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

theregister.com

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

#71

Post by totalkikedeath »

throwaway382736 wrote: post #69
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #21

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…

I've observed the people who are very anti-DEI will change their talking points when they are competing with Asians and Indians. Suddenly they start espousing DEI principles and emphasize how it's important to find a more "well rounded" individual.

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

#72

Post by black_13 »

zanfr wrote: post #49

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 systematical…

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

#73

Post by frankus »

fazeirony wrote: post #34
mullingitover wrote: post #6

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.

let's be more direct and truthful - ibm directly aided the third reich in their despicable actions. full stop.

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.

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

#74

Post by marcusb »

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.

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

#75

Post by [deleted] »

daheza wrote: post #52
alephnerd wrote: post #37

> 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 se…

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 takin…

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by toomuchtodo »

jlarocco wrote: post #66
givemeethekeys wrote: post #4

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.

Having worked at a fully remote company before (and during) COVID, I'm surprised so many companies have stuck with it for so long. IME, remote work works best when everybody in the company buys into it and there's an effort to make it run smoothly. Conversations in chat, always online meetings, etc. Considering most companies were forced into remote work by a pandemic with no planning or anything, it's surprising it'…

Easier to force people back versus fix bad management, because bad management is everywhere.

(there is $120B+ in remote enterprise market cap as of this comment, anyone saying it doesn't work is not accurately representing the situation; it might not work for them because they are unwilling to make it work, but the evidence is clear it can work, does work, and did work during the pandemic)

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

#77

Post by missedthecue »

martinald wrote: post #17
tempest_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know if it's bad management per se. I think some people are very well suited for remote; some people aren't. Probably a rough extension of introversion/extroversion in the people mix. If you take a bunch of very extroverted people and have them all work remotely they will not have a good time (in general). Equally; if you take a bunch of very introverted people and have them in an office they'll really not li…

yeah I feel like blaming management is like blaming teachers when students got bad scores during remote-schooling. You can give them all the resources they need to succeed, but if they'd rather go to the dog park in the middle of the day, there's not much that can be done.

Meanwhile, it's worth noting that some students excelled at remote schooling. But most are reading at a level 3 grades behind.

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

#78

Post by MyPasswordSucks »

zanfr wrote: post #38
foobiekr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

after covid is an illusion, there is no such thing as "after" for an ongoing pandemic.... and the company you work for seems rather incompetent

> after covid is an illusion, there is no such thing as "after" for an ongoing pandemic....

The US death rate from Covid in Q4 2023 (so, pre-Trump II) is roughly the same as the US death rate from influenza. 14.9 or 16.8 deaths per 100,000 for Covid (first number is 12 months ending with Q4 2023, second number is the three month rolling window), 13.5 or 15.1 deaths per 100,000 for influenza.

"After covid" is a perfectly fine description of the current state of affairs.

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

#79

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

andsoitis wrote: post #32
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're bending the knee. The CEO class loves their own freedom to move about at will but hates the idea that workers have the right to just NOT be in the office. Trump, Musk, and Ramiswamy were all ultra-gung ho about ensuring that as many people with federal jobs were as miserable as possible.

> The CEO class loves their own freedom to move about at will but hates the idea that workers have the right to just NOT be in the office. I don’t know that that is a reasonable take. More appropriate would be to acknowledge that different roles have different needs, depending on who you collaborate with, etc.

> different roles have different needs, depending on who you collaborate with, etc.

At one FAANG company where the CEO is pushing for RTO, it's mandatory regardless of whether all of the people you collaborate with are in other offices across the country, and your manager has no power to offer an exemption even when they fully agree that there's no reason for you to be at the office.

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

#80

Post by femiagbabiaka »

conductr wrote: post #67
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #42

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.c…

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 art…

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.

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