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IBM, Remote-Work Pioneer, is Calling Thousands Of Employees Back To the Office (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Less than a year into her tenure as IBM's chief marketing officer, Michelle Peluso prepared to make an announcement that she knew would excite some of her 5,500 new employees, but also, inevitably, inspire resignation notices from others. In a video message, Peluso explained the "only one recipe I know for success." Its ingredients included great people, the right tools, a mission, analysis of results, and one more thing: "really creative and inspiring locations." IBM had decided to "co-locate" the US marketing department, about 2,600 people, which meant that all teams would now work together, "shoulder to shoulder," from one of six different locations -- Atlanta, Raleigh, Austin, Boston, San Francisco, and New York. Employees who worked primarily from home would be required to commute, and employees who worked remotely or from an office that was not on the list (or an office that was on the list, but different than the one to which their teams had been assigned) would be required to either move or look for another job. Similar announcements had already been made in other departments, and more would be made in the future. At IBM, which has embraced remote work for decades, a relatively large proportion of employees work outside of central hubs. (By 2009, when remote work was still, for most, a novelty, 40% of IBM's 386,000 global employees already worked at home). [...] "When you're playing phone tag with someone is quite different than when you're sitting next to someone and can pop up behind them and ask them a question," Peluso says. Not all IBM employees see it that way.
Maybe they just figured out how to get rid of a bunch of employees without having to pay severances or unemployment.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Every reorganization, every revamp, every change means that some people will not like it. And those that don't like it have two options: Grin and bear it, or hand in a resignation note.
Question for 100 points: Will good people, who are sought and have zero problem finding a new job, be in the first or in the latter group? And where will people who know that they have no chance of ever being hired again because they're lazy, dumb or both be?
And now ponder what group you'll retain with your constant, idiot changes!
For fuck's sake, when you take over a company, you needn't piss all over it to mark it as yours! It ain't a tree and you're not a dumb dog.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's amazing what I can do in eight hours at home versus the constant interruptions in the office.
It's notable that some of the largest reversals of remote work in recent memory have been spearheaded by women.
The irony is delicious.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Didn't Yahoo! do something similar shortly before tanking? It seems pretty short-sighted to make oneself less competitive at attracting technical workers in the U.S. at a time when many are predicting increased competition for U.S. technical workers.
Well, Marissa Meyer did it - and, in the end, she got tens of millions of dollars.
#DeleteChrome
the business suited, company-song-singing, Brutalist architecture and monotonous color scheme are all strong indicators of "inspiring" design elements. "your house is too colorful. come back to the office where everything is so boring you'll sing company songs just to feel something!"
Team Connection and BluePages were the two things IBM did right. With those we rarely had to play telephone tag when I was mobile.
sig = null;
From TFS:
Having worked for IBM back in the 1980's (in Boca Raton, FL), I can provide a datapoint: IBM labs (the MITRE Kanji printer labs, specifically) were incredibly uncomfortable, required long, annoying walks from the parking lot and between locations and buildings, and were run in an extremely uncreative manner. To describe the environment, I'd go with "windowless, cold, and cavelike." Truly a shitty place to work. Whereas working at home... okay, now that is a creative, inspiring location. Because like pretty much anyone who puts a home together, I designed it specifically to be that way to my specific interests and inclinations.
Now... it's been a long time, and perhaps if they re-hired me, they'd amaze me with a comfortable office with a view, a nearby, well-stocked cafeteria, an in-office hutch for my dog, and a secretary to handle the reams of make-work reports. Or perhaps there are no more reports (cough... cough... sorry, can't even write that with a straight face.) I find this, or any reasonable equivalency to it... unlikely. But perhaps they are actually in a position to do this now.
But then again, my experience there was so bad, I'd never respond to an IBM recruiter again, even if I was in the market for a job, which I am not.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well, Marissa Meyer did it - and, in the end, she got tens of millions of dollars.
...and Yahoo! Went! Down! The! Shitter! Faster! ;)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Indeed. Bad to the company, very good for the CEO. Of course, a move like that requires the absence of all personal honor and integrity, but the way to get to such a C-level position already makes sure to weed out anybody that does not qualify in this sense.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
As RTFA, I'm struck that is affects 5.5k marketers (1.5% of the company's workforce) who are not getting the results that their boss is looking for. Ms. Peluso believes that the issue is with employees not being able to effectively work together because they are in different locations (ie their homes). She may very well be right and it's within her authority to bring the employees into the office.
