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IBM, a Pioneer of Remote Work, Calls Workers Back to the Office
- Callmenorm 9y agoDidn't we have an article on HN last month that said IBM claims remote workers work harder and longer with more loyalty? We also had an article that said their marketing dept. was killing remote workers.
- drewg123 9y agoOne of them is likely https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291461
- alltakendamned 9y agoNon-paywall link?
- nandhp 9y agohttp://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/18/ibm-pioneer-remote-work-calls-workers-back-to-office.html http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/18/ibm-pioneer-r...
- crusso 9y agoThe normal trick of opening wsj articles in an incognito window is no longer working for me. Here's a link that worked for me: https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-thousands-of-employees-back-to-the-office/ https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-tho... Both WSJ article and the one I linked to are from March.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoOff topic to post, but it's fairly easy to track unique visitors outside of cookies.
- crusso 9y agoYou mean unique IP addresses?
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoAt work so I can't test it but I believe a twitter redirect will still get you past the paywall.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- T3RMINATED 9y agoOct 21, 2016 - "Working from home should be a rare occurrence to accommodate legitimate ... dismay as workers adjusted to the idea that they can no longer work from home. ... Clarifying Honeywell's "remote work policy to employees," Hamel said Honeywell too... Goodbye work from Home. Many will follow .
- Harkins 9y agoHospice recall? When an elderly loved one enters hospice and is unlikely to ever leave, all the family is called back in to gather for their death. Happened with Yahoo a couple years ago. I didn't realize IBM was doing so poorly.
- tome 9y agoWell, Warren Buffet just (partially) divested.
- jbob2000 9y agoThat's a great point! I tried out Bluemix and it was soooo bad! I was awestruck as to how a company as big as IBM could create something so hacked together. Amazon literally paved the way for cloud services, all they had to do was copy them. I mean, just visit the IBM website. Try to figure out what it is they actually do. It's ridiculous. I have no idea WTF any of their services are.
- krzyk 9y agoFirst they took free tea and coffee in the office (http://www.rediff.com/money/2009/apr/15bcrisis-no-more-free-tea-coffee-for-ibm-staff.htm http://www.rediff.com/money/2009/apr/15bcrisis-no-more-free-...) now they are taking away WFH. There are fewer and fewer incentives to work for IBM.
- misja111 9y agoTIL that some people chose to work at IBM because of the free tea and coffee
- jhall1468 9y agoThat's not what he said. The point was, IBM is taking away every fringe benefit, making them less competitive. Amazon is notorious for its frugality, but at the very least it offers free damn coffee. This is an argument of all things being equal. If IBM and Microsoft offer me the same package for the same job, but Microsoft offers me free coffee, I'll probably take the coffee.
- vorpalhex 9y agoDespite the fact that I usually bring my coffee from home, or go to a local shop, the fact that a company offers free coffee/snacks/etc matters from a perspective. If a company is going to nickel and dime you, charge you $0.25 for a coffee or force you to provide your own... they probably are going to be cheap in other places as well. If they aren't willing to give you coffee or seltzer, they are hardly going to give you good hardware or software - which is something that does affect me. That being said, that only goes so far. I don't really care about free lunches, or if a company has some game console. I mostly just don't want to work for a company that is going to nickel and dime me because it means they're cheapskates.
- throwanem 9y agoFree lunches are a startup-culture thing, for the most part. Game consoles, likewise. I don't need toys to play with at work, or my food paid for - I'm a grownup, and I can deal. Free coffee isn't really in the same realm. The most enterprisey places I've ever worked have still offered it, not because they felt like being sweethearts, but because it makes hard economic sense - people will drink coffee, and at modern professional salaries, having them spend their paid time dealing directly with all the ancillaries around it is quite literally more expensive than just buying coffee and maintaining the equipment involved. Dropping it is thus penny wise, pound foolish.
- codingdave 9y agoIBM is calling its marketing teams back into the offices. Not all remote workers. The marketing teams. At least as far as I, and the people I know who work at IBM, have heard.
- drewg123 9y agoPerhaps in this wave. However, I have an old friend who was recalled last year, and he was technical. He decided to quit, rather than to move.
- jbfr 9y agoDisclosure: I work for IBM on a team impacted by these changes. As far as I know multiple business units within IBM, including Cloud, Watson, and Watson IoT have gone through relocation requests for Design and Engineering roles.
- loukrazy 9y agoFormer IBM engineer here, can confirm this has been happening for many job roles over the last year in many divisions
- rtkwe 9y agoA lot of technical teams were given the same requests last year with more or less insistence depending on how much they wanted to retain people on particular projects.
- abtinf 9y agoI work for IBM. I can't comment on any specifics of this article or related matters. My statements reflect only my personal opinion and not those of IBM. I would only say that the scale of IBM operations dwarf other tech companies you might think of as "large", with a headcount around ~380k per the 2016 IBM annual report [1]. Making a concrete, sweeping statement about the values and policies concerning a collection of people this large is a fraught endeavor. Think about it this way, the population of Seattle (668k) within the same ballpark as IBM. If a friend of yours living in Seattle were to make a blanket statement about some aspect of Seattle, how much would you trust it? And even if your source was WSJ, how precise and to what portion of the population do you think a 900 word article could be relevant? And even if you yourself lived in Seattle, would you feel comfortable making blanket statements about the impact of even something as widely discussed/published as a new law or ordinance? [1] https://www.ibm.com/annualreport/2016/images/downloads/IBM-Annual-Report-2016.pdf https://www.ibm.com/annualreport/2016/images/downloads/IBM-A...
