IBM is Telling Remote Workers To Get Back in the Office Or Leave (wsj.com) 215
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.
The CEO's pay package is objectionable (Score:5, Funny)
So, let's fuck with the regular employees. That'll fix it.
Re:The CEO's pay package is objectionable (Score:4, Funny)
Since when did IBM hire "regular employees?"
If you're regular, don't even bother applying.
You have to be exceptional, and also have pressed shirts.
Real IBMers were still wearing their pressed shirts when working from home, and it isn't really that big a change for them to come back to the office.
Re:The CEO's pay package is objectionable (Score:5, Insightful)
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Queue the constructive dismissal lawsuit...
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Constructive dismissal requires either a breach of contract, or else a hostile work environment.
It is safe to say that IBM's contract covers this already. They do have HR staff, and lawyers, so this is obvious.
If you manage to convince the Court that your being required to show up at the office creates a hostile work environment, that might not really play out the way you intend! You'd only be proving that their misconduct was in not firing you.
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Not necessarily--a remote worker doesn't have quite the same contact with the culture in the workplace. It is not my employers' fault for hiring me if I find that, as a remote worker, I am managing to be protected from the hostile work environment created by the in-house culture. It can also be that, well, what makes the difference is as simple as if your coworkers can see you: being a remote worker can be quite sufficient to prevent discrimination for some.
I'd expect it to be easier to go for breach of co
Re: The CEO's pay package is objectionable (Score:2)
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Well, if we're going to talk about my current job; their offices are in entirely in NYC. I'm not going to keep working with them if they decide for some reason I must work from their office, because NYC is expensive and they don't pay anywhere near enough to cover the cost of actually living in NYC. The point really would be to discourage them by upping the cost to them by making such a demand.
I overall suspect that the theory that this is a stealthed layoff is right--especially since IBM has a track reco
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If the workplace is hostile or not depending only on if you enter the door, then we've already identified the source of the hostility.
It Will Change Nothing (Score:3)
IBM == I've Been Misled? (Score:2)
Report: IBM's top exec pay package 'now worth $65 million' [wraltechwire.com]. Quote: "... IBM has posted declining revenues over the past five years under her leadership and last week reported declining revenue for the 20th consecutive quarter."
Could someone explain how CEOs get such high pay?
IBM == Is Brainless Moron?
IBM == Insufferably Bad Management?
Re: IBM == I've Been Misled? (Score:2)
Declining revenue or declining profit? You can't just expect revenue to continue growing in an older company, at some point your market is saturated or you are inflating a bubble. I see IBM doing pretty well in its more futuristic technologies section. The problem is lack of innovation anywhere else.
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That's misleading and you know it.
That was a short term peak, they're still above their long-term average, they're still above where they were during the ".com boom" or any other period. They had a peak in the `10-15 years because tech generally was experiencing a lot of uncertainty and IBM was a safe haven.
A company that is in decline should have some sort of real shrinkage, not just have consistent growth combined with a short-term market capitalization increase and correction.
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R&D -> licensing -> profit
Top R&D engineers -> trust -> professional services -> profit
Already using IBM professional services -> easy to integrate IBM software -> licensing -> profit
They used to make a lot of computer hardware as a fourth leg, but when most of it became commoditized they sold most of it off and rolled the rest into services and licensing; you can't buy a laptop from them, but they'll happily design you a custom supercomputer.
Big Company Moves (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Big Company Moves (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I suspect that if they don't see the value of teleworkers they'll hurt a lot faster from the "invisible" work that just went missing. I mean you have your written duties, the big stuff that they mostly know about.. but then you have all those little things where something this is wrong/missing/not updated and eventually it turns out Bob used to do that but Bob's not around anymore.
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A very common thing. You get points just for showing up in the office.
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IBM hasn't done anything important in quite a few decades. They're simply maintaining large amounts of software they primarily purchased from others and then branding it IBM. SPSS hasn't changed since they purchased it yet they still want thousands of dollars in licensing every year.
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Their mainframe division is quite impressive and still cranking out new machines.
Re: Big Company Moves (Score:2)
Anything that's not Intel? If I can buy the same hardware from SuperMicro, you're not really innovative.
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All of the mainframe and AS/400 machines are POWER based. Do some reading up.
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Well the mainframe uses its own architecture. It is based on the POWER CPU design but AFAIK it isn't the same thing. You are correct about AS/400.
I don't think it matters (Score:2)
Instead of trying to come up with excuses why older employees should work into their 60s+ we should be figuring out what to do with people as their productivity declines. That's a touchy subject though because the only real solution is income redistribution and nobody likes that...
Why Companies Should Hire Older Developers (Score:2)
https://developers.slashdot.or... [slashdot.org]
That said, I'm all for a basic income for everyone! Especially 20s-30s something people who are often running on little sleep from taking care of young children...