I guess you could argue that this is the thin edge of the wedge - more IBM employees from other areas who are working productively at home could be forced to come into the office but, before that happens, let's wait and see what happens here.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
This. I worked for IBM for a couple of years and it was the darkest, least inspiring office I have ever been in.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I know of no better way to piss off the best talent than to say, you have to move to our preferred location to keep your job because, well no particularly great add, just because.....Probably IBM wants to lay off people but this will backfire. The best who don't want to move will simply say, "Bye" and get offer from a variety of companies, even IBM competitors (who are most likely to hire them in a heartbeat on whatever terms they want within reason, including telecommute). The benefits of working together in office over telecommute are less and less with improving video phones, chats and cheaper availability of cell phones, unless there are specific company secrets you don't want in cyberspace perhaps. The end result will be the best of IBM's staff being "Exceptions" or the best leaving, and the most insecure moving, only to be let go later because they were the bottom of the crop anyway. This will be a no win in a series of non-winning actions.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
IBM does not want any USC working for them they want chained to the job 1hb's.
I've worked for IBM Help Desk only once for a few years. But I have worked in many former IBM shops with IBM-branded hardware and legacy software still lingering around.
This is what happens when you let a Marketing Puke run (ruin?) a company.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
*sigh* Will MBA schools please start teaching all the C-level wanna be's that while treating all your employees the same is the easy route to follow it is rarely the best route. Sacrificing known productivity increases from remote work for some mystical hoped for innovations seems to be a bad bet. I can actually see it making sense for the highly creative individuals doing marketing campaigns, but I can't see it being of much use to those whose job is to track and squash code bugs.
Here's a theory that should fit most Slashdotter's world view:
The real driver is that the bosses are missing the adulation of the crowds and the face to face sucking up denied them by remote work.
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
True. I was taking a piss at Dolby Labs in SF. The CEO walk in the bathroom. Both urinals are occupied. He actually said, 'I should piss on you'.
Swear to god. I was a lowly software developer. That should be pissed on for being an inconvenience. We all know the higher you get, the more bodies you had to have stepped on. Its the only way it works. Wake up. Ceos are not good people.
Obviously Michelle didn't check with Meg (Whitman). This didn't help HP, I bear witness. Also, chats/PMs are GREAT - as long as you don't use them as substitute to actually talking to people.
When poor leadership is the problem, it doesn't much matter where people work from.
Yeah I'm never going back to an office. I went one step further, and also switched to contract work as well. I mean I know it's not for everybody, but for me both changes have been great for me personally.
IBM bought the International Space Station?!
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Like India!
It'd be nice to have a lively company too, but 20 bucks are 20 bucks.
They did the same thing at the last company I worked for, made all the remote workers start reporting to the nearest office. The company only had a couple of offices in the US, so many of the sales and marketing people worked remotely. The net effect was that all of the good sales and marketing people who had long standing relationships with our customers left the company, taking their knowledge and customer relationships with them, a number ended up working for our competition. Rather than improve efficiency, this policy alienated our customers, got rid of our best sales performers, and hastened the demise of the company.
I work at home more than 80% of the time, When I do have to be in an office my productivity tanks. Most of the day is filled with idle chat instead of actual work.
The implications are that either (a) IBM can't properly technologically provide for remote work or (b) IBM is unable to manage remote workers properly. Neither bodes well for their business.
That is all.
Theory X and Y is strong with this one.
Managers who continually look to put employees into their own egotistical context, rather than focus on performance are not ones I'd wish to work for.
Working for HP and Intel was never inspiring but IBM seems to be showing it's roots as an old behemoth of a company. I am sure they will do well in the 21st century with 19th century values. They have been around since the late 1800's, who dare tell them they are wrong?
"Don't fear death... fear not living..." -me
Companies that inspire turnover but are otherwise stable collect cruft from employees who are competent enough to not be fired, through whatever means, but not talented or crafty enough to have options.
Short term this bloats the organization, as more people are required to accomplish the same tasks, but long term, limits the ability of the company to do anything or change tactics - gaining more and more inertial mass.
This is just a perturbation that moves IBM along that chain.
I accepted a job offer from IBM in the 90's after going through their lengthy and involved interview process.I didn't make it to my first day as the reams of paperwork I had to fill out before ever setting foot in the door were terrifying.
You can fight change or embrace it. IBM's competitors will be more agile. It's pretty clear that the future will be dominated by distributed teams with the absolute best people for the problem set working on it, almost certainly in a remote fashion. I'm writing on a computer's who's operating system was done in just sort of a fashion...
..don't panic
This is great news. The explosion of talent into new venues should make for a resurgence in creativity. All the people that will now look for work in their own location or better yet, start up their own business should revitalize things. As for IBM, they need to slim down anyway.
