41–50 of 68 posts
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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.
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.
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.
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TIL that some people chose to work at IBM because of the free tea and coffee
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…
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> 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 sup…
They do not offer COL adjustment. Also no guarantees that you will not have to subsequently relocate to another location
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.
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.
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...
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 w…