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IBM: Remote Working Is Great! (For Everyone Except Us) (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: IBM, the company that just weeks ago said it was doing away with its work-from-home policy, is now preaching the benefits of telecommuting to customers. Big Blue's Smarter Workforce Group says a recent panel it hosted at the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conference concluded that customers who work remotely are "more engaged, have stronger trust in leadership and much stronger intention to stay. These findings mirror what an IBM Smarter Workforce Institute study found," the group wrote. "Challenging the modern myths of remote working shares employee research revealing that remote workers are highly engaged, more likely to consider their workplaces as innovative, happier about their job prospects and less stressed than their more traditional, office-bound colleagues." This is posted without any apparent sense of irony, as IBM said just weeks ago that remote workers were not part of its "recipe for success" and could no longer be permitted to work anywhere other than its six regional offices in various techie hubs around the US.
I never had trouble finding a job as a programmer until I started looking for remote work.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
...when you know the real reason for removing their work-from-home policy and asking that everyone go to physical IBM offices.
They're not doing away with employees working remotely because they don't believe in it, they're doing away with it to encourage their oldest employees to retire or quit. Possibly also to weed out some employees who weren't really doing any work, which happens plenty with any job that offers telecommuting.
Once their oldest employees who aren't willing to relocate or move to keep their job quit, they'll offer telecommuting to their employees again.
The get paid 1/3 what the average American does. You're more likely to get remote work if you're willing to work for less.
By requiring that workers move to hub cities such as San Francisco, Austin, or New York, IBM could both rid itself of older workers and make the jobs more appealing to younger, lower-salaried professionals...
Coincidentally, an internal IBM video distributed to staff, and seen by The Register, advocates working in an office. Funnily enough, it features a lot of young folks...
Story about IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty: At IBM's annual meeting last week, shareholders agreed with a proposal to increase her salary more than 60 percent to $33 million. (May 5, 2017)
From the story:
Her $33 million paycheck this year puts her ahead of tech CEOs like Microsoft's Satya Nadella ($18 million), who is successfully steering the company back towards growth, as well as leaders at fast-growing tech giants like Alphabet's Larry Page ($1), Apple's Tim Cook ($9 million) and Amazon's Jeff Bezos ($2 million).
Rometty has presided over 20 straight quarters of declining revenue growth.
Since she became CEO in January 2012, revenue has declined more than 26 percent on a trailing 12-month basis compared to the year before she took over, and net income has fallen nearly 27 percent.
Do as we say, not as we do. Because we have some great software to sell your telecommuting workforce.
During my time at Big Blue, we asked to be allowed to work from home one day per week. We were told that if we were saying our jobs could be done from any location that we needed to keep in mind that our jobs could be done from ANY location. At that point our entire team agreed that our jobs required us being at our desk 5-7 days a week. Go Big Blue!
They're cheap.
If they TRULY wanted to lower salary requirements, they should move to Smallville, KS. I heard it was a super place to live :)
. . . they spent the last decade closing smaller sites world-wide, and consolidating everything in giga-sites. Part of this action was changing the office space into "e-workplaces" or "flexible offices". This basically meant tearing out the cubicle dividers, leaving a big full-floor room filled with just empty desks.
Employees get a locker room type closet with a trolley suitcase like thingy to stash all their junk that workers usually leave on their desks. IBM employees are not allowed to leave any items on the desk, since it is not their desk. Every morning they play "musical chairs" and everyone tries to grab a desk in a good position. If you are a programmer and need to concentrate in silence . . . and a salesperson sits down next to you doing "LOC = Lines Of Calls" instead of "LOC = Lines Of Code" like you . . . well, that is just tough shit for you.
IBM managers know that this is a stupid idea, but the goal was to save money, and that trumps everything. So they tried to sweeten the deal a bit by letting folks work at home. Basically, IBM has outsourced its office space building services to its employees. Well, guess what . . . if you can't at least put a picture of your wife and kids on your desk . . . you don't get "attached" to your "place of work". You also don't feel very much attached to the company either . . . so guess what that does to turnover rates.
So now, IBM wants to lure its employees back to work at IBM locations. But too many don't even have an office to go back to. If IBM wants to haul them back in, all they need to do is give their employees real offices to go back to.
These IBM e-places are just as pleasant to visit as a trip to Dachau: very loud, greying chipped concrete colored paint, rickety desks and chairs that make IKEA furniture look like luxury items.
Of course, they can always threaten to fire the employees, if they don't come back. Which is probably going to happen, since even Warren Buffet threw in the towel, and declared IBM to be a basket case. They desperately need another Lou Gerstner, to turn them back around again.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
IBM is no doubt just doing this in America and maybe Europe. They are hoping to gut the western employees. That is why I no longer even consider an IBM product or service.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I worked at IBM for about four years from 2000-2004. I have friends that just left about a year ago. They had begun the India-shift at that time already, but didn't have any W@H policy. The key thing to understand about IBM is that it's like a small city. They have more than 300,000 employees world wide. Like all cities there are good and bad parts of town. You work at Watson? Okay that's upscale. You work for IBM Global Services as a NOC engineer, sysadmin, or Java dev? That's the slums. If you work for IBM "true blue" you'd probably have an easier time W@H in the past than a red-headed stepchild working at IBM Global Services. The clients in IBM GS are the table pounding types and mostly in financial industries. They'd just have to complain to the sales reps that they heard a dog in the background of a con-call and W@H ends for everyone. I saw incidents occur like that while at IBM. You can also bet your ass that the Ph.D researchers at Watson who have any W@H privs are keeping them. IBM was always scared shitless to upset that apple cart. When I used to do security scans at IBM, those guys would always get a pass, no matter what. Bottom line: it's where you are at in IBM that will ultimately matter, I promise.
Funny you should mention that. I think I've figured out why that is.
The greatest threat to democracy and the rule of the people is, and always has been, disparity of power. In the 18th century, when the American War of Independence happened (not actually a revolution, because revolutions are regime changes, and the same people who ran America in 1870 still ran it in 1880), the most powerful people in Europe were the kings and the aristocrats. They were the state (Louis of France said it literally: "I am the state!") As with Rome, where the democratic senate had been overpowered by the rule of the Emperors, the greatest threat in the 18th century was the aristocracy, who were, at that time, the state.
But the men who established the American system forgot the lessons of the first democracy. Athens was a democracy, and it was destroyed not by kings and nobles, but by the Oligarchs (Athens was where the word originated), and they were not aristocrats, but merchants who came to own everything. In fact, Greece's problems to this day are that it still has laws that recognize oligarchs, who pay almost no taxes. Onassis was an oligarch.
The totemic worship of the founding documents of the United States means that the American people no longer recognize them for what they were: living documents that were hotly debated and considered deeply flawed even by the men who approved them. And it also means that Americans seem to be incapable of recognizing that these men made what is now an anachronistic mistake. The ruling class today is no longer the lords and kings, but the oligarchs. These are the threats to democracy.
But freedom has become a worship word. Remember that Star Trek episode? American's adhere blindly to a 200+ year old doctrine only because they are old, without understand the context of the time, or why they might be wrong. And so, a new order of aristocrats have come to take your freedom, and you will hand it to them, because you believe that such a threat can only come from the state.