IBM was legendarily over-managed. This is second-hand but a guy I used to work with told a story of when he interned for a summer at IBM in London during the mid-90s doing what would now be called a QA engineering. At that time everyone wore suits to work but the culture was changing so the interns put in a request to be allowed casual Fridays. Bear in mind that they were locked in a back room somewhere without any customer interaction so they didn't think it was a big deal.
Months later, just before the end of the internship, they received a reply. Their manager had forwarded their request up the chain of command and the email had the full quoted history. Their request had been bumped up 4 successive layers in the London office, then across to the US headquarters where it continued its upwards trajectory, finally alighting on the desk of a VP who, after thanking them for bring the issue to his attention, rendered an carefully considered opinion.
The whole process had taken weeks, presumably as each person in the hierarchy debated whether they had the authority to tackle such a weighty issue.
The email had then been inexplicably bounced back DOWN the chain one link at a time, back across the Atlantic Ocean, and through the local office, down to the suit-bound interns, again weeks later, who by this stage only had days left at the internship.
The answer was no.
In the late 90s I moved from one country to another. As a part of a job hunt I applied to the local IBM office, because I had some OS/2 mileage. Then promptly got three offers from other places, accepted one and completely forgot about the IBM application.
Not 8 (eight) months later I got a call from their HR saying they'd like to interview me next Thursday. And then they got completely flabergasted when I said I was no longer interested. Don't know what they were smoking, but they were exceptionally full of themselves... while not even offering a good pay.
When I went to a grad jobs fair in 1998 or so IBM were offering at least 25% less than any other company I spoke to, and 40% less than the best paying roles.
The only company they were on par with was Arthur Andersen, who were offering around £15k for trainee accountant roles, but you know how fast those salaries go up once you’re qualified and start to progress.
My dad was am IBM lifer, when they said they could wear suits that weren't black he wore a blue suit and his boss asked him if he rode the bus to work.
Wait, I'm confused. Was that supposed to be an insult?!
This is a very legitimate question: In the US, where is it not?
Public buses aren't safe, clean, or timely. Where I am, it's 2.5 hours rather than a 26 minute commute by car. The only reason you ride one is usually if you are already in the proximity of your destination, especially if that destination is downtown. For all other cases, private or ride-share makes way more sense. We're talking buses here, not shuttles, light rails, monorails, etc.
I worked at IBM Research, totally unlike the rest of IBM in terms of how it was run, and being a non-US person it was quite natural for me to take the bus to work because either that or train is how you get to work. I never met any coworkers on there, although I did get to know the cafeteria staff, cleaners, and so on, who all caught the bus, quite well.
In other countries most people use public transportation and small percentage uses car
Many in the US also use public transportation when they can but busses are generally thought of as a last resort. Unlike trains, teams, or subways their schedule is at the whim of traffic. So the general thinking is that if you are going to be stuck in traffic anyways you might as well be comfortable in your own car if you can afford one.
US is different, deal with it.
London buses are a pleasure in contrast.
Interesting, IBM sales and consulting were infamous for sending in an army of blue suits in
That would have been in the 1980s.
I interned at an IBM R&D site in Winchester (UK) for a year in 1988-89 and none of us interns wore suits, or even ties. I don't recall many of the f/t IBMers doing so either. It was pretty informal really.
(Not disputing your story, just providing a different perspective.)
I work with a lot of government departments. The "policy" is not a thing that can enforce itself, and often barely exists at all. Rarely is it actually written down!
Mostly these things boil down to a vetocracy where all managers in some hierarch must say 'yes', otherwise a single 'no' is a final 'no'.
Hence, the trick is not to ask because the more people are involved the higher the chance that one of them will say 'no'.
The manager in that office you worked in most likely made a decision themselves and didn't punt it up the hierarchy, and hence nobody told him 'no'.
The corollary to that is a clever bureaucrat can kill a proposal simply by inviting many decision makers to a meeting.
PS: It's hilarious to see this effect play out as a consultant, because often I deal with different "randomly" selected subsets of the same organisation and the difference in their day-to-day can be stark. It just boils down to which managers take individual responsibility, and which regularly beg for permission to do their job. "No."
> Hence, the trick is not to ask because the more people are involved the higher the chance that one of them will say 'no'.
So in my case at IBM the trick to being able to keep a hand-and-a-half sword in your office is to just have it appear there one day. My boss did a bit of a double-take the first time he saw it but that was the only reaction I got.
They did have a "no firearms in the building" policy but that didn't extend to medieval edged weapons, although there may have been a change made after I left.
And I thought I was crazy for keeping a crowbar in the office...
(I work at a particle accelerator and we need to protect ourselves for interdimensional breaches)
Do you truky, in your heart of hearts, believe that?