The wife and kids can be told to leave you alone. Co-workers not so much.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Well, the IBM application outsourcing teams I see at work on our customer's sites are the most incompetent, arrogant and expensive specimen of developer (as a group) I have ever encountered. Let's see how long they can keep this up....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Playing phone tag is so last decade! There's no excuse for not having one of the many available chat programs that remote employees can use to get in touch and ask questions - in fact we use it in our cubicle environment even though the person you need to ask a question of is only a few cubes away. Many times it's more efficient and allows the other party to decide when they want to answer rather than being interrupted.
What does it say that a tech company like IBM can't effectively use technology to get their teams to collaborate?
' "When you're playing phone tag with someone is quite different than when you're sitting next to someone and can pop up behind them and ask them a question," Peluso says.' No wants to talk to Peluso, clearly by the pop up behind them and ask question statement we can all hate her together.
Well, Marissa Meyer did it - and, in the end, she got tens of millions of dollars.
...and Yahoo! Went! Down! The! Shitter! Faster! ;)
Yahoo's stock price ~doubled under her tenure. She may have destroyed any engineering left there, but the business did well.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Raleigh is on the list which I assume means RTP. And a lot of the people who popularized that expansion of the acronym were the ones who came to Raleigh when the RTP office was built.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Yahoo's stock price slightly more than doubled.
Tech stocks in general doubled under her tenure. She did marginally above average in the eyes of investors while alienating users gutting future growth opportunities.
The stock price paints a different picture to the health of the business.
I am the president of a 5-person software development firm. Everyone works from home. We use video Skype daily. If you need to talk to a colleague, you see if they are online and you connect with them, even if it is just for a 30 sec conversation. All development is done in the cloud and our co-lo facility. The only real challenge has been our QA processes, which we are slowly figuring out. I have found that employees tend to put in longer hours when working at home, but are very content with their work-life balance. I can monitor their work both by seeing if they are online, and of course, by how much code they are checking in and if they are meeting their milestones. I have yet to any downside whatsoever.
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If you're in my meeting and you focus on and answer IMs (and I outrank you), you will not be in my team's future meetings.
If I later find out it was about a member of your close family's health or safety crisis, you are of course forgiven.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
So here we have an exec who has the quiet and privacy of their own closed-door office pontificating that it will be better for the other employees to be jammed shoulder to shoulder in open-plan offices.
That's not going to work for high-performance employees, such as those valuable 10x software-architects/programmers who have vision, focus, craft, and bursts of overdrive-productivity:
https://hackernoon.com/know-th...
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
It rose because of the AlleyBlabla stock it owned since before her reign. Epic fail at virtue signalling.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yahoo's stock price ~doubled under her tenure. She may have destroyed any engineering left there, but the business did well.
You really need to stop desperately repeating this lie by omission in every thread. The stock price went up because of Yang's investment in Alibaba, nothing at all to do with Mayer.
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I have a friend who is celebrating his 21st year at Intel. He has considered leaving a few times, but just couldn't because they take such good care of him. He gets stock options that come out to about 1/3 of my salary, he makes very good money, usually gets double-digit raises and bonuses that are about 1/4 to 1/3 my salary.
Every seven years, he gets a paid 3-month sabbatical, in addition to vacation. This year will be his 3rd one. He had to move once for the company, and when he did they pretty much covered every expense.
Quite honestly, I have known a couple of other people who have worked there, and none of them complained about it.
What I was told about Intel was that they take care of their employees, and during hard times (like during the economic downturn) they take better care of them. It's how they keep good people. I always respected them for that. I can't say as much for any software or financial company that I have worked for in the last 24 years.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
No. Sorry I just can't let this one fly. Title should have been "IBM discovered to not actually understand the fundamental technology underlying a successful telecommuting strategy."
This is why it's best to not have any dogs or kids, and have a wife who has a professional job at an office, plus a couple of cats.
At my old job, we had a support contract from IBM for some servers that we were using for vitual hosts.
Occasionally we needed to call for support help, usually odd hours in emergencies.
The staff who were the MOST helpful, invariably, turned out to be people sitting in their homes doing remote support.
After getting the same person on occasion, I learned sh ran all her support from a home office in Oregon with calls forwarded.
Fantastic work, she'd occasionally say something like "get out of here" and mention it was her cat bothering her.
