Thread regarding IBM layoffs

The Peter Principle:

Anything that works will be used in progressively more demanding applications until it eventually fails

@HEISALIARLIAR

Your post fits exactly what this Work At Home post was started from.

"I worked 80 hrs per week minimum remotely and most of it from home."

( How can you prove it? You could claim 150 hours and there is no way to prove it.)

"I was visible via Lotus Notes Instant messaging when working."

(Being logged on to Sametime offers no proof you are actually working, you could log on to Sametime and disappear for hours and no one would know.)

"My manager could clearly see when I was on, as my peers and coworkers."

( See above response, being logged on to Sametime offers no proof you are working.)

"The pressure was ALWAYS intense to produce and work insane amount of hours."

( Management always applied pressure to try to insure productivity.)

"I have never worked harder or longer hours at any company. "

( Did you ever think that maybe you were in over your head in your job? It's not uncommon to reach a point where you are no longer capable to do a job. It's called the Peter Principle.)

I worked 80 hrs per week minimum remotely and most of it from home.

I was visible via Lotus Notes Instant messaging when working.

My manager could clearly see when I was on, as my peers and coworkers.

The pressure was ALWAYS intense to produce and work insane amount of hours.

I have never worked harder or longer hours at any company.

The person who made this comment is either an IBM shill trying to put a good spin on an absolutely stupid decision, or they have never worked at IBM.

Interesting to read that everyone that worked from home and posted a response to the starter of this post indicated that they were busting their butt working from home.

Virtually everyone that worked at IBM, worked in a group setting, and everyone in those groups always claimed to be working their butts off doing their job.

Nobody ever claimed to be a coaster while the others were working hard. But if you asked individual group members about who was a hard worker and who was a coaster, everyone except the coasters knew who the slackers were.

@4vtm OUCH

Hey Hot Poker. Whatever, bro. Now go back to serving my fries.

Well dummy please understand 2 things,

1) myself and everyone I work with ended up putting in far more hours of work at home when IBM made the brilliant decision to close offices.

2) going back to an office is one thing, moving 1,000 miles to live near one of the 6 locations in the entire country is quite another. When we worked in offices, there were dozens in every major city and at least one in every small city, and many smaller towns.

Enjoy the unproductive time commuting in and commuting home. Enjoy the 7 am conference call that you'll have to take from the office now. Or maybe you can work in Armonk 4 days a week like everyone else there already does.

IBM has ruled on this:

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/smarter-workforce/2017/05/making-telework-work-insights-siop-2017/

One thing I notice in many of these posts are the unhappy employees that now have to report to a site or lose their job. They also claim that there are plenty of tech jobs out there and that they don't need IBM.

So, I say Prove it!

Show IBM that you don't have to put up with reporting to a site to work.

Talk is cheap, you are not going to change the current culture at IBM unless you develop some guts. With all these available tech jobs out there that pay more and have better benefits there shouldn't be a problem finding a job within a few weeks. Go for it!

More like the work from the office "scam"

Show up and sign on, then go and pick up breakfast, then sit and talk with coworkers.

Attend some lame meeting, then back to talking with coworkers or play with smartphone.

Go out to lunch. Come back and turn TV on to watch the ball game. (yes, turn on TV)

Go for long afternoon walk or some take 30 minute consecutive smoke breaks.

Guess what, its time to go home.

IBM is hemorrhaging money with the centers you dope. If someone is a bad worker you fire them.

You don't turn the clock back to 1995 thinking your bottom line will change. OMG, lmao at you

I used to work my butt off working from home. Nights, weekends, holidays, vacation, you name it. I was dedicated and motivated. But in the last few years, with everything that has happened, seeing highly skilled coworkers kicked overboard with no thanks, seeing the execs, especially Rometty looting the company and treating people like garbage, I definitely work as the one person described it. I'm just treading water and collecting a paycheck. When they finally cut me, I'll go work for a customer or competitor and regain my motivation, and make damn sure anything from IBM is removed and they gain no further footprint. Just about all of my coworkers feel the same, the ones that are left, anyway.

I spent 35 years with IBM and retired more than 5 years ago. My job was classified as Critical Site Support at one of the Major IBM Outsourcing Sites.

I was required to be on site every day, I was on call 24hrs a day and required to carry a pager and cellphone. My numbers were in Bluepages and I did NOT have the option of working from home.

My job required me to contact and coordinate with the Account Teams, Project Managers, Hardware Support, Software Support and Operations when a problem would arise.

Many of these people were work at home staff.

I experienced many of the problems as described by the 1st poster, BUT let me clarify that MOST of the work at home people were responsive and available when needed. But let me also say that probably 25% of these people did just what was listed in the original post. When you would have to contact this 25%, you would find out that their priority was doing their personal business over the business needs of IBM.

Co-location has had two goals -- provide soft layoffs without severance and try to emulate the success of startups like Slack through "shoulder-to-shoulder" collaboration. The first goal was achieved at tremendous cost since the best employees being forced to co-locate simply found other jobs where they lived. In the division where I work the Marketing function has just disappeared, gone, like they never existed. No one I know co-located to one of the absurdly expensive cities offered for co-location.

