IBM did a “back to the field” thing in the 1980s to encourage people to leave the various labs and join field teams. This was back in the no–layoffs era at IBM

IBM did a “back to the field” thing in the 1980s to encourage people to leave the various labs and join field teams. This was back in the no–layoffs era at IBM. About ten years later many of those people got caught out as IBM quickly downsized in 1993–1995. So this isn't the first time IBM has done this sort of thing. When I ran www.ibm.com we had a mix of local (NYC) and remote staff, mostly doing sysadmin tasks, not so much programming. Everyone hung out on our internal IRC channel. We'd do daily checkins and document everything that happened in a Notes db (ugly but the advantage that we could keep a reference copy on our laptops).