15 ms·

IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

• xyst 2y ago
  Surprising that IBM still generates _new_ sales and has a dedicated sales workforce. Must be hard to generate new sales for their deadass mainframe tech.
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    They are one of the larger MSPs globally, they own RedHat and Hashicorp, SPSS is the backbone of the global logistics industry, and IBM Cloud does have decent traction in the financial services and logistics space.
  • kube-system 2y ago
    IBM makes money selling mainframes like Microsoft makes money selling boxed copies of Windows. They're mostly making money doing other stuff.
  • bluedino 2y ago
    We're still buying tons of things from IBM. Storage, Linux, automation, data analytics... Part of it is the old guard saying "Let's see what IBM has" when we're looking for solutions, but they do provide a pretty large group of established products. They're already in, as well.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• josefritzishere 2y ago
  Sounds like IBM is going to have a bad year. I should probably dump that stock.
  • bravetraveler 2y ago
    They're pretty cozy with Uncle Sam, take that for what you will...
    • mindslight 2y ago
      There are a lot more competing options to run the "census" systems this time around though.
    • jerlam 2y ago
      Except the US government has been canceling contracts left and right.
      • bravetraveler 2y ago
        Doing things and then undoing things, I care not to waste time on predictions. Corruption is as corruption does. Spend a little cash, have a dinner, get favor. Or something. They want to save downtown... because downtown made a bet.
• givemeethekeys 2y ago
  The general reasoning given by a lot of these companies is that WFH did not work. Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up. I think they are looking for scapegoats for some cost cutting. Officially force people back and hopefully some will quit. In practice, many will continue to operate as before.
  • scarface_74 2y ago
    Of course they are. It makes no sense for sales roles to be in an office for “collaboration”.
  • foobiekr 2y ago
    I work for a company that made a big deal about how well it worked. The CEO and chief people officer both made a lot of public statements about it, during and just after covid. They did this claiming they had the numbers to back it up and said numbers but they basically made them up. It was PR and they were using it to aid recruiting into what was and is a company that young people avoided. What numbers they did have were mostly inertia and a side effect of lockdowns (people had little else to do); new projects and new teams floundered very visibly. Internally, it was very clear that it did not work. The numbers were massaged to back up the executive leaders, but everyone was pretty clear what was going on, and even the exec leaders, in leader-only meetings, did eventually admit that it was "more nuanced" initially to "does not work" internally. The company has since moved away sharply from remote employees. It's still not full-on RTO, but it's edging toward it. I'm not saying this is everyone, but I think people should really take the 2020-2023 rise in remote and the narrative around it with a grain of salt. Most of the companies that championed it have reverted, and they aren't doing that because bosses are control freaks.
    • tempest_ 2y ago
      This often just feels like bad management. They go remote, but don't change a lot of other things or attempt to mitigate the downsides (there are downsides, everything is a trade off) and then claim its a failure when they need a stealth layoff. Also IBM has a long history of "Resource Actions" so this type of thing is not all unexpected from them.
• mullingitover 2y ago
  IBM of course has a long and uh, colorful history when it comes to complying with government programs violently opposed to diversity. Must’ve invoked a lot of nostalgia for them seeing Musk’s inauguration speech.
  • fazeirony 2y ago
    let's be more direct and truthful - ibm directly aided the third reich in their despicable actions. full stop.
    • SalmonSnarker 2y ago
      in kindness to the previous poster, they are being as direct and truthful as one can be on a platform that has tilted hard to the right in the past 5 years and where discussion of the alluded-to-salute is flagged [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42774621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42774621
      • arionhardison 2y ago
        It’s striking how corporate complicity in systematic oppression can be sanitized over time until egregious patterns only resurface as political talking points.
    • frankus 2y ago
      I attended a talk given by a local author who wrote a book about his father being the first black software engineer at IBM, who joined with several women around 1950, and the gist was that it was mostly to take some heat off of them for this collaboration.