The second goal -- creating a startup culture -- is just idiocy for a company like IBM that hasn't the salary, benefits, perks, or catchet of a Slack, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc. The former CIO of IBM, Jeff Smith, a leader in the co-location effort, has already left IBM and dollars to donuts Michelle Peluso and Bob Lord, the other co-location proponents, will have moved on within a year.

The co-location decision wasn't thought through. It's just one more non-evidence based idea that short term IBMers managed to sell to Ginny as a panacea for the company's ills.

(Oh, and I work much longer and harder from home than I ever did in the office. Anyone who thinks IBMers slack off while working from home doesn't have a clue. And I've been in management a long time.)

I agree with the original poster on some aspects. I know some IBMers who logged onto Sametime but were away from their desks for prolonged periods during working hours. On numerous occasions I would send a Sametime message to someone working from home and it would go unanswered for hours on end, if at all. I know one person at the Montreal A/R office who placed her Sametime status at "In a Meeting" or "Do Not Disturb" throughout the day for years and years and I wouldn't be surprised if she was probably running errands or doing other personal tasks when she should be working.

But we cannot generalize all work-from-home IBMers in this way. The majority of IBMers are industrious and hard-working. They have numbers to meet and targets to attain. At IBM as with all companies you will have productive employees but you also have slackers. It's like that at all companies.

If anyone forced back to the office does a second of work outside business hours they are stupid

And what "experience" is that? Did you work at IBM? Did you visit the employees at their home offices to check up on them? Where did you acquire such vast knowledge?

I agree with the original poster, in my experience many IBM work at home employees were playing the system against IBM for their own gains.

It appears that some of these people disputing that, either were some of the few that actually did productive things at home or are the scammers that now have to actually show up to work and prove that they are working.

You obviously never worked at an IBM office - or maybe anywhere at all. Time wasters are time wasters wherever they are and they always have ways of avoiding work. Hard workers are hard workers wherever they are and they always excel.

You have no idea what you're talking about. By working from home I don't lose an hour a day getting s---ed into useless chats. I don't have to put up with the distractions of an an officemate. I can do actual work during those boring meetings they make us listen to. I don't have to come and go according to the commuter traffic pattern. Lunch is a 10-minute trip to the kitchen instead of an hour in the cafeteria. And on, and on. Some people can't handle working from home and that's fine, but for the rest of us, IBM is getting a bargain they don't even begin to appreciate.

Wow!! Speaking as a partner of an IBM'er who works from home I can only WISH that my mate would take company time to accompany me while I take the car in for repair or shop for some obscure plumbing part so he can fix the leak under the sink on the weekend!

I'm sure there are people out there who see home based work as a way to screw the system but in my 35 years of meeting IBM employees I have observed for the most part nothing less that earnest, diligent folks who bleed blue.

Poor English skills and a childish, spiteful tone. I doubt whoever wrote this has the intelligence or skill to work autonomously and be self-motivated. Instead, he/she resorts to banal stereotyping with comments that more reflect their own work ethos and attitude.

As others have said, working from home blurs the home/work boundaries and invariably leads to longer working days and infinitely more achieved than would be in a noisy office.

Ginni, was that your post?

Sitting in a office does not mean productivity. Going to the office means more interruptions and less focus. If you have someone at home not working, they will tend to do the same at the office.

Sounds like the useless troll with the poor work ethic was caught in the act and got RA'd.. All I can say is I got a lot more done when working from home. I would average 11-12 hour days because I was not stuck in traffic twice a day, could work late at night if I needed to and get back at it in the morning. But now that I have to report to an office everyday all IBM gets is 8 hours no more, no less. If the project does not get completed I no longer stress out about it, can only do so much in 8 hours. I guess the one positive thing for me that has come out of it is I have more free time and I'm using it to find another job with a company that values their employees.

Nice post troll, were you stalking these people? You seem to know a lot about there person lives.

Wow, I've been totally doing it wrong. I've worked at home via IBM for 16 years now. I get up every morning at 6am and before I even hit the bathroom I boot my laptop. I'm at it all day, usually heading to the kitchen to make a sandwich (instead of driving to an hour long lunch as I would if I was in the office) and back at it.

I'm generally working until around 6pm, then dinner. Throughout the night, I'm always stopping by the laptop to check for new email and keep up so I'm not deluged in the morning. This also includes weekends - not up quite as early, but the laptop is always on and significant time spent on it. That's what my peers do to - I know because if I have a question, I can usually see them on sametime (now slack) at nights and weekends and they are responsive if I ask questions.

When I was on the world-wide team, I was always on conf calls throughout the evening to compensate for the time difference. I still had to work my 'day' hours because I'm US based.

I'm not bragging, this is simply how it is. I'm no fan of IBM, in fact just as hateful these days as everyone else. But work at home is definitely a huge bonus for the company, not to mention we pay for our own internet costs, printers, ink, paper, coffee, etc.

Agree with the first reply, I have same experience (and back). The person who started the thread was obviously writing about themselves !

Simply not what I experienced with 99% of IBMers. Calls with Asia and Europe, back to back "cadence" calls, transparent deliverables and tools, understaffing, constant transformation and high performance targets ensured I often didn't move from chair from early until late or break for lunch until mid afternoon. Have the back problems to show for it. Far more "productive" than commuting several hours per day to an office.