IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by rbetts » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 5:02 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #140

Finnucane wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the anti-DEI stuff is predicated on the idea that civil rights are bad and that white (straight dude) rule is good. There's not really any point in sugar-coating it or pretending the idea has any kind of intellectual or legal legitimacy. It is entirely driven by animus and resentment. The folks driving it aren't even hiding it.

This is classic ad hominem fallacy. I don't think I've seen such a great example in a long time

Uh huh.

> U.S. State Department hire Darren Beattie wrote on X: "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men."

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-darren-beattie-state...

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

#152

Post by dingnuts » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 5:04 PM UTC

Anon1096 wrote: post #148

jmward01 wrote: post #100

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 cha…

The American conception of diversity that looks for race and gender ends up grouping 60% of the world together as "Asian". These are regions of the world with vast cultural differences (the obvious because South VS East Asia) and even within countries someone from Beijing is vastly different from someone from Xinjiang. It's extremely western-biased to look at what's going on in DEI efforts and think that it in any wa…

"AAPI" is truly the epitome of a DEI term that is racist in exactly the way the ideology pretends not to be.

Really, you're going to group indigenous New Zealanders with Han Chinese as "one" racial group? Just to pick two very different groups at random. There are many absurd pairings that fit under "AAPI" and it's a parody of itself.

It's erasing these cultures to group them all under one constructed postmodern umbrella

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

#153

Post by acdha » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 5:04 PM UTC

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…

I think both problems are real, and your last paragraph really gets at why. People and jobs vary widely, and so does the quality of management. If you have a strong business and reasonably mature teams, you might not even realize problems with your management culture and practice are until something big changes; conversely, if you have strong managers you might have been able to soak up a lot of personnel and job issues before they got attention because some unappreciated middle managers put a lid on potential problems first.

In all cases, you really someone with time to look at the business as a whole to evaluate these things. For example, one of the things which has made RTO unproductive for many workers are open plan offices, which is a really easy problem to see and fix if workplace productivity is someone’s job but not if the RTO push is being driven by politics or the need to justify leases.

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

#154

Post by grandempire » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 5:05 PM UTC

dfxm12 wrote: post #136

jmward01 wrote: post #100

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 cha…

The biggest predication of anti-DEI stuff is white supremacy. Despite what they say, based on their actions, the best fit (or put another way, "merit") is clearly not a concern for the current US administration.

I think this is an online minority positions. There are a lot of well intentioned concerns which have nothing to do with “supremacy “

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

#155

Post by ghaff » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 5:07 PM UTC

MyPasswordSucks wrote: post #134

repiret wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Veering off topic, but this letter is in a variable width font. Were there typewriters that could do that? Was this so widely distributed that it was typeset on a printing press? The letterhead and body text aren’t aligned, so if it did go through a press it took two passes. The signature is also in ink, so that’s either a third pass for color, or an actual signature, and the letter doesn’t have the notation to indic…

> Veering off topic, but this letter is in a variable width font. Were there typewriters that could do that? Yes, and in fact one of the most popular was from IBM itself [1], released in 1944. > The letterhead and body text aren’t aligned, so if it did go through a press it took two passes. It was pretty standard practice to have pre-printed letterhead, hence the cachet of something being issued on "company letterhea…

Of course it was typed by a secretary. At a computer company I worked at starting in the mid 1980s it was not unheard of for some execs to have their admins print out emails for them and type in the handwritten responses. This was an internal-only system. No external email.

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

#156

Post by nelblu » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 5:09 PM UTC

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.

> Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up.

I took a new job in 2022, at that time everyone was still working from home. My boss, who was a VP at that time, said isn't this amazing? We save on fuel, time, spend more time at home etc. Productivity has been amazing and all.

Two years later in early 2024 when they started pushing RTO, same guy repeats the standard bullshit about - we need those sidebar conversations, we need to meet face to face and all. Not a single word of how it wastes fuel, or time etc.

I realized he was powerless against the corporate policies, but just his hypocrisy was enough for me to find another (100% remote) job.

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

#157

Post by bigmattystyles » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 5:09 PM UTC

dfxm12 wrote: post #136

jmward01 wrote: post #100

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 cha…

The biggest predication of anti-DEI stuff is white supremacy. Despite what they say, based on their actions, the best fit (or put another way, "merit") is clearly not a concern for the current US administration.

Furthermore, if these anti-DEI folks, whatever DEI means, think that people are hiring primarily based on some attribute rather than capability then it's fair to assume that if someone in any position is a straight, white, male they are there, not because they are qualified, but because they are straight, white, male. And from what I've seen, that's actually always been more of a problem than sourcing candidates from various populations.

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

#158

Post by freedomben » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

rbetts wrote: post #151

freedomben wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is classic ad hominem fallacy. I don't think I've seen such a great example in a long time

Uh huh. > U.S. State Department hire Darren Beattie wrote on X: "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men." https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-darren-beattie-state...

Yes, to be clear I'm not suggesting they have pure motives, nor am I suggesting they don't deserve the criticism. You are reading into my statement things that aren't there.

What I'm saying is that's irrelevant to the claim they are making. It is an ad hominem, which is a formal logical fallacy and has been for a very long time (going back well over 2,000 years)[1]. It didn't used to be controversial to say that ad hominem was a fallacy.

Are you disagreeing with me that the above is ad hominem? Or that ad hominem is a fallacy?

Wouldn't it be much better to just refute the claim instead of attack the person's motives? I.e. I think it's pretty damn easy to demonstrate that non white men have been great leaders who have gotten things to work. Refuting that claim is the non-fallacious approach and may actually convince someone honest (likely some third-party who is reading it later, you'll probably never convince the original speaker).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

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

#159

Post by ghaff » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

lexicality wrote: post #114

repiret wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Veering off topic, but this letter is in a variable width font. Were there typewriters that could do that? Was this so widely distributed that it was typeset on a printing press? The letterhead and body text aren’t aligned, so if it did go through a press it took two passes. The signature is also in ink, so that’s either a third pass for color, or an actual signature, and the letter doesn’t have the notation to indic…

IBM made a lot of very fancy typewriters so while I don't know what they had in 1953, one would assume that the president of the company would have access to the fanciest model they offered

Or his secretary would have :-)

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

#160

Post by CharlesW » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 5:13 PM UTC

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #143

CharlesW wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has IBM ever let moral or ethical standards get in the way of profit? 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 c…

If you have to go back 80 years to find something to complain about, I'd say it's not worth complaining about.

"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.co... ² https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/stat-ibms-watson-gave-un... ³ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/ibm-stirs-controversy-by...