IBM Calling Remote Workers Back to the Office | Hacker News Reader

IBM Calling Remote Workers Back to the Office

wsj.com

14 pointsbwoj14 comments

Pulling in remote workers is a last ditch effort that admits a) they don't know what they (Management) are doing b) they don't know what workers or teams are doing c) they don't mind losing people that don't office. They must like the attrition. Workers that are good will leave. I'd take it as a RIF to get rid of their best people.

> Relocating offices or asking employees to move can sometimes be read as layoffs in disguise, since a certain percentage of workers won’t be able to relocate.

I think this is definitely true. I also expected this was the case for Yahoo. In general, perks and management philosophies only change when things aren't going well. From what I can observe, IBM has been on a decade long crash course of cutting and squeezing to show increasing profits.

I would hate this.

Working from home is great. You get more time in your day, you don't burn any fuel getting back and forth to work, everything costs you less, etc. It's win-win-win-everything.

If IBM can't measure productivity and/or motivate people, I'd say that's a symptom of poor management.

IBM's been on this destructive kick for almost a year now. I was considering interviewing with them as my last company shut down, and then this news broke; that was in spring.

Assuming this does nothing to change the trend of whatever executive decided this was how to turn around some metric. Most likely profit, we can start calling it officially a leading indicator of a march towards irrelevance. See Yahoo! I've always wondered if IBMs largely touted shift to consulting to maintain profits was just putting off the inevitable. Does anyone see IBM as cutting edge technologists?

I work at IBM.

In terms of technical leadership, what you are interested in? IBM invests enormous amounts of money in open source projects and IBM Research. And for the last 24 years straight, IBM has earned more patents than any other company (it’s not even close).

> And for the last 24 years straight, IBM has earned more patents than any other company (it’s not even close)

That's not a great measure of technical leadership. Shows they have good lawyers though!

Why isn’t that a good measure of technical leadership?

Because any old chump can file a patent request and get it approved. There's a reason patent trolls exist.

Restating your argument: there have been cases in which patents of questionable quality have been granted which recognize questionable rights; there exist entities who act in bad faith to acquire patents for the purpose enforcing those questionable rights; therefore, all patents are of questionable quality in the possession of entities who act in bad faith to enforce questionable rights.

This is self-evidently fallacious reasoning. It also drops the context that tech companies in aggregate spend tens of billions of dollars per year on R&D, creating the incredible world of technology, industry, and human flourishing in which we live.

The point is more that creating patents doesn’t add value whatsoever, nor is it representative of adding value in some other way.

The only people that see a net gain on patents are lawyers, and big corps- that’s why they spend billions on them.

This article was published several months ago: May 18, 2017.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14367304

Dupe also paywall.

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