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Exclusive IBM is cracking down on remote workers, ordering unlucky employees to either come into one of six main offices and work "shoulder to shoulder" – or leave for good.
In a confidential video message to staff seen by The Register on Tuesday, chief marketing officer Michelle Peluso told her US marketing troops they must work at "a smaller set of locations" if they want to continue with the company. Staffers have 30 days to decide whether to stay or go.
This means affected IBMers who telecommute, work at a smaller district office, or otherwise work separately from their team, will now have just a few weeks to either quit their jobs, or commit to moving to another part of America. The company's employee badge system will be used to ensure people do come into the office rather than stealthily remain remote workers.
According to sources, the six "strategic" offices US marketing staff must work from are in: Austin, Texas; San Francisco, California; New York City, New York; Boston, Massachusetts; Atlanta, Georgia; and Raleigh, North Carolina. El Reg understands that employees will not get to choose a nearby office, but will instead be assigned a location based on where their team is predominantly situated. The first wave of workers were informed of the changes on Monday. The next wave will be instructed in early March, we're told.
Marissa Mayer has worked wonders at Yahoo and the rest of the tech industry should follow her lead?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by donkeyhotay on Thursday February 09 2017, @03:24PM
It's a common trend among organizations. I work in a pretty large company. A few years ago, a major corporation in the area went bankrupt, and had to lay off hundreds of workers. Now obviously, they didn't lay off their best workers. Nevertheless, my company started snatching them up, particularly their management. Now we're starting to look as large and bloated as the other company that had the layoffs. Five years ago, our IT department ran smoothly with a couple dozen people and work got completed in a timely fashion. Now we have about 200 people in IT, and even the simplest project takes weeks or months to complete.
Taking lessons from the losers. I give us about four more years before things start imploding.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 09 2017, @04:15PM
I've seen the same thing often in my career. Once the size of an organization passes a certain threshhold, communication and coordination (meetings, emails, calls, etc) come to dominate all available time and productive work slowly gets squeezed out. If you're a person who prefers productive work to communication and coordination, your frustration climbs in direct proportion to that ratio. So you don't consider your email phrasing or words in meetings carefully enough, weighing the political ramifications therein, and eventually misstep. Since the PHBs who revel in communication and coordination and politics typically do not grasp the technical, productive work they can only judge you on how you communicate and coordinate, the realm they understand. Your promotions and raises suffer accordingly.
When things begin to go awry, launch dates missed, bugs multiplying, specs bungled, the PHBs inevitably re-org the communication and coordination structure and hire more people to do that. The communication/coordination-to-productive work ratio gets worse.
If you're a technical person, and your boss is an MBA with no technical background, or your technical endeavors are led around by the nose by Legal or Marketing, then you can be certain that the place where you work is following that same progression and will eventually succumb to the stupid.
I often think the best thing we could do for ourselves as human societies, structurally, is to break up companies that exceed that size threshhold. Else, "Too Big To Fail" will be our epitaph.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday February 09 2017, @07:42PM
It seems to me that you can still keep that productivity if there isn't any empire building. Let development teams still have full production access. Let dev teams still talk directly to the product owners. When people wear a lot of different hats they can get things done. If i have to negotiate with QA and then a release team and then some random DBA rejects my item for a completely unrelated aesthetic change then it really slows everything down. Too many opaque layers of BS.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Thursday February 09 2017, @10:56PM
Agreed. I do find I chafe badly at the (unnecessary?) inefficiencies of large organisations.
I've been to regular meetings over the course of several weeks to discuss the implementation of some feature, only for it to be decided, regretfully, that we didn't have the time or resources to implement it. The combined man hours wasted during all those meetings would have been sufficient to design and implement and test it fully several times over.
And as well as political inefficiencies, don't forget to consider bikeshedding. Take a simple, clean and efficient design proposal. Once it's been though a few meetings, it's accumulated so much additional cruft from the various "stakeholders" that it's become such a bloated, inefficient and poorly-considered mess that you might as well have not even bothered starting.
I've also been reprimanded for implementing stuff without it being properly discussed and approved by several levels of management. When the cost of implementing something is say a couple of hours, including testing, but the cost of discussing it is several weeks, I detest that the organisational overhead chokes every ounce of creativity and productivity from its members.
I'm certainly not suggesting that organisations don't need to have processes in place for managing work. But when the overhead of all those processes actively impedes the primary purpose of the organisation, there's a clear problem. It's strange that despite making huge leaps forward in technological prowess, our ability to organise and conduct ourselves seems to have remained largely unchanged.