IBM has decided to co-locate its US marketing department

<i>A theory among some employees is that IBM is using co-location as a downsizing effort.</i><p>I hope it&#x27;s not an accurate theory. Downsizing this way means your most self-motivated, productive employees are likely to leave long before those who drive to the office because they feel they have no other choice.<p><i>Like Best Buy and Yahoo at the points at which they decided to co-locate, IBM is a business that needs to do something new.</i><p>Our businesses are shrinking, so let&#x27;s try something new: make our employees less productive.<p>Despite the positive spin the writer puts on the plan, to me it seems like the death throes of past-their-prime companies.<p>And based on what others have said in these comments, the change is mostly affecting marketing employees.<p>I&#x27;d say co-location is a pet tactic of the writer, without any real evidence that remote work is anything but progress.<p>If a job can be done remotely, it should be done remotely.

Disclosure: I&#x27;m a developer at IBM, but not speaking in official capacity. The comment here is completely personal.<p>I went through this article and it seems like a lot of FUD. The line to note is:<p>&gt; Though not every department at IBM will be asked to colocate, many will.<p>So yes, some departments have been &quot;asked&quot; to colocate. However, AFAIK nobody is being &quot;forced&quot;. My team lead was asked to colocate but decided to stay where they are because of personal reasons (family).<p>Speaking generally, I&#x27;ve had incredibly flexible hours, more so than at any other place I&#x27;ve worked so far (and I have worked at some of the &quot;hip&quot; places).<p>Anyways, the headline itself seems truly sensationalist.

&#x2F;IBM employee rant begin<p>To me, the fact that IBM has for years encouraged remote work, been affirmatively OK with people moving hundreds, even thousands of miles from their nearest co-location center to then yanking this policy and forcing employees to decide whether to move in a short amount of time makes this, in my mind, a thinly-veiled downsizing effort.<p>Imagine; for years, your department in is NY state, but you&#x27;ve been told it&#x27;s totally cool to move to Colorado and work from home. In fact, IBM exclaims how it&#x27;s good for the company because it saves space and money! You build your family&#x27;s life there, then all the sudden - you have a month to decide to relocate to NY state (sell your house, change your kids&#x27; school, etc) or quit with a measly package. They won&#x27;t even allow you to go to the nearby IBM office in Colorado because your group is based in NY state.<p>I know employment is at-will, and what IBM is doing is perfectly legal. It doesn&#x27;t mean it doesn&#x27;t stink.

&gt; Peluso, formerly the CEO of fashion startup Gilt, explained the “only one recipe I know for success.” Its ingredients included great people, the right tools, a mission, analysis of results, and one more thing: “really creative and inspiring locations.”<p>That must be the same secret recipe that quartered[1] GILT&#x27;s value in less than 10 years!<p>[1] Gilt Groupe at one point valued at $1B, sold to HBC for $250M - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gilt_Groupe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gilt_Groupe</a>

This isn&#x27;t universal - a good friend of mine works for a team that is getting shipped off to IBM as part of a merger, and told to apply for the new IBM jobs if they want to keep working there. Ignoring the ugliness of that situation for the moment, he specifically asked about this news of remote work ending as it relates to how coding jobs would be impacted, and was told that the jobs he was applying for were intended to remain remote.<p>All the news I have seen has been about the marketing team, and my story is just one team, so I have no real idea what the big picture is, but it seems to be more nuanced than what we are reading about in the news.

Marissa Mayer did the same thing shortly after getting to Yahoo. I think the results there speak for themselves. There&#x27;s never a case where a move like this will boost morale or attract&#x2F;keep top talent. IMO moves like this are all about showing dominance and being a &quot;person of action.&quot; It&#x27;s corporate politics showmanship at the expense of results.

<p><pre><code> “It’s time for Act II: WINNING!” read the subject line of Peluos’s blog post </code></pre> Nothing says &quot;high-quality leadership role-model&quot; like Charlie Sheen.

