
IBM tells thousands of remote employees to come back to office or find new jobs - lx
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/ibm-to-remote-workers-come-back-to-the-mothership-or-else/
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bitmapbrother
This is IBM's way of making their remote employees quit rather than looking
like the bad guy and firing them. Why fire them and pay them severance when
you can give them an ultimatum, let them quit and not pay them any severance?
And the ones that don't quit will eventually get fired.

I'm surprised how the board of directors can continually show their confidence
in one of the most incompetent IBM CEO's in recent history.

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PhantomGremlin
_I 'm surprised how the board of directors can continually show their
confidence in one of the most incompetent IBM CEO's in recent history._

I'm not a big fan of Ginni Rometty. She's been CEO for over 5 years.

But in her defense, what can she do??? She's been dealt a tough hand. Their
legacy businesses are tapering off, their strategy of offshoring their
consulting services isn't working, and their sizzle (such as Watson) doesn't
amount to a hill of beans (to steal from Bogart) compared to the size of the
company.

What should she have been doing to fix IBM's problems?

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yourapostasy
She inherited Palmisano's promise to investors, and re-committed to it when
she signed on, and at that very moment she painted herself into a corner. She
tries to serve two masters, and ends up failing both: shareholders and a bet-
the-company pivot.

This likely signals she herself doesn't really believe in her own championing
words on the pivot. Definitely not enough to command the shareholders and
spend the buyback funds she did spend on the pivot instead.

At this point, the sectors they're betting on for the pivot are not hauling in
the kind of revenue required to replace what they are losing in their legacy
sectors. Hence the appearance of a death spiral.

What isn't widely known is those legacy sectors are by and large still
profitable. Just not enough for the leadership team; a tragedy of
micromanagement and misdirected metrics.

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dreamcompiler
This seems to be the next phase in American business "best practices" that
started with outsourcing (very cheap workers who are easy to fire), continued
with contractors (cheaper than employees and easy to fire), and now continues
with teleworkers (not really cheap but still easy to fire).

This is the biggest reason the US needs single-payer healthcare: Tying
healthcare to employment when there is no such thing as long-term employment
means healthcare only works for rich people.

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aomix
I got so used to listening to a relative explain how IBM is run by
incompetents that when that person retired I felt like we lost a family
tradition.

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pascalxus
Big Layoff. IBM must be in big trouble. Tell everyone to short that stock.

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valuearb
Why would a layoff be bad for IBM's business?

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fred_is_fred
Agreed. Layoffs are generally positive for stocks at least in the short term.

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dkfmn
Do you mean generally positive for [the stock price] or [potential earnings]?
Seems like while layoff announcements generally would improve earnings they
hurt stock prices. It may be related to the perception that layoffs are often
reactive to worsening conditions rather than proactive right-sizings of the
business.

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fred_is_fred
If Facebook said that people have stopped using Facebook and they're laying
off 10% of the workforce that would be a negative. IBM on the other hand has
its hands in dozens of businesses with declining revenue with no real way to
improve the situation. In those cases, better to lay people off and milk the
cash cow for a few years.

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marcstreeter
seems like the message that is being sent is that workers that are remote are
less valued than those that are sitting at a desk in corporate HQ. Reading
some of the quotes from the remote workers seems to imply that as well. If
that's true, it's an unfortunate reality from a company that even does studies
in favor of remote work.

