2009 IBM: Teleworking will save the WORLD! 2017 IBM: Get back to the office or else Remote working might be a dirty word among senior IBMers these days but it wasn't always so: teleworking, Big Blue once claimed, would help heal a global economy suffering aftershocks of the banking meltdown, and it might even play a part in planetary salvation. As El Reg exclusively revealed last week, IBM is following the …
The beatings will continue until moral improves.
It used to be everyone had their own office with a door. As a field engineer I had my own office. Then we moved to cubicles, then 2 or 3 to a cube with lower or no walls, then hot desks, and then, thankfully, remote from home with subsidized furniture, phone, and internet. Now it's remote and you pay for your own equipment.
IBM's new work requirement will change ...again. Hang in there for it. That is if they let you.
Tell of bastard deception. I worked for a company that use to repair all hardware for IBM. IBM use to do this internally but said this would be cheaper. So the fire all the staffers that did this work and brought my company in. After a year they said this was not working out fired my company brought. back in house. Except the techs the hired were paid less. I think this was a scam and that IBM had no intentions on keeping my company. This was just a way to get rid of senior people and cut wages.
pretty much every 2 - 4 years we have a change like this. I've worked at the same organisation for 20+ years and after a while you just learn to bob up and down on the current. Nothing actually changes in your job - you just do what you've always done. I'm currently contracted to work in an office. I don't have a desk, I'm expected to hot desk so instead I actually work from home like everyone else I work with. Like all of them I only go into the office once a month to use the printer, usually at weekends to print off multiple copies of the agenda for my local PTA meetings, posters for lost cats, garage sales etc. The important thing is that on the directory listing my working location is this particular office so whichever senior manager tasked himself (it's always a man) to get everyone working in office hubs can report that his initiative has worked and he gets his bonus and can put a couple more buz words on his CV. I don't care as long as I do a good job for my customers I'm happy. My boss doesn't care as long as I get the job done and keep out of his hair. His boss cares even less and the senior boss doesn't even know I exist - I'm just part of a three digit number in a cell on a spreadsheet that calculates his on-target bonus.
Projected move: Central London to King's Langley. Questionnaire sent round to see who would stay with the company. 80% said they would. Oops, King's Langley suddenly turned out ot be too expensive.
Actual move: Central London to Leeds. Hardly anyone stayed. Those who didn't included most of the top team whose idea it was and rumour had it that one of them still got a relocation package.
Bringing people together into larger and larger conurbations is not a good idea. It means longer commutes on average. It's unsustainable. Governments should be giving tax concessions or other encouragement to forms of distributed working, be it working from home, smaller local offices or whatever. They probably will but years later than they should.
@earl gray and AC
Just telling it like it is. I've been a reg reader for over a decade. In days past it was tech articles or articles that had something to do with tech. These days there are more and more articles that have absolutely NOTHING to do with tech. They are topical for sure and bear discussion. Just no on what is supposed to be a tech site.
The reply "Tech angle?" wasn't something that I made up, nor the IT? icon...
Most of us actually work in technology. While ultimately we only do it to get money to pay for things we spend a lot of our lives working, so the environment under which we do it is important to us.
That's why stuff like this matters. Globalisation matters. Brexit matters. Nutjobs in the white house matter. etc.
Teleworking is bullshit. You can't collaborate with a team over a shitty camera and email. You either beleave in innovation and get your arse to work or leave. Everyone I've ever known who WFH gets less than half done compared to those in the office - lots of activity and little of it really productive. Maybe the odd afternoon is cool. Remote 'working simply doesnt innovate.
I've found that it depends on the job. When I was a programmer, I was more productive in the office. That had a lot to do with living very close to the office and having my own desk but it was also because we spent a lot of time testing each others' code and discussing ideas. Ideas and innovation tend to spring into your mind when you're designing things and you need to discuss them when they're fresh.
In that respect I can sympathise to an extent with the motion that marketing folks may be better off working together, ulterior motives aside. (It's ironic but not entirely unsurprising that the head of marketing has made such a complete fucking mess of marketing this)
I have spent a lot of my career working as a pre-sales and post-sales techie. Going into the office means spending hours travelling to sit in the same room as other people who are doing other things. They tend to be on the phone a lot and this is incredibly distracting. It means I get nothing done. If I sit at home I get more done before 10AM than I do in the office. I do need regular meetings with colleagues to catch up, however.
The point is you're trying to pigeon hole everyone into your own personal situation. The reality is that different circumstances have different solutions.
Melissa Meyer had good reason to end telecommuting at Yahoo. She even checked the VPN logs and found that many people were not working at all.
Meg Whitman, on the other hand, killed off telecommuting just to thin the herd at HP without any need for severance packages. VPN service at HP was so high that they ran out of licenses on a regular basis until they switched solutions. I always got out of bed a little early so I could logon before those licenses were gone.
IBM staffers are probably in for worse if things go the way of HP/HPE. Whitman even had people going through our locations taking roll call at random and reporting results to all managers.
First it saved money to get people out of the offices, because of reduced real estate costs. Somehow now those don't matter (and one of their six "strategic" offices is in Manhattan!) and they claim getting everyone together will save money. It will, but only because a lot of people will quit.
But I'm sure they know that, and want it to happen. Then they can replace the older workers who can't/won't relocate due to family with cheap college graduates willing to relocate, and offshore workers.
Lets be honest - people working from home use work time to look after the kids, water the plants, take the car for a service and meet with friends for lunch. Unless you are really motivated - it is a productivity death spiral given all the distractions.
When working on projects, having to deal with fellow team members with crying kids, barking dogs and lawn mowers in the background, their inability to stay current with recent trends and lack of team work is infinitely irritating. Try and be agile with a dispersed team sitting in different time zones.
The idiots who came up with the home office for team workers had one target, to remove employee costs from the bottom line - none had productivity improvements on their minds.
Ok - Ill get my coat - its the one with the bus and train tickets in the pockets,
Ditto trying to find a quiet room in an office to hold a conference call, without shouty salesman sitting next to you. The only sound I have here is the sound of my fridge. Kids out the house at 7.30 means I start work at 7.30. I can also jump in the car, walk 10 mins to the train station, or take a 20 min cab ride to Heathrow to get to a customer if necessary.
Really don't get your lunch comment. Working at home means grabbing something from the fridge. Working in the office means going out to buy something. I usually go for lunch with colleagues or meet friends who work in the City when I go into the office. At home I work while I eat.
~ At least show a little more imagination Senior-Execs @ IBM and claim that its all good and necessary for 'new' Security practices etc.
~ Overall I'd love if workers silently organized and stopped going into work altogether, ignoring this stupid rule entirely.
~ If enough defied it, what could management do. They never do anything anyway. Plus they can't fire everyone overnight like 'Reagan'...
~ So teleworking turned out to be a flop for IBM. Wonder if the promise of AI putting people out of work will prove to be a flop in the next decade too???
Interesting reading all of the comments on this thread. Posting anonymously for obvious reasons but I have to say that I've seen absolutely no evidence of this in the UK. There has been no edict about locations and no discussion of it. I guess it's possible that there's something going on in the recesses of GTS or GBS, but nowhere else in the UK.
The CMO and CDO were hired from outside IBM and could not get a grasp on who does what where so they had HR pull the badge in records of their organizations and found many people never go into an IBM office. Since they came from consumer based small companies where everyone works "shoulder to shoulder" they decided everyone will need to come into the office. The finance people figured out they could get rid of all the age 40+ people who have families and unwilling to move and the board found a way to "hire" 25K millennials by having 35K 40+ people quit..
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