Technology

Just determined to lose talent.

They asked nicely. Then they abruptly started threatening termination. Keep in mind this is after they had to close a few offices when the regular employee RTO mandate resulted in a large amount of attrition.

So now there are people with 120+ mile round trip commutes because they live within the cutoff distance. Nearly all meetings are video calls anyway due to team members being scattered all over the world. When folks asked leadership why in a company-wide meeting months ago they basically said to suck it up.

This has morale pretty low, when it was already terrible even for folks that prefer in-person and live close. Some quit after the announcement. The brain drain is already causing an impact because there’s so much tribal knowledge and teams are silo’d as hell.

Never seen a company so out of touch or be so openly hostile to their workers. It’s just wild.

Fire me.

Sure seems like a great way to avoid severance in those places it's required.

Amazing how the companies that "care about employees" don't care so much these days...

Step 1: Enforce RTO mandates Step 2: Fire remote employees Step 3: Replace the fired folks with remote job positions, paying 10%-15% less.

What does IBM even do anymore?

When other companies in my city have tried this move it just means more really, really good talent hits the market to start filling open roles at my employer!

IBM amplified the death and destruction of the holocaust by assisting the nazis with a more efficient process to find Jewish people.

The Nazis made extensive use of Hollerith punch card and alphabetical accounting equipment and IBM's majority-owned German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag), supplied this equipment from the early 1930s. This equipment was critical to Nazi efforts to categorize citizens of both Germany and other nations that fell under Nazi control through ongoing censuses. This census data was used to facilitate the round-up of Jews and other targeted groups, and to catalog their movements through the machinery of the Holocaust, including internment in the concentration camps. Nazi concentration camps operated a Hollerith department called Hollerith Abteilung, which had IBM machines, including calculating and sorting machines.

The guy that ran the company through this period was named Watson - their AI offering today is named after him... the guy that greenlit the nazi stuff - This world is a fucking joke.

So they have to move to an office, any office?

Meaning they can no longer be remote but don't have to be in the same office as the people they manage?

That makes a lot of sense.

Cool, are they going to pay more, so people can move closer to the urban area where these offices presumably are? No? Then fuck off.

Why aren't tech workers unionizing when this shit happens?

IBM fucking around. Let's see if they find out.

"Why are we spending so much on data security and oversight?"

"What...? What the fuck are you asking...? Those are integral for our work."

"Can we reduce the need for added security measures by putting a physical layer in place? Like in the old days."

"No? Especially not while everybody works from home, ha ha ha... ha..."

"..."

"..."

Funnily enough I used to live very close to the office in the picture.

Such a low effort way to reduce payroll. It actually made me laugh. The position of "People Manager" has to come in to work, but I didn't see a mention of the managed. So the people manager can be at home, working remotely with their team, or they can be on site...working remotely with their team? I wonder how many years it's going to take for corporate American to realize times have changed. Or for some organized crackdown from the other side.

Have fun with the labor shortage, you're not dealing with a bootlicker generation, you're dealing with the no-notice quit generation