No even IBM... this is why I don't want to strive at work anymore.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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What do you mean by that? Aren't IBM the gleaming gold standard of ruining your market dominance with idiotic management practices and investor-driven shortsightedness?
If anything, I am surprised they still had schemes that incentivise employees by distributing some form of equity
IBM is what a company that survived crossing to the other side of the enshittification fence looks like. They are profitable, for sure, but they have nothing of value to offer to an actual human being. They only speak corpo and their only semi-amiable relationships are with other corporate entities via contracts, negotiations, arbitration, and lawsuits. It's functionally and physically incapable of communicating, offering a product or relating with an average real person, for they haven't known what that is in at least three decades.
IBM has always been a business-to-business. Their name literally comes from International Business Machines.
They began that way, then they branched into personal computation when that became a thing. Then they took a machine gun to their feet in that market
It’s was too much hassle for too little profit. Their bread and butter is having regular people not remember they still exist.
I suppose the several IBM PCs I owned in the 80s and 90s were all just hallucinations. Useful hallucinations though, they taught me to use DOS and to program in BASIC.
I don't think I claimed they don't do consumer stuff but business stuff has always been their core business.
IBM wasn't interested in PCs, and they were already enshittifyjng by then.
A company is not necessarily limited to the activities implied by its name.
Did I say that? OP complained that IBM has become so business oriented recently, but that has always been its core business.
It's what it sounded like and I'm not the only guy who saw it that way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That just means more than one people jump to conclusions
Aren’t IBM the gleaming gold standard of ruining your market dominance with idiotic management practices and investor-driven shortsightedness?
Honestly, when I think "IBM", I can't help but think of the company that built the industrial accounting machines for the Nazis back in the 1930s.
I expected more from a renowned company, rookie mistake I guess.
They went shitty decades ago.
I'd say at best the PC wars is a good demarcation, maybe even before then.
The Original Macintosh was an attack at how shitty IBM was.
I do what I'm paid to do and not an ounce more, unless I'm doing it entirely for myself with no expectation of any compensation or favor.
I value my time and I don't work for free. To do otherwise, I think, is self-disrespecting.
On a previous job, two people and I (all subcontracted) raised up the IT support department of a company from what was barebones. AD, Azure, Intune, package deployment, ticketing and inventory software, automations and more. We made a great team.
After a year and a half we realized they wanted to implement and external L1 support team that is still to this day a bunch of incompetent idiots. On top of that, the company merged with them part of another company, including IT personnel that automatically became staff members without any effort or merits, while we remained subcontracted.
From the tree people team, the coordinator and I left, while the remaining person is still stuck there, because she's on her 50's and it's more complicated for her to find another job, but she's a person who strives and knows her shit. around.
TL;DR: I'm not even talking about going the extra mile or working for free, I'm talking about putting effort on the job you're paid to do just to be spit in the face in exchange. I've reached a new point where IDGAF if I'm slacking all day at work as long as I don't get in trouble or fired. The burnout is real.
At work and at home. IBM has a history of making their employees sign contracts that state that anything their employees invent at home in their own free time, is the property of IBM
IBM doesn't make stuff, just invent and own IP. And now they don't even invent.
It's funny how the big tech companies are getting worse, to the point where engineers are favouring a return to "boomer tech" because they treat their employees well long-term - and now the older companies that focused on research and consultancy are starting to become shit at that.
IBM is boomer tech.
What do you mean by boomer tech?
I imagine going back to the ways of 1960s IBM/Bell Labs where you have a secure, well-defined role, you are well compensated for your time and you have plenty of like-minded people to bounce ideas off.
Who wanted to eliminate that? My Grama used to work at Bell Labs as a researcher when it was in Manhattan, she always looked back fondly on those chapters of her life. Startups are fun, but Christ are they unstable and you're wearing 11teen hats simultaneously.
Seems shortsighted at best.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Exclusive IBM has canceled a program that rewarded inventors at Big Blue for patents or publications, leaving some angry that they are missing out on potential bonuses.
By cancelling the scheme, a source told The Register, IBM has eliminated a financial liability by voiding the accrued, unredeemed credits issued to program participants which could have been converted into potential cash awards.
We're told that IBM's invention review process could take months, meaning that employees just didn't have time between the announcement and the program sunset to pursue the next plateau and cash out.
Citing the revised award scheme, one question read, "Do we allow customers to unilaterally cancel the payment schedule after work has been delivered?"
We're told these represented the most upvoted questions submitted to the CEO's recent monthly Office Hours meeting, but the response was evasive.
A former IBMer reports that a colleague still with Big Blue said, "My opinion...the invention award program was buggered a long time [ago].
The original article contains 471 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 66%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Bigger companies are forced to do such programmes. I was working on a software tool for managing these ideas.
The problem I see here, is the software was boring, the project was boring and the users in charge are bored, too. There is hardly anyone who takes the process serious.
I'm not surprised, by IBM's decision. However, I think they waste a lot of potential by not listening properly to their employers.
When I was at IBM I won three such awards — one for publication, and two for patents.
At the time at least, they had an online form you had to fill in if you thought something you had developed was potentially patentable; that would go to some small committee for analysis and a decision as to whether or not it was worth pursuing — if it was, it went off to the patent lawyers. You then spent a good deal of time describing your invention to them so they could write up all of the patent documents in a manner that would cover as many bases as possible.
The awards weren’t huge. I don’t remember getting a monetary award for the publication — just a framed certificate. The patents paid $1500 CAN each.
At least one of the patented inventions would have happened anyway, because it was just a solution I came up with during the course of my work. I didn’t even consider submitting it as a patentable idea until a few team members encouraged me to do so. But if there wasn’t a monetary award I would have been less likely to fill out the form for the patent in the first place. All IBM is likely going to find by removing the award is that a lot fewer people (outside IBM Research) are going to have incentive to self-declare their potentially patentable ideas.
Hello fellow ex-IBMer. I came to the corp from an open source background and I was happy that my LTC coworkers seemed to despise software parents despite the huge pressure from management.
I wonder how much of this is that IBM fell out of the patent lead and decided to just take their ball and go home. Or how much is RedHat influence shifting the mindset away from the patent Mexican standoff with everyone else.
There's a way for Big Blue staffers to resist the shaft.
What do you mean by that? Aren't IBM the gleaming gold standard of ruining your market dominance with idiotic management practices and investor-driven shortsightedness?
If anything, I am surprised they still had schemes that incentivise employees by distributing some form of equity