I am remote, and have been for the last 3.5 yrs. As a software developer I find that the times I am least productive are when I need to work in an office. It is loud and distractions are everywhere. People stop by your desk to chat and ask for things, you inevitably get roped into ping-pong or foosball games, you take way longer lunches because that is what everyone else seems to be doing. The list goes on.<p>I am always glad to get home from the office so I can focus and get work done in peace. It may not be the case for all roles, but for software development I think (motivated and diligent) remote workers are way more productive, and can provide a much better ROI for their employers.

It worked out <i>ever so well</i> for Yahoo when Mayer did it so surely it&#x27;ll work for IBM who has two orders of magnitude more employees...actually, perhaps the end goal is voluntary resignations?

IBM is so weird.<p>I haven&#x27;t worked for them, but I work with 2 former IBM Engineers in Austin... both of them say the same weird things.. like, you can&#x27;t get two monitors (when one asked, he was declined, then his boss pulled an old CRT out of a closet and gave it too him... a 640x480 CRT from what must have been 184 years ago) ... And other weird tales that just seem antithetical to a tech company..

&quot;the severance payment will be equal to one month’s base salary, the standard at IBM.&quot;<p>Worth keeping in mind that this is the new policy as of about a year ago (they changed it before the big waves of layoffs last year).<p>Before the change you would get a week for every 6 months worked, up to 23 weeks.

I have known many people who work in companies like Oracle, IBM etc where there is consulting at client location and then report at designated office. Generally reporting at designated office is very lax and people either are at client site or just stay at home. I wonder if tightening remote work requirement is for these people too.<p>Lately at traditional IT companies even temporarily non-billable resources are increasingly being scrutinized for their output.

Remote work has many benefits, but it&#x27;s not all upside. Possibly IBM saw the successes they had by co-locating the Watson, Marketing and Health squads compared and decided there was a lot of productivity being lost.

When I went to sign up for Watson&#x27;s API services, I had to allow for third party cookies just to enter my payment information. It was a pain just trying to dig through Chrome to allow this, but I wonder how many of their potential customers just punt on that point alone.<p>For one of their flagship products, it&#x27;s been an average experience at best.

I use to think that remote work was goal I should be aiming for but after have a few friends did it and I thought more about it I&#x27;ve decided I would hate it. On the surface it sounds great and while I fully support working from home a few times a month I can&#x27;t support any more than that.<p>One of my good friends that did it has an interesting take, he said that since he was more introverted he thought he was perfect for remote work when in fact it made him miserable. His dad worked remotely for a large part of his life but was an extrovert. He concluded that contrary to what may seem like common sense introverts do worse in remote work because the office is where they get a majority of their human interaction while extroverts are going to make that happen regardless of if they go into an office every day.<p>I have no experience with working from home for a long period of time but I know calling into meetings is the worst and that there are a TON of decisions&#x2F;conversations that you get ZERO input on (most of the time you don&#x27;t even know they happened) when you are remote. I have never been so happy that I didn&#x27;t get a remote job I interviewed for a few years ago.<p>As much as I hate companies giving a perk and then taking it away I can&#x27;t help but think this is the right move for IBM.<p>PS: Yes HipChat&#x2F;Slack&#x2F;Jira&#x2F;GitLab&#x2F;GitHub&#x2F;etc&#x2F;etc&#x2F;etc can help with this but you are fooling yourself if you think that the people in the office are going to record every single interaction&#x2F;conversation&#x2F;etc of note. Remote-only teams might be an exception but even then you really do lose the ability to roll over to co-workers chair and have an impromptu conversation.

It&#x27;s easy to forget that IBM is in the share buyback business. They&#x27;re not a growing technology power. They have Watson, which isn&#x27;t enough to save them. They can&#x27;t invest money wisely, so every year they cut headcount and return some money to shareholders. It&#x27;s the orderly returning of money to shareholders from a company that doesn&#x27;t need investment anymore.<p>So why should this company offer perks to compete with Google or a startup? They only need a shrinking subset of lifers to keep the lights on.<p>If you want to telecommute, find a place that specializes in it.