- blakesterz 9y ago"Companies began offering generous remote work policies because they expected large savings in office and real-estate costs, said Jennifer Glass, a University of Texas professor who studies telecommuting and advises companies on remote-work strategies. Those savings haven't materialized, Ms. Glass said, so workers are being called back to the office." How is that possible? For large companies in really expensive areas especially. "Relocating offices or asking employees to move can sometimes be read as layoffs in disguise, since a certain percentage of workers won't be able to relocate." That seems more likely to be the one of the biggest real reasons why they're doing this.
- nugget 9y ago> It’s unlikely that IBM employees, as they centralize in office hubs, will reap the lavish office benefits and constant supply of free gourmet food that companies like Facebook and Google use to keep employees on-site. They won’t even receive raises after moving to expensive cities like San Francisco and New York. If it's true that they won't offer any COL adjustment for folks headed to SF or NY, then that would support the view that it's meant to reduce headcount.
- loukrazy 9y agoThey do not offer COL adjustment. Also no guarantees that you will not have to subsequently relocate to another location
- brainopener 9y agoI used to know IBM'ers who said it stood for "I Be Moving"
- kps 9y agoI'm glad I live in a country where such a change would constitute constructive dismissal.
- priam 9y agoMy speculation is this is a way to make cuts without firing anyone
- fensterblick 9y agoWith IBM, one can't help but feel this is a tactic to force layoffs without having to actually do a layoff. I believe they tried similar tactics in their Global Business Services division in the mid-2000s.
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoOf course it's a layoff. It's the same thing yahoo did. When business are doing well they don't force their employees into impossible situations.
- hackunomatter 9y agoYahoo's policy affected about 180 people. That's about 1.5% of the company. Of those 180, about 60 were allowed to WFH. "Firing" 120 people in such a convoluted way is stupid. But the Internet continues to believe in stupider things, so who am I to ask.
- johnnyfaehell 9y agoDidn't Yahoo look at their VPN logs and notice people literally weren't doing any work?
- hackunomatter 9y agoYes. Most people forget these details and just hate on "Oh noes! Working from home was banned!!".
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sqeaky 9y agoWhy is "stupid" for businesses to attempt to coerce employees to quit rather than to fire them? Evil, or assholish sure, but I don't think its stupid. If they had layoffs they would have to deal with unemployment payments. They might have to deal with lawsuits. Dpending on laws they might even need to rehire some of them. They will certainly have higher short term expenses than if a bunch of people choose to leave. If they do get rid of a bunch of people who choose to leave they are also getting rid of people who least wanted to stay, which some might see as a benefit. I don't think this is a good way to decide but I have heard much more stupid logic than this.
- zachmax 9y agoI believe this is only for marketing teams
- davidgerard 9y agoBeen hearing about it happening to technical people I know, even when it's clearly bloody stupid.
- eesaitcho 9y agoIt happened to all tech folks in my group (IBM Analytics) about a year ago. I was remote, but got axed by an RA (layoff) before it took effect.
- zachmax 9y agoSorry to hear about that mate :/ Hope you're in a good situation now!
- Matt3o12_ 9y agoA lot of people said that they just use that to fire people but isn't that the most counterproductive to do so because most of the good people who do not have trouble finding another job will just quit while the desperate who need the job and cannot find anything comparable will most likely stay. So wouldn't this hurt the company a lot more in the long run since more talent will be gone and the less talented people will stay. Sure it will reduce the payroll expenses but they should be seeing less revenue rather quickly.
- chrisbennet 9y agoI don't think they really care about the long run. They are burning the furniture to keep warm at this point.
- Matt3o12_ 9y agoStill, should the investors get upset? Firing a selected group of people is one thing (which many investory see as good) but firing their best people does not sound very smart to them either (and I believe most of them are worried about the long term because they cannot just dump 100k in stocks without affecting their price too much).
- kevin_thibedeau 9y agoMBAs at work. Care only about the financials and never mind the institutional knowledge.
- dbg31415 9y agoSeems more PR-friendly than, "We are doing a round of layoffs..." Cheaper for them too, as they don't have to pay severance. This is all-around skeezy.
- sctb 9y agoRelated discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603831
- jondubois 9y agoHaving worked for both small startups and large corporations, I fully understand why remote work doesn't make sense for large companies. Large companies have a lot of trouble keeping track of what their employees are doing even when they are in the office. I've worked for a couple of large companies where some employees came into the office everyday but did essentially nothing and no one really cared. If those same employees had the opportunity to work remotely, then they might actually have fun on company time - They could even take up a second "full time job" which also allows them to do nothing and they would get two paychecks for doing nothing. It's actually not difficult to put yourself into a position within some big companies where everyone forgets you exist but you still get a paycheck. There are some big companies where employees make quotation signs with their fingers when saying the phrase 'He/she is "working from home" today' whilst chuckling among each other. For employees to be motivated to work from home, they need to be able to see clearly how their work affects the company and their career path - Unfortunately big companies don't offer enough accountability for this to happen.
- lovich 9y agoI can see where big companies are coming from with wanting the people they pay to do work, but if you can't tell if that's happening when they work remotely why would you be able to tell if its happening when they are in the office. The only thing they can tell accurately now is that people are in their cubes/seat/open office plan. They'd be better off coming up with some way to evaluate the output of their employees if this was really about that. However I am of the opinion that this is just layoffs with a different name, and that's why you don't see an effort to actually evaluate output.
- jondubois 9y agoIt's about incentives. If your employees know that they're stuck in the office all day, they have fewer options; their non-work activities are limited to browsing Facebook, reading blogs and looking at cat pictures - They can either do those things or actually do work. If they're at home they can play computer games, go out, watch a movie, etc...
- beezle 9y agoI've Been Moved