• jmclnx 2y ago
  IBM will use any excuse to justify firing people over 50 years old. So "DEI purge" is just an excuse, nothing more. Everyone I know there knows this was coming after Nov 2024. IBM just wants to hide the number and age of the people being fired.
  • x86_64Ubuntu 2y ago
    Yeah they kind of got burned by the "dinobabies" comment from a while back.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • eYrKEC2 2y ago
    Their previous excuse was "AI is so awesome, we've automated away the jobs"
• jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Awful. I hope Red Hat is escaping the tightening gauntlet on this misdeed.
  • eikenberry 2y ago
    I also wonder about how they are going to manage Hashicorp, a fully remote remote company.
  • Mountain_Skies 2y ago
    Red Hat is involved with a lawsuit alleging that they used illegal criteria to discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, and sex in hiring and layoffs. Until that is settled one way or the other, Red Hat is a potential liability to its parent company. The most likely path is status quo so if doesn't look like IBM is punishing nor rewarding Red Hat for the situation.
• throwaway5752 2y ago
  Posted without further comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
• panzagl 2y ago
  You know, even if you hired a protected class because of DEI fashion, that doesn't mean you can fire them just because the fashion has changed. The laws protecting them are still there, and I would think announcing "we're getting rid of DEI hires" would be giving a labor lawyer a discrimination case on a plate.
  • mikeyouse 2y ago
    I think it's more they're gutting the DEI programs rather than the hires - many large companies have some variant of "reach out and hold campus events at HBCUs" or "sponsor a booth at a Girls who Code conference" which are suddenly mortal sins in the eyes of the people doling out Federal procurement contracts.
  • sidewndr46 2y ago
    This is sort of like saying "IBM can't create a program designed to specifically prefer H-1Bs". They can't. They have had to pay tens of thousands of dollars in associated fees due to those illegal acts. They've also had to promise not do it again. Which they have. They paid those fines, again when caught doing the thing they can't do because it's illegal.
  • Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
    But the case won't get heard because the entire NLRB is frozen up. The dept of justice also won't hear these cases. So it doesn't even matter how blatant the violation is if there is no enforcement.
  • rdtsc 2y ago
    They would just say you’re reassigned to the Alaska office. You’re expected to work there 3 days a week starting October or something. See, they didn’t fire them! They just resigned under their own accord. /s
    • bufferoverflow 2y ago
      No, that would be constructive dismissal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal
• angelgonzales 2y ago
  Within the last half decade it appears like IBM overtly markets to whatever administration and party is in power, a few years ago they were marketing creepy vaccine passports [1]. [1] https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/vaccine-passport https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/vaccine-passport
  • CharlesW 2y ago
    Has IBM ever let moral or ethical standards get in the way of profit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust "…Black outlined the key role of IBM's technology in the Holocaust genocide committed by the German Nazi regime, by facilitating the regime's generation and tabulation of punch cards for national census data, military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity."
    • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
      If you have to go back 80 years to find something to complain about, I'd say it's not worth complaining about.
      • CharlesW 2y ago
        "That One Time It Powered a Genocide" is just an older example of how IBM is happy to put profit over principles. They have a long history that includes happily selling to authoritarian regimes¹, knowingly selling technology that doesn't work², commercializing biometric data without consent³, age discrimination, and more. ¹ http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.comp.html http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.co... ² https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/stat-ibms-watson-gave-unsafe-and-incorrect-cancer-treatment-advice/528666/ https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/stat-ibms-watson-gave-un... ³ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/ibm-stirs-controversy-by-sharing-photos-for-ai-facial-recognition/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/ibm-stirs-controversy-by...
        • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
• hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  I am curious if anyone can find the text for "IBM's Policy Letter #4" written by IBM's chairman in 1953, which is referenced in this article. I did some searching but all the links I found to the full text were broken. I ask because I think it shows what a Rorschach test the arguments over DEI have become. I at least found one quote from the Policy Letter #4 which stated "It is the policy of this organization to hire people who have the personality, talent and background necessary to fill a given job, regardless of race, color or creed." Of course, in 1953 that was a pretty bold stance given the widespread official segregation policies in the Southern US at the time. Now, though, it feel like how you view that statement depends on which "tribe" you align with in the DEI debate: Anti-DEI folks say "Exactly, we want to hire people based on merit regardless of race, color or creed, and DEI has basically turned into a policy of racial quotas" while pro-DEI folks say "The policy back then was to fight official and systemic racism, which we still need to combat today." So I'd just like to find the full original policy document so I can make up my own mind.
  • easterncalculus 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • eastbound 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • colechristensen 2y ago
        Are you being serious?
        • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
          I think they are: the sociological definition of a minority is a member of a class which is socially disadvantaged (sociologists talk about women as minorities for this reason) and a sociological "-ism" (racism, sexism) is policy or decisions which disadvantage the socially disadvantaged. Presuming that position, it's understandable that they further believe that not favoring the disadvantaged is continuing the status quo, which is a disadvantage to the already-disadvantaged, hence the sociological "-ism".
• ramesh31 2y ago
  >"DEI Purge" What in the actual fuck is that supposed to mean? Firing black people to make the president happy? As if there were any meaningful amount of "DEI" to "purge" from the tech industry in the first place. Absolutely disgusting.
  • pitaj 2y ago
    It typically just means gutting DEI programs, not firing people hired because of them.
    • ramesh31 2y ago
      >It typically just means gutting DEI programs, not firing people hired because of them. And who do you think is running those programs?
      • foobiekr 2y ago
        Why do you think "DEI people" are running DEI programs?
• alephnerd 2y ago
  > On Tuesday, Big Blue shared new rules on where it expects its US sales staff to work: At least three days a week at a client, a flagship office, or a sales hub. > And the mainframe giant last week told all US Cloud employees, sales or otherwise, to return to the office at least three days per week at designated "strategic" locations. Yep. It's a de facto layoff. Smart of them to add the DEI statement - as we can see here, everyone is arguing over that while ignoring what is essentially a mass layoff.
  • daheza 2y ago
    My company did the same thing - come to the office 3x per week. We came in to the office to find monitors that were old pre-covid. No office supplies (tissues, mouse pads, batteries, keyboards) Expired food and beverages from pre-covid No desks for my teammembers The work environment was also much worse than before. Now you get to overhear the executives bragging about their new cars, the golfing trips they are taking while trying to focus on your work. You have folks taking calls from there desk without even using a headset. My team productivity has gone down the drain. The business pre-covid was 90% US engineers and during covid we offshored most of everything to india. Now how am I supposed to get my team to have calls with india at early morning and evenings when we are forced to spend an hour just driving to the office.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • ghaff 2y ago
    Note that a lot of”IBM’s” cloud employees are actually at Red Hat, which I’m guessing though I don’t actually know, are not affected by this assuming it’s true.
• femiagbabiaka 2y ago
  I'm super skeptical of this article, particularly the inclusion of the phrase "DEI purge", which I cannot find attributed to a single quote in the article. There's a memo from CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux that is quoted from, but not linked to, and the memo itself seems like a pretty anodyne statement that doesn't allude to any "DEI purge" or even DEI related firings, even if it is hypocritical[1]. 1: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nickle-lamoreaux_dei-diversity-inclusion-activity-6930225406239285248-x7yN/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nickle-lamoreaux_dei-diversit...
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • conductr 2y ago
    There's a whole section of the article titled "DEI'ing inside" where they explain some tactics that fit the bill. Of course nobody said the phrase "DEI purge", that's the author summarizing it for a headline. I'm not really taking a stand on whether it's accurate or click/rage-bait, just saying this is standard writing style to summarize things into themes and it appears they have the content to back it up in the article, it shouldn't need to be a direct quote.
