IBM, a Pioneer of Remote Work, Calls Workers Back to the Office

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-a-pioneer-of-remote-work-calls-workers-back-to-the-office-1495108802

by stephenhuey • 9 years ago

55 63 9 years ago

Callmenorm• 9 years ago

Didn'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.

drewg1232• 9 years ago

One of them is likely https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291461

alltakendamned• 9 years ago

Non-paywall link?

nandhp• 9 years ago

http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/18/ibm-pioneer-r...

crusso2• 9 years ago

The 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-tho...

Both WSJ article and the one I linked to are from March.

matt_wulfeck2• 9 years ago

Off topic to post, but it's fairly easy to track unique visitors outside of cookies.

crusso2• 9 years ago

You mean unique IP addresses?

frgtpsswrdlame• 9 years ago

At work so I can't test it but I believe a twitter redirect will still get you past the paywall.

Harkins• 9 years ago

Hospice 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.

tome2• 9 years ago

Well, Warren Buffet just (partially) divested.

jbob2000• 9 years ago

That'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.

krzyk2• 9 years ago

First they took free tea and coffee in the office (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• 9 years ago

TIL that some people chose to work at IBM because of the free tea and coffee

jhall1468• 9 years ago

That'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• 9 years ago

Despite 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.

throwanem2• 9 years ago

I won't (quite) outright refuse to work somewhere because they don't offer free coffee. But it's not a good sign they're somewhere I want to work, if they can't or won't manage table stakes.

krzyk2• 9 years ago

It's the other way around, if all other places offer that as a minimum, why go to a place that is "cheap" in such a way? What would be next, bring your own water or a power generator?

My first job after college was in a small company (now they call them startups) that had 5 people. We worked in an old building, had low end equipment, but we had free coffee and tea (and water).

It costs them next to nothing to have that basic "benefits", yearly it is probably much less then a single travel of any of their chief officers.

If they are so cheap, then they probably won't give you big money for your work (small pay increases, or none) also, for me it is a big warning sign: GET OUT.

ballenf• 9 years ago

At least as of 1990, at one large IBM location in the US there were regular vending stations for coffee and tea. Was <50 cents (20 cents, maybe) for a cup of "freshly brewed" coffee. You also needed exact change or lost the difference (the "exact change" light seemed perpetually on). Also there were ashtrays built in to the walls at regular intervals.

Don't know when they started giving away coffee, but it was tried for some years and then stopped apparently. Like remote working.

saltylicorice• 9 years ago

My IBM office didn't have free coffee in 2005.

taternuts• 9 years ago

Wow! I'd be seriously worried if my company yanked free coffee and tea. I guess on IBM's scale that turns out to be some real change, but I have to imagine the time spent leaving campus for coffee and all is more expensive overall.

hawski• 9 years ago

It reads like Warning Signs Of Corporate Doom [0]. In case of one company I worked for it was pretty spot on.

[0] http://wiki.c2.com/?WarningSignsOfCorporateDoom

codingdave• 9 years ago

IBM 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.

drewg1232• 9 years ago

Perhaps 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• 9 years ago

Disclosure: 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.

loukrazy2• 9 years ago

Former IBM engineer here, can confirm this has been happening for many job roles over the last year in many divisions

rtkwe• 9 years ago

A 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• 9 years ago

I 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-A...

blakesterz• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

loukrazy2• 9 years ago

They do not offer COL adjustment. Also no guarantees that you will not have to subsequently relocate to another location

kps• 9 years ago

I'm glad I live in a country where such a change would constitute constructive dismissal.

priam• 9 years ago

My speculation is this is a way to make cuts without firing anyone

fensterblick• 9 years ago

With 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_wulfeck2• 9 years ago

Of 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.

hackunomatter3• 9 years ago

Yahoo'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.

korzun• 9 years ago

They probably took a good look at the performance of people onsite vs. offsite and noticed an issue and decided to act on it.

I view this move as a life lesson since they will most likely do their best to retain remote workers that are in-line or above when it comes to performance.

The rest will need to figure out what they want to do; you can't cry about this if you did not pull your weight.

zachmax2• 9 years ago

I believe this is only for marketing teams

davidgerard• 9 years ago

Been hearing about it happening to technical people I know, even when it's clearly bloody stupid.

eesaitcho• 9 years ago

It 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.

zachmax2• 9 years ago

Sorry to hear about that mate :/ Hope you're in a good situation now!

Matt3o12_2• 9 years ago

A 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• 9 years ago

I don't think they really care about the long run. They are burning the furniture to keep warm at this point.

Matt3o12_2• 9 years ago

Still, 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• 9 years ago

MBAs at work. Care only about the financials and never mind the institutional knowledge.

dbg31415• 9 years ago

Seems 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• 9 years ago

Related discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291461

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603831

jondubois4• 9 years ago

Having 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.

lovich2• 9 years ago

I 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.

jondubois4• 9 years ago

It'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...

Spooky23• 9 years ago

For most workers, work from home works as long as you don't do it all of the time and never hire an asshole.

I've never seen a team with a big remote work culture that really worked unless it was part of the business where field ops make sense or when most time is interacting with customers.

beezle• 9 years ago

I've Been Moved

IBM, a Pioneer of Remote Work, Calls Workers Back to the Office

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