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What, you mean using spelling and whole words and stuff?
Yes, I think that's what he meant. And expressing complete thoughts.
Frotty tops (Score:3)
Call me back to the office once, shame on you.
Call me back to the office twice, shame on msmanishHD. [slashdot.org]
Deja Vu? (Score:3)
Not that redundancy can't be a good thing. But saving time is also good.
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https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
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Soft Layoff (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Umm, Okay (Score:2)
I quit!
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I know.
Telecommuting by another name. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Telecommuting by another name. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is merely a soft layoff. Force people to quit by making their jobs insufferable. I'm sure they figure the older, more highly paid, employees will go first.
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Office space (Score:5, Interesting)
I presume that they have since realised that there are, in fact, real benefits to having a full team in a single location. And now that they have sacked so many staff, they now have the free space to actually implement the most sensible and efficient (for the company, not the employees) way of getting the most out of their people.
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Except the last time I saw them try this it was a disaster. They chose some out of the way location where no good talent would re-locate to. This client came back to our group after this disaster and after all of the legacy employees with all of the tribal knowledge had been laid off.
They would have to shuffle all of their teams in order to implement anything like this.
Not convinced it would actually benefit IBM in the slightest. Although I am sure they think differently.
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That's Apple, not IBM
Re: Office space (Score:2)
Have you seen a big cubefarm? The chances of two people on the same team being within a few hundred feet of each other are remote.
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Have you seen a big cubefarm? The chances of two people on the same team being within a few hundred feet of each other are remote.
It depends on whether the cube farm is set up as flex space or not. A lot of companies are going to unassigned seating with lockers or rollerbags to put your stuff away at night or take it with you. When you arrive in the morning you select an open space. In this type of environment you can sit next to team members through a little bit of coordination, seat saving (i.e. like saving a seat at the movie theater for a friend), or just sitting in the same area every day.
Re:Office space (Score:5, Informative)
I presume that they have since realised that there are, in fact, real benefits to having a full team in a single location.
You would think wrong. This mandate started in the second half of last year, and there has been no attempt to move teams that work in different IBM locations together -- or, for that matter, to implement any environment changes that might make having a team all be in the same location useful.
This is 100% about reducing head count.
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If you feel your cheeks burning it must mean you finally clicked over on that "max" tab and looked at their current value compared to during the .com boom or any other age.
Forced resignations (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If you want to get rid of employees who are "just coasting", figure out who they are and especially who they aren't, and lay them off, and pay their ****ing severance, and think about who you want to keep and what you want to do with them.
It's Pirate Ship Captaincy 101: Employees will work well for nice manageme
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relying on labor laws and the hefty cost of severance to keep their jobs
I think you're about 4 decades behind current labor practices.
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Meanwhile you have the productive employees at the office
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah.
Ha.
--
BMO
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"contractor" = disposable, low quality labor, but cheap
I sometimes made more money than regular employees because I was brought in to do a short-term contract. Those 2% raises don't add up over time.
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Did "sometimes" outweigh a steady income where you don't have to worry about landing clients back to back?
Whenever recruiters and hiring managers ask me why I don't want a "permanent" position, I ask them why the position they're offering isn't "permanent"? I've never got a straight answer on that.
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You mean like during the last decade where inflation has been practically negative?
Last 20+ years.
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So what you're saying is, despite your claim that 2% raises don't add up over time, inflation numbers suggest that the 2% raises HAVE added up over time, increasing the actual value of their salaries faster than inflation has eroded them?
Please educate yourself.
But after adjusting for inflation, today's average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then. In fact, in real terms the average wage peaked more than 40 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 has the same purchasing power as $22.41 would today.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ [pewresearch.org]
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You mean like during the last decade where ***REPORTED*** inflation has been practically negative?
FTFY
See http://www.shadowstats.com/alt... [shadowstats.com] for more realistic numbers. My 1974 Ford Maverick, 302 V8 and automatic transmission, was approximately $4070 CDN, sales-tax included. The 2017 Ford Focus is approx $14,400 CDN, before taxes. Public transit has also risen. http://globalnews.ca/news/2359... [globalnews.ca] "From 3 cents to $3.25: a brief history of TTC fare hikes". And of course, house prices are going nuts.
But Canadia
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I don't know where that "without having to pay severance" thing comes from.
It comes from Europeans who want to lecture everybody about how little they know about the American workplace.
Europeans presume that because in most of Europe it is mandatory unless you have an excuse. Severance in the US is usually an optional thing that an employer does in rare cases to keep former employees happy/quiet. Sometimes it is part of a contract, in which case it just gets paid. It isn't a thing to include it in the contract and then try to use gimmicks to avoid paying it. Companies that include
Radical idea to improve the company!! (Score:2)
I have a radical idea to improve the company!! maybe stop selling everything you have to become a simple "government and big company" service provider (where you repack mostly open source tools with some in house tools)
yes, those pay big money, but those are only choosing IBM because of the name. New guys, companies, tech people now that IBM is expensive and do not have anything new to offer and bypass then and use open source directly without paying a fortune!