    • femiagbabiaka 2y ago
      No, it's misleading: > IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge Because the rest of the items in the headline are labor related, the implication is that "DEI" is getting fired, whatever that means. People in this comment section who did not read TFA are commenting on "DEI" firings, even though there's nothing in TFA about that. It's a little worse than clickbait IMO.
      • Angostura 2y ago
        > related, the implication is that "DEI" is getting fired, No. the implication is that DEI policies are being watered down or removed
• zanfr 2y ago
  As a European who used to go "fuck yeah Intel!" "fuck yeah Boeing!" "fuck yeah IBM!" etc... it seems like US companies are going down the drain real fast. I blame bad management, lack of innovation, poor quality control and of course, general greed... In this case it is bad management hiding behind RTO/DEI excuses. WFH works for many and especially on "cloud" stuff I do not see the point of having people systematically RTO to... tweak a few config files (most of the time) or change some hardware (some of the time) I have the example of a friend in IT who was made to drive 4 hours to change.... the default DNS on a Windows machine at a client's.... a phone call would have done it...
  • oldpersonintx 2y ago
    [dead]
  • black_13 2y ago
    [dead]
• sambull 2y ago
  Since they seem to just go with the wind of what people want, I'm sure they are itching on building some AI to detect and classify woke
• jonfw 2y ago
  > And the mainframe giant last week told all US Cloud employees, sales or otherwise, to return to the office at least three days per week at designated "strategic" locations. This statement is not true
• tims33 2y ago
  “Cloud”
• marcusb 2y ago
  At least as described by the OP, I have a hard time believing IBM is doing this. There are a whole bunch of markets -- far more than they listed in their flagship/hub site list -- where a vendor like IBM would have a several - a few dozen dedicated teams that just serve local clients. Now, in a lot of cases (but by no means all) the sales engineers can get badged at their customers and spend a few days a week onsite. While not unheard of, especially at the largest shops, its less common for the account managers to be badged and have unfettered access. That said, I've never worked at IBM, and the sales segments they listed in the article (strategic, enterprise, etc.) are notoriously company-specific. But, I can't imagine the ones in the exception list cover all of teams with named accounts. Deliberately placing your sales teams in different cities than their clients is almost always an incredibly dumb idea, WFH or not. In 15 years of sales engineering/sales engineering management, I remember exactly one account team we deliberately placed outside of their client geography, and that was because the client was so spread out, it made more sense to put the team close to a big airport than pick a single client site to place them near. edit - I’m talking about dedicated/assigned teams, not inside sales or startups that have one or a handful of teams to cover everything.
• mystraline 2y ago
  Getting rid of DEI is par for the course with the trump administration. How else would they handle the database and personnel backend of the current fascist's database requirements? Jewish Holocaust victims' tattoos were IBM database primary IDs. and given ongoing federal/government contracting, thus is yet another opportunity to be at ground zero for another genocide.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Of all the RTO orders, part of this at least makes sense. If you're in sales, it's beneficial to be close to your clients. But if you're working on cloud, hard to see how working at the office is any more productive than from home. also, this is significant: > The employee shuffling has been accompanied by rolling layoffs in the US, but hiring in India – there are at least 10x as many open IBM jobs in India as there are in any other IBM location, according to the corporation's career listings. And earlier this week, IBM said it "is setting up a new software lab in Lucknow," India.
  • fred_is_fred 2y ago
    It's not that complicated. If you fire all the 35-60 year olds you get sued. However, if you tell everyone ages 20-60 that they have to move, you will get a disproportionate number of people 35-60 refusing to move - and it's legal. They have kids in school, they are married, they have a house, etc. They are also making more money. Telling teams to RTO especially to move to do so is one of the simplest cost saving tricks any tech company has.
