags and persons of their employees as they leave the store. We field techs were told that we were to submit to these same procedures and that we should not raise any complaints about it! I told my boss and my dispatcher not to assign me to any of these calls because I would refuse to submit. I can't imagine being forced to submit to that every day. Hell I just walk past the idiot security guys at places like Best Buy. I will not allow them to assume I am a crook for shopping or working at their stores.
I completely, totally, and utterly disagree with the above. I work at IBM now, and I can promise you there are very firm policies in place about not monitoring employee activities without a good cause and serious management oversight.
If you do something obviously stupid, and people see and complain, you will get looked at. But remember, if someone is doing something like looking a p0rn at work and the workplace doesn't take action, then the employer becomes liable for creating a "hostile" workplace.
Contrary to a lot of public percerption, IBM is very liberal. The phrases "open-door policy" and "an equal day's work for an equal day's pay" both were coined by Watson. We've recognized same-sex unions for years, had company anti-discrimation policies long before it was the expected thing to do. I know I sound like a raving fanboy, and I'll be the first to admit that IBM also has its share of large company bureaucratic BS, but the important things which make my job pleasant on a human level are always done well.