IBM have so many patents each year , yet IBM st
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Make things with patents? Don't be silly. The most profitable, wildly successful IBM business strategy is patent trolling. They get the revenue of other companies that make stuff, without doing any of the work -- a sweet deal.
Not quite a dupe, but... (Score:2)
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Why are woman tech CEOs incompetent? (Score:2)
Because the majority of tech CEOs are incompetent. (Score:2)
For every Bill Gates, there are many, many, many incompetent male tech CEOs.
It's not gender, it's general incompetence. With a tiny pool of women tech CEOs, you would not expect a lot of massive successes if you apply the same competence percentage as male CEOs.
And then... (Score:2)
Anything that makes the place really shitty to work in so they can jack up the attrition rate. So much cheaper than layoffs even if you end up with all the deadwood that can't find work elsewhere.
Incompetent overpaid CEO is incompetent news at 11 (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing to see here, just more of the same.
It is far past time to pass a law that limits CEOs pay to 10x the average pay of their employees in cash and the rest in company stocks that can only be sold 10% per year, requiring CEOs to focus on the long term health and viability of their company, not just short term gains...
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Migrate AIX to Linux, IBM will die. (Score:2)
My theory is, the more that virtualization takes over and sites migrate their uber expensive AIX and HACMP high-availability architecture to RedHat and Oracle Linux, etc., the less relevancy IBM will have in any context.
In my field there are only a dwindling few Healthcare shops that still use Websphere and have to hire droves of offshore folks to maintain care and feeding of their ESQL WebSphere monstrosity - and when they learn they can do a lot better integration with newer, cheaper and more efficient te
Severance still Required (Score:2)
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Good thing the vast majority of the US uses at-will employment, so severance doesn't matter.
Stealth layoff (Score:3)
In a lot of places I've worked (never for IBM, but know a lot of people who have...) this was done as a copycat HR thing ("Google and GE do this, so I'm going to propose it at the next board meeting" says the VP of HR.) -- or a cheap way to get rid of high-talent, high-salary workers.
The first thing is usually just a silly knee-jerk reaction, and is very similar to VPs of IT reading an airline magazine "article" about some buzzwordy technology and suddenly declaring that we're "all-in" on Technology X. The place I work for is very nice to work for job-wise, but often badly copies HR policies that don't really apply to our company. (Our new push to attract hip young Millenials at the expense of everyone else is a perfect example -- comically out of touch with reality and copied word for word from some business rag article about Google.)
The stealth layoff is more sinister. IBM is famous for offshoring every single job they can in recent years, and arbitrary HR policies like this are less likely to be tolerated by older, talented workers. We have a few fully remote workers, and they earn that privilege because they are _really_ good at what they do. I imagine IBM has a very similar situation, with a small cadre of old-timers who really know what's going on secretly directing the newbies behind the scenes. Older workers with families can't move as easily as some new graduate who can fit all their belongings in their car. Old-school IBM, where people had jobs for life, would have been a different story. Those days, if your company moved you for a new project, you moved because it was a good opportunity and it would increase your salary and/or presence within the company. Now, all employees are treated as disposable and knowledge counts for little.
I'm sure they have some people milking the work from home thing...you always will, and big companies really do build up a lot of excess staff. This happens a lot with companies that go on acquisition sprees, and people just hide out until the next big clean-out. But in my opinion this will force the few talented US-based workers at IBM out, and allow them to say "See? We can't find anyone willing to work here in the US -- prepare this division for relocation to Bangalore!"
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It will be interesting to see how global teams... (Score:2)
pay package (Score:2)
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How does a CEO get a pay package like that if the shareholders are irate about it? Isn't it the shareholders that decide to approve the pay package?
Nope. It's the Board of Directors. Guess what kind of job all the members of the Board have? Yeah, CEO.
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Bad performance isn't because of remote workers (Score:2)
It is the IBM environment and procedures for pushing changes. All of the management processes at IBM are specifically designed to slow progress, that is their point. First give the employee a good laptop, load it with two metric tons of security software (slow the pc to a crawl). Don't grant access to any tools without a presidential approval (meaning Trump, not CEO of IBM). Don't grant access to code without approval of congress. Don't allow code changes without UN approval (and expect a Russian veto)
A real move forward (Score:2)
Advance to the rear!
More likely (as others have stated) "please quit."
Re:Doesn't make money sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Doesn't make money sense (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just a stealth layoff, it's stealth ageism. I'd wager that much of IBM's older, higher salaried workforce is participating in the remote program, while the workers who are already in the urban centers around the offices or are willing to uproot their lives to move to one are younger and cheaper.