I have to say that the decline started a long time ago. This is simply another symptom of a dying culture; it's a death throe. There is no technology issue that forces this change; there is no business, or cultural, or teamworking imperative. It's an attempt at controlling something that looks a lot like leakage. The view from the top, as IBM implodes must seem like someone is shoplifting all of the spare hours, taking all of the passion for the product line, the productivity and creativity away and they must get control back! What they have failed to realise is it's just the force of entropy; they've been shot through by Time's arrow. The only solutions are to re-invent or die.
. I don't recall Louis V Gerstner worrying about remote working. I *do* remember him going crazy about having hundreds of Vice Presidents, none of whom could give him an elevator pitch on any subject of their choosing without having someone prepare a slide deck for them.
what stopped you from peeing on his shoes? goes around comes around..
I'm all for distributed systems, but for many big companies, mainframes still make a lot of economic sense:
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/...
"While some believe that smaller distributed servers provide the agility needed in today's fast-moving cognitive era, the IBM mainframe is the preferred solution for many of the world's most competitive businesses, including:
92 of the top 100 banks worldwide
70%+ of the world's largest retailers
23 of the world's 25 largest airlines"
And see also, on a smaller scale:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"IBM designed IBM i as a "turnkey" operating system, requiring little or no on-site attention from IT staff during normal operation. For example, IBM i has a built-in DB2 database which does not require separate installation. Disks are multiply redundant, and can be replaced on line without interrupting work. Hardware and software maintenance tasks are integrated. System administration has been wizard-driven for years, even before that term was defined. This automatic self-care policy goes so far as to automatically schedule all common system maintenance, detect many failures and even order spare parts and service automatically. Organizations using i sometimes have sticker shock when confronting the cost of system maintenance on other systems.[1]"
In general:
"Why on Earth Is IBM Still Making Mainframes?"
https://www.wired.com/2015/01/...
"Business is more mobile than ever. Yet however lightweight those mobile devices feel in your pocket, they can still make good use of a big, powerful machine chugging away in a back room, not going anywhere."
Mainframes are also more than just hardware. Mainframes are in a sense a culture of 100% uptime and reliability.
That said, distributed computing continues to improve... And distributed computing culture continues to improve...
As to the original article, IBM is still shooting itself in the foot with this move away from supporting remote work... What IBM needs to be creative is not colocation but "slack" in the Tom DeMarco sense:
https://www.amazon.com/Slack-G...
"Why is it that today's superefficient organizations are ailing? Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth."
That was the great thing about IBM Research when I worked there around 2000 -- a bit of slack to be creative and good work/life balance. But, IBMers even then said the rest of IBM was not like Research...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Unfortunately not always that simple. Your local fire department resembles your statement nearly all of the time.
Some places have very fluctuating workloads with short lead times so what looks like incompetence and overstaffing is sometimes (note sometimes) a matter of holding onto resources for those times when they need them. A way to spot something like that which is competently run is to take note of the amount of training and the secondary tasks that are carried out when the primary tasks do not require all hands. In comparison a place not so well run will just have people spinning their wheels and playing at workplace politics.
I know what you describes happens, I've been a number on a list of staff being charged out to the client while sitting around waiting for ten hours a day (I left that fraudster swiftly - not good for the reputation), but it's not the typical situation.
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
The most important for a company to re-invent itself is the first item and it relates to "shoplifting all of the spare hours":
"Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency (by Tom DeMarco)"
https://www.amazon.com/Slack-G...
He says there is a tradeoff between efficiency meeting old needs quickly) versus effectiveness (meeting new needs with flexibility & responsiveness).
DeMarco points out that it is precisely the middle management layer that needs some slack time the most to be able to innovate in ways that lead to organizational learning. But everyone needs slack time to take part in that too. IBM is likely going in the completely wrong direction if it is reeling people in to presumably over-schedule them even more.
I last worked for IBM in Research about sixteen years ago myself... The project I worked the most on was the IBM Personal Speech Assistant (a forerunner to Siri and such). The team was very proud that Lou asked for one for his office:
http://liamcomerford.com/alpha...
But -- I had enough "slack" then (after a year of hard work) that when my then supervisor (his site above) went on a two week vacation, I build a speech activated display wall out of used ThinkPads which looked a lot like a Jeopardy board. (A coworker said it was a a good thing I was not in the lab when my supervisor first walked in after his vacation. :-) I always wonder though if years later that spark led to the idea of Watson being on Jeopardy?
Still think a conversational display wall is a good idea to pursue further. And I still want to make a programming language tailored to being edited easily via voice recognition. Of course IBM has long since sold off ViaVoice... And while there was some slack in Research then around 2000, I was told it was nothing like what was there in the 1970s and 1980s where a lot more creativity was possible. So, even then, these ideas were unlikely to be pursue-able.