It is obviously a joke, but I bought it after several visitors asked us if we didn't have a crowbar xD
Wouldn't you also want to keep a can of spray paint to draw the Elder Sign? You know, in case it was needed in a hurry.
Come to think of it, does an Elder Sign still work if you spray it onto a wall using a template? I think you need to investigate that the next time there's a breach... you've got plenty of interns right?
I need to ask me Warhammer colleague...
> The corollary to that is a clever bureaucrat can kill a proposal simply by inviting many decision makers to a meeting.
My version of this:
For my friends, everything; for my enemies, pull security in.
> The corollary to that is a clever bureaucrat can kill a proposal simply by inviting many decision makers to a meeting.
Not particularly clever. My experience is that low-level team/line managers typically already have the authority to say "no" to their own people; but they don't want to take the blame for saying "no" (they want their team to like them!), so by punting the decision up the chain, they're effectively punting the blame for saying no up the chain (under the expectation that anything so punted will get a "no" response.)
Some this backfires, though: everyone above them says yes, and so they have to be the one to say no. (They may end up lying if asked, vaguely saying "someone important" said no.)
Sometimes this backfires badly: not only does everyone above them say yes, but someone somewhere up the chain loves the idea, and turns it into an "initiative" — i.e. something the line-level manager is now locked into doing.
> Sometimes this backfires badly: not only does everyone above them say yes, but someone somewhere up the chain loves the idea, and turns it into an "initiative" — i.e. something the line-level manager is now locked into doing.
I've seen a variant of this (repeatedly!) where a sales person will suggest the bronze/silver/gold/platinum edition of some product to a manager, the decision goes up the chain (unnecessarily), and then someone near the top says: "Platinum sounds the best!". Nobody dares take responsibility for suggesting "anything less than the best", so it gets locked in.
Meanwhile, the platinum edition exists only to make the silver and gold pricing look reasonable, so now... now... the consultant has to implement a solution based on the "bells & whistles edition" which takes 10x as long and has a bunch of issues. E.g.: "clustered" versus simply "active-passive" or weird nonstandard high bandwidth ports instead of ordinary Ethernet, etc.
Mr. Show, "Change for a Dollar": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyocQT4Vn2g
Should have gone to First CityWide:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXDxNCzUspM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KodqIPMbyUg
I love First City Wide. They really came through when I was heading out to go camping and knew I might need quarters for the showers.
I have a few of these.
I asked to be excepted from a contract condition giving IBM first pick on any IP I develop in my own time.
Keep in mind, I was working in one of their technical support call centres. I had no access to IBM proprietary information, I had no role in developing it, I was a complete non risk on this front. I had more access to customer systems, no access to RED or BLUE networks, just an IBM lotus notes account I could use to slowly download information from HR.
Everyone I could physically speak to looked at my request and went, hey that's a really reasonable request.
It took 6 weeks for the first no to come back, my direct manager, whose stats I was apparently holding in place, apparently tried to intercede, adding 2 further weeks for a review. The answer was still no. This had apparently gone up through one line of reporting across to the US, branched out into legal and came back down that path. It was crazy.
So I left, so I could work on a small software project with a friend without risking IBM having an interest in it.
Another one. The HR forms were all written in the early 80s and digitised sometime in the 00s. Our team, not being customer facing, was super diverse. I know there was an attempt to try and get the HR forms updated to recognise other gender/pronoun combinations. This took like 12 weeks to be reviewed, and I think the eventual no was based entirely on the fact that no one wanted to try and figure out whose job it was to update the forms. Our team was full of LGBT people, and retention of them appeared to be critical. Hard no.
Also, our sexual harrassment training came on tape (in the year of our lord two thousand and ten) and implied that it was the updated version, previously it might have been vinyl or something.
This sent me down a rabbit hole. In the US, the PIIA effectively is the law - your employer gets to decide whether your side project "relates to their business." In the EU (where I am) it's basically: not on a work laptop, not on work hours? Yours.
I'm fine here :)
i never want to work at IBM. it sounds like hell
A coworker of mine got his first job at IBM after graduating from what was effectively an early version of a tech trade school when tech trade schools were not common.
He showed up to work at an IBM hardware factory in the US and as soon as everyone walked in the door they was called into a meeting that day. IBM announced they were all laid off immediately. IBM having almost no experience with layoffs to that point and still styling itself as a company you go to work at for life seemed to be legitimately unsure what to do.
So they gave everyone minimum 1 years pay, benefits, IBM actually assigned HR people who were VERY involved in trying to place people other places and paid many to relocate them, and what amounted to a 4 year scholarship too if they wanted to use it.
Dude had been there less than an hour and decided to just go back to school for 4 years ...
Good story but in fairness the "no" decision was usable for the next set of interns.
Was? Is.