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It's not just a stealth layoff, it's stealth ageism. I'd wager that much of IBM's older, higher salaried workforce is participating in the remote program, while the workers who are already in the urban centers around the offices or are willing to uproot their lives to move to one are younger and cheaper.
That's bizarre. It's the older workers who appreciate most the face-to-face interactions.
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It's not just a stealth layoff, it's stealth ageism. I'd wager that much of IBM's older, higher salaried workforce is participating in the remote program, while the workers who are already in the urban centers around the offices or are willing to uproot their lives to move to one are younger and cheaper.
I kept thinking about this and I am not so sure that the policy would be successful in cutting older/higher salaries people. If those people are in their 50s or 60s, they are too young to be retired. They would have to put up for some times. They know that getting a new job would be limited in the field for their age. Yes, some of them (low percentage) may be very good and could find a job later on, but most of them, I doubt, can do that. Putting up with move, and then try to find something else along the w
Re:Doesn't make money sense (Score:5, Interesting)
As an older worker, I'm extremely offended that you would assume I'm unwilling to comply with job requirements and move if necessary to retain a job I am good at and I love. That is extremely discriminatory.
It's not specifically age related. Age is being used as a catchall for people in the age range where they have a family and kids. If your kids are in a good school with lots of friends in a nice community are you going to move or look for another job?
Working in the nearest city may require uprooting the whole family and moving to an area with higher housing prices, etc. People have done it. Most prefer not to if they can help it, at least until the kids are old enough to be in college, etc.
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If you're settled down and not near the office, you're also not a longterm employee.
It is funny watching people write crazy things to satisfy their bias. I think remote workers are good too, but it doesn't mean it is advantageous to every company in every way, or that companies who don't like it are somehow discriminating. Sheesh.
Re: Doesn't make money sense (Score:2)
These days, if you've worked for the same IT company for more than a handful of years, you're a long term employee...
Not sure where you get the idea that being remote in another town doesn't make you long term by default?
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Since when does a company like IBM that has many times more applicants than positions care about "these days?"
"These days" lots of people still don't care what some kids have to say about it.
If you assume that IBM has an average career length of a handful of years, that's entirely your own problem.
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As an older worker, I'm extremely offended that you would assume I'm unwilling to comply with job requirements and move if necessary to retain a job I am good at and I love. That is extremely discriminatory.
It's more that younger workers have fewer ties to the place where they currently live. They may be unmarried, they may be totally career-motivated, they're unlikely to have kids. Older workers CAN move if absolutely necessary, but they may be unwilling to bother. But there are other factors as well.
Factors on the side of older workers be more willing to move:
*) Older workers have more money. Moving can be expensive.
*) Older workers might be more concerned about being -able- to find a new job, so they might
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Exactly. HP did the same thing 2-3 years ago. They wanted to get headcount down. They offered an early retirement, but not enough people took it because the package wasn't great. So then they changed the work-from-home policy which had been in place for years and insisted everybody had to go back to an office. Problem was they had eliminated lots of offices as a previous cost-cutting measure, so many employees had no office anywhere near their home. HP said no exceptions - drive to an office, even if it's h
Re:Doesn't make money sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:HA! SHIP IS SINKING! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Mod parent comment to +10. (Score:2)
IBM == Is Badly Managed?
IBM == Ich Bin Mude. (German for "I am tired".)
IBM == Internal Bothersome Meddling?
IBM == Ich! Blah! Meh! ???
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Expensive and unreliable are the two first words that come to mind for IBM.
I've got enough : I don't want to work with IBM products anymore either.
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Their products aren't what they used to be, what products they even have left, but their professional services are still the best in the industry.
When people talk about IBM and services, that means professional services. When you're talking about IBM Passport Advantage that is end-user support for their enterprise software. That's the hand-holding that is included with the software product. That isn't what they're famous for. What they're famous for is their Professional Services; when you don't just licens
Re: HA! SHIP IS SINKING! (Score:2)
Uh...
Most expensive, perhaps. And, maybe there are tiers, where they hide the good people in the back room...
But from what I've seen, there is little to distinguish them from wipro.
And that is why wipro is dominating global corporate IT services.
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Right, professional services is who the IT guys call when they can't figure it out. They employees you're paying to have look at your problem are engineers, not IT drones.
Professional services, both people are engineers, the one calling for help and the one giving the help.
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I would have to disagree with you.....
The "professional services" have been severely lacking too in last years in dealing with them.
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they will have the attrition numbers they seek.
I wish them luck. The people that leave are the ones with the most marketable skills. The ones that hang on through all the bullshit are the fuck-ups who couldn't get work elsewhere.
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I'm not sure working from home is good for companies.
If you don't have to work at home to outsource your job to China.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/01/16/169528579/outsourced-employee-sends-own-job-to-china-surfs-web [npr.org]