• jmward01 2y ago
  The anit-DEI stuff is predicated on an idea that there is a clear known 'best fit' for a position and it shouldn't take into account X, whatever X is. The problem is always this, nobody actually knows what a best fit really is. Nature shows us that one trait leads to longer term survival, diversity. When you think you know the traits that pick most suitable and exclude other traits then you are getting rid of the chance to find something you didn't know about. Diversity is a key ingredient in long term health and survival. The challenge though is that diversity naturally creates a certain amount of dissonance simply because you are now getting what you didn't expect. This is a feature, not a bug, so building for it is critical. A hiring policy that seeks out diversity and injects it in, in the long term, will lead to a stronger, healthier company.
  • cynicalpeace 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • Etheryte 2y ago
    To play the devil's advocate, how do we know this carries over to business? If this was the case, it should have a track record at this point, since DEI has been a topic for a long time. Looking at comparable companies where one did do DEI and the other didn't, did one or the other have a statistically significant edge over the other? I have no idea, but I'm far from convinced purely from a reasoning stand point.
    • pjc50 2y ago
      The current example is Target vs Costco. (Because of a black pastor-led boycott of Target for dropping their DEI policy)
      • dboreham 2y ago
        Personal experience is that Costco foot traffic has been visibly increased in recent weeks. Our Costco has a few colorful members of staff, which I personally find makes my visits there more pleasant.
• sidewndr46 2y ago
  I guess all of sales will be moving to Delaware since all of IBM's customer's are incorporated there.
• mathattack 2y ago
  IBM is long past innovation, and is in the license audit and share buyback business. Age bias lawsuit: https://www.cohenmilstein.com/fired-ibm-workers-wrap-up-age-bias-lawsuit-with-co/ https://www.cohenmilstein.com/fired-ibm-workers-wrap-up-age-... IBM audit: https://itaa.com/insights/ibm-audits-lessons-learnt-cimino-ibm-irs-court-case/ https://itaa.com/insights/ibm-audits-lessons-learnt-cimino-i...
• mdhb 2y ago
  So this is IBM siding with the Nazis for a second time around now it seems? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
• dudeinhawaii 2y ago
  Large corporations aren't demonstrably harmed by DEI initiatives, yet all hiring processes should be merit-based. Encouraging more women in engineering is a reasonable goal, but lowering qualification standards would be problematic. Throughout my career, I've never observed standards being lowered for diversity candidates—though I've witnessed DEI being wrongly blamed when underperformers are terminated. What I have consistently seen is hiring standards fluctuating based on company performance: loosening when profits are high, tightening when they're not. The most pervasive bias in hiring isn't DEI-related but rather social network preference, where managers favor friends, neighbors, or people similar to themselves regardless of qualifications. This mirrors the "backdoor" admissions seen at elite universities and extends to government appointments, where connections often appear to outweigh merit...
• jduonfiji 2y ago
  [flagged]
• Hobadee 2y ago
  I really don't mind RTO. As a mostly-remote worker right now, I would actually prefer a few office days each week; being right next to colleagues and able to spitball news, ideas, and other work (and non-work) stuff is great for my knowledge, abilities, and morale. With that being said, It's also nice to be able to get uninterrupted heads-down time, or just work at my own pace at home some times. I think 3 days in-office and 2 days WFH is the sweet spot, at least for me.
  • anon6362 2y ago
    Don't fall for the commute hype. Get a life that doesn't living at work or require sitting in traffic to fulfill the whims of management control-freaks.
  • hackable_sand 2y ago
    > able to spitball news, ideas, and other work (and non-work) stuff ... you can do this from home too
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  What does IBM do?
• EasyMark 2y ago
  Living up to their memory as not being averse to supporting Nazis before WW2 finally broke out.
• notepad0x90 2y ago
  Just thinking out loud here, are they not worried about class action lawsuits. Maybe they think the courts and jury trial is on their side, but if the 2028 election doesn't go towards the current admin's side, then won't there be massive lawsuits? It's not like IBM is a stranger to that either way. What's the risk calculus here? If I were an apathetic CEO who just cares about the bottom-line, I would wait for the government to at least publicly pressure the company before bending the knee. That way, the company is insulated from lawsuits to a degree, "coercion" could be the defense. It's almost like they're eager to promote racism now lol.