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IBM is Telling Remote Workers To Get Back in the Office Or Leave (wsj.com)
For the last few years, IBM has built up a remote work program for its 380,000 employees. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that IBM is "quietly dismantling" this option, and has told its employees this week that they either need to work in the office or leave the company (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). From the report: IBM is giving thousands of its remote workers in the U.S. a choice this week: Abandon your home workspaces and relocate to a regional office -- or leave the company. The 105-year-old technology giant is quietly dismantling its popular decades-old remote work program to bring employees back into offices, a move it says will improve collaboration and accelerate the pace of work. The changes comes as IBM copes with 20 consecutive quarters of falling revenue and rising shareholder ire over Chief Executive Ginni Rometty's pay package. The company won't say how many of its 380,000 employees are affected by the policy change, which so far has been rolled out to its Watson division, software development, digital marketing, and design -- divisions that employ tens of thousands of workers. The shift is particularly surprising since the Armonk, N.Y., company has been among the business world's staunchest boosters of remote work, both for itself and its customers. IBM markets software and services for what it calls "the anytime, anywhere workforce," and its researchers have published numerous studies on the merits of remote work.
IBM, a giant corporation with big financial challenges, is addressing their labor cost issues by issuing a blanket proclamation that will remove mostly older, higher salaried employees from their workforce while simultaneously retaining and hiring in more younger, cheaper employees in the urban tech centers where their few remaining offices are located.
Expect the policy to continue until they start to hurt from the lack of experienced people to execute the little actual work that gets done in the corporation.
It's a stealth layoff. They are betting that a good number of the remote employees will be unwilling to relocate, and quit. But if enough of them do actually come to the offices, then there will be another round of layoffs in the near future.
the "soft layoff" is a coward ceo's last line of defense to "rightsize costs"
As if all the brains hadn't bled away from big blue a generation ago... Anyone left with the ability to work at an actual productive job will quit rather than move.
When you don't know how to manage your workers, you do it the easy way by watching the punch-clock. It does absolutely nothing to help your company, but it's easy, and it makes the boss feel good.
Utter nonsense. None of these types of operations are centralized enough for this to matter. Even if you go into an IBM run facility, your entire team will be spread to the four corners of the earth. Even if you work with people in the same building, those people will be nowhere near you.
Working in large corporate outfits like this is still effectively telecommuting even if you have to drive into one of their offices.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This is a good way to get rid of your lifer employees who've settled down into family life and are just coasting, relying on labor laws and the hefty cost of severance to keep their jobs. Call in to a meeting after dropping off the kids here, respond to some emails after picking up the kids there, everything off at 5. Meanwhile you have the productive employees at the office that come to kind of ignore and not expect anything from the wfh crowd. I've been a contractor at several large companies (cisco, yahoo, oracle) and I've seen it. Yes yes you have your rock star wfh employee here and there. But for the most part, the wfh folks might as well not even be on the team you wouldn't notice and everybody resents them because they make more money than them and don't have to come in and they don't do anything. So this sort of policy shift is a good way of getting rid of dead weight without having to pay severance because there's no way a remote coaster can convert to productive office monkey and they know it.
That's what IBM wants. This is a stealth layoff.
It is IBM's business and business MODEL that are killing IBM>
In recent years, I had to work with one of their products they bought a couple years back.
The original product, worked GREAT was small, efficient, and on Linux you had a GUI-less install that worked just fine. Easy to configure and just *worked*.
Now..wind forward a couple years to now.
NOW they have forced this great stand alone product, to work on WAS (Websphere Applicaton Server), and other layers of unnecessary applications and abstraction...and the fun thing is...NO ONE at IBM knows how the fuck all the parts and pieces actually work now.
You put in a service request on the product in question...you get help to a point, then they say.. "Oh, that's a WAS problem" and send you there...they send you back saying it is an installer problem...etc, etc etc.
I won't even get into the troubles that come with trying to traverse the cluster fuck that is their IBM Passport advantage, trying to find all the many part numbers that will actually make the *magic* combination of parts that will work together.
They try to sell you to the service guys for this, who often...have problems figuring this out themselves.
IBM is $$$$...bloated, too many groups within that cannot and do not talk to each other...THAT is why they suck.
I remember the old saying:
"No one ever got fired for hiring IBM".
If I were a project manager today, if someone so much as got two of the three letters of IBM out of their mouth...I'd CAN that motherfucker in a heartbeat.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........