What I find a bit odd is that this is ostensibly about becoming more innovative.<p>But does anyone really believe that major strategic business and product innovation occurs at the level of the individual contributors and teams who will be affected by this change?<p>I mean, sure, cool new features happen at that level, but you can&#x27;t tell me the iPhone would&#x27;ve fallen out of a &quot;water cooler&quot; conversation between a couple of C++ devs on a Wednesday afternoon in the office.

&gt; In a video message, Peluso, formerly the CEO of fashion startup Gilt, explained the “only one recipe I know for success.” Its ingredients included great people, the right tools, a mission, analysis of results, and one more thing: “really creative and inspiring locations.”<p>Why is this news coming from the CMO? Anyone know?

HP did the same thing a couple years ago.<p>Main reason is downsizing, easiest way to thin the herd. At that size, HR is just a spreadsheet exercise, quality of the individual employees does not factor in.<p>Of course this will not affect their &quot;remote&quot; workforce in India, this is about the high-pay western markets.

For affected IBMers... find a new remote gig!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lukasz-madon&#x2F;awesome-remote-job" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lukasz-madon&#x2F;awesome-remote-job</a>

Some thirty years ago I heard a joke from a friend&#x27;s dad (employee of IBM) that it stands for &quot;I&#x27;ve Been Moved&quot;.<p>So this is just &quot;IBM Classic&quot; showing through the modern varnish.

IBM is not ending remote work. They&#x27;re laying off thousands of North American workers every quarter and sending those jobs remotely to India.

IBM is a failed services company. Ive been a subcontractor for 2 projects run by IBM. Both fiascos of mismanagement. The project management at IBM had an incredible churn rate. On the first project, they were kicked off for completely failing to deliver. The second project had them completely marginalized. The sad thing is that it was another &quot;big 4&quot; consulting company that took over, who was only slightly less incompetent. I really have trouble understanding the big 4 consulting model. It mainly seems to consist of the following:<p>1) plant 2-300% of the consultants on site that are necessary 2) create an enormous amount of power point slides that look impressive but mainly say nothing 3) outsource the real work to India or cheap labor 4) deliver 25% of the requirements in 300% of the time

Today, in the &quot;companies that treat people like things&quot; section we talk about IBM -- a company that routinely fires thousands of people. Today, the enlightened company is planning to relocate or dismiss the rest of their workforce, in the hope to change the company from the inventor and champion of all-that-is-waterfall to &quot;agile&quot;.<p>All with a straight face.

This sort of &#x27;cultural&#x27; double down is why I left. There&#x27;s some talented people there - I&#x27;m thankful for everything I learned from them - but the culture is too rigid for creative exploration and [most importantly] discovery.

If co-location is so great, why are they in six different offices? Call a layoff a layoff. I guess they avoid paying severance if you quit because you live in Idaho.

Unrelated: Are there people in the world who prefer spending 8 hours in the office vs 8 hours wherever they want (office OR home OR cafe)?

This sounds like an attempt to graft a small-company or startup atmosphere onto the dying trunk of a behemoth.

maybe there&#x27;s a new and exciting product that they want to develop that needs everyone&#x27;s exclusive attention, or it&#x27;s a business idea that will fail miserably.

I&#x27;m not sure how you attract new people to work for a company with <i>19</i> straight quarters of declining sales. Pinky swear that they will turn around this time?

Whatever salary they&#x27;re paying remoters now isn&#x27;t going to be enough to live in NY or San Fran without a significant quality of life cut. And basically they get extra &quot;work&quot; out of you for free -- time spent commuting. So 40 hours a week becomes 50 hours a week assuming a 1-hour commute.<p>Is it me or is this move seemingly initiated by female executives that want to project power in order to compensate for the perception that they are less dedicated to work because of their sex? Given a sample size of two, I would avoid working for anyone named Melissa.