And also around 2000, on teamwork at Research, one thing I heard at lunch was someone saying something like "We hire the top people from the most competitive schools and then wonder why they have trouble getting along.." There is a certain lack of diversity as well from such hiring practices.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Add more fuel to the concept that there is a "talent shortage". Companies are just completely unwilling to pay what workers are worth or offer them any training flexibility or even kindness.
Modern employers feel completely entitled to perfect workers for dirt cheap pay and completely unfulfilling work.
Then they whine "labor shortage".
Have you never worked for a bad CEO? No matter how well the industry, or economy in general is doing, the right person can tank any company. She was at least a mediocre CEO - likely better than that as Yahoo was already swirling the bowl when she got there.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What has that got to do with my comment, or yours which I replied to. I'm just pointing out that the stock price is not an indication of the health of a company, and when taken in isolation without exploring the rest of the industry it can't be taken as an indication of how good a business did.
Anyone who was still at HP after Carly Fiorina pretty much deserved what they got because the cancer was already terminal after that. Meg Whitman was pretty much just continuing the same policies.
Not trying to slam... it's just the writing was on the wall after Carly. HP was sick and staggering; the good people had already left or were just working out the rest of their tenure before retirement. The management had no clear direction or even idea how to get the company back on its feet. Meg Whitman came in and pandered to the shareholders and has done little in my opinion that really has a lot of hope of saving the company. The company has split at a time when synergies between the two companies should have been strongest... that step in and of itself speaks volumes to how disconnected they are from business realities today. HPe and what's left of HPeS will continue to stagger along while HPQ will probably do a Lenovo and end up traded off to some Chinese sweat-shop builder.
In fairness I never worked for HP, but did work for a number of MSP's and VARs so I know a LOT of people who were at HP. I know very few people who still are. I saw IBM do the same thing about 10 years ahead of HP... I am not sure why HP thought following IBM's lead was a good idea.
Still, your last comment has some valid points; companies that rest on their laurels do not survive... particularly in IT. They need to be disruptive by their very nature, and few large companies seem to have an ability to do that. Thankfully, there are a few left who look like they might survive the long haul.
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This is BS .... The way that I read this is just that they are trying to get as many people to resign as possible without having to pay out severance packages knowing that a huge % of their employees won't want to uproot their families just to keep working at IBM. If the people quit rather than having a RIF they don't look weak.
IBM will pay people the same, but now the employees will have a commute to and from work. This will add about 1-2 hours per day to the employee's "work". Even if IBM's claims are true that this will increase creativity/productivity, it is at considerable expense to every employee. What a great way to shake down your employees.
I retired from IBM. I am not sure how a marketing group can operate only within the US time zones. Marketing is an international exercise.
In my 10 years at IBM, I participated in online group meetings with folks across the globe.
Project management meetings (IBM has excellent PMs) were usually set at US West Coast time, no matter who participated.
But sub-meetings were "time shared"...this week India set the start time, next week Czechoslovakia, then the US, etc
I had a nice office, near home, and no familial obligations, so it was ok with me.
But, there were many others who had family and found it a real burden to join a 4AM meeting, or 10PM meeting.
And to be forced to join from the office, then commute home...ouch.
But, those are the rules.
I mean, every libertarian I've ever seen online or spoken with, 100% of the time, says "if you don't like the company, or you can't find a job where you live, move."
So everyone on the right should be cheering this....
Actually, I'm surprised WFH ever got this far. I read, in the late eighties? early nineties? that companies with a lot of experience in telecommuting wanted their people in at least one or two days a week, not just for face-to-face meetings... but for the water cooler conversations that turn out to be critically important.
Me... I do *not* want to work from home. When I'm at work, I'm at work; when I'm not, I'm not working. My current job, if I get contacted at home more than 2-3 times a year, it's unusual. And if I was at a job where they thought that they *OWNED* me, and could bother me when I wasn't at work any time they wanted, I'd have them paying time and a half or double or triple time, depending on day and time.
I work to live. I do NOT live to work. And indentured servitude is forbidden in the US Constitution.
What probably happened is that one of the higher uppityups got a stick up his ass because he couldn't reach the person he wanted one day and made a big stink about it. What a freaking joke.
My point was: you can't call here a bad CEO, because bad CEOs destroy companies, often quite quickly.
Stock price is the best guess of people good at financial analysis of the future financial prospects of a company. The wisdom of that crowd is generally better than you'd think. Of course, where they're wrong, there's lots of money to be made.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.