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  • Re: IBM orders workers ba

    From Mike Powell@1:2320/105 to KURT WEISKE on Tue Apr 22 08:24:00 2025
    I suppose they still have those "big iron" clients out there, pretty

    Yes, they did where I worked. They actually moved to hosting the "big
    iron" in a cloud-like service. I forget what they called it, but the
    machines reside at one of their IBM facilities.


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  • From Mike Powell@1:2320/105 to KURT WEISKE on Sun Apr 20 08:28:00 2025
    IBM orders workers back to the office, or face the consequences

    This story was pretty amazing - "relocation assistance" for people 50
    miles away from the office or greater, meaning no more remote work. 8
    offices in some of the most expensive places to live in the US with no mention of compensation for people who need to move, and buried in the
    story is some confusing language around DEI - sticking to ideals of DEI
    while adhering to local applicable laws and government policies, while 10x-ing their hiring in India left me confused.

    Having worked closely with IBM for many years, I am not too shocked that
    this all sounds confusing. With tech, and especially sales, a lot of
    workers are on the road most of the time anyway so I am not sure why having them "in the office" would even be important. Even when they are "in the office" they won't be there.


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  • From Kurt Weiske@1:218/1 to Mike Powell on Mon Apr 21 07:30:18 2025
    Mike Powell wrote to KURT WEISKE <=-

    Having worked closely with IBM for many years, I am not too shocked
    that this all sounds confusing. With tech, and especially sales, a lot
    of workers are on the road most of the time anyway so I am not sure why having them "in the office" would even be important. Even when they
    are "in the office" they won't be there.

    It sounded like a big part of the directive was to allow for techs
    embedded in large contracts to include time at customer sites as part of
    their RTO. RTC, as they called it.

    My first IT gig was at a shop that was all IBM - PS/2 desktops and
    servers, AS/400 and S/38 midrange computers and token ring networking.
    We had a dedicated rep who was onsite 2 days a week, primarily
    schmoozing the VP of IT (who seemed so old, but it about my age now!)

    I suppose they still have those "big iron" clients out there, pretty
    sure they sold the server business to Lenovo along with the desktop
    business.

    Pretty interesting times, being able to have IBM branded schwag, mice,
    desktop PCs, network equipment, operating systems, applications, intel
    servers and big iron all supported by the same company.

    My OS/2 pen just recently ran out of ink - it outlasted the OS by many
    years!



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  • From Kurt Weiske@1:218/1 to Mike Powell on Thu Apr 24 20:19:39 2025
    Mike Powell wrote to KURT WEISKE <=-

    I suppose they still have those "big iron" clients out there, pretty

    Yes, they did where I worked. They actually moved to hosting the "big iron" in a cloud-like service. I forget what they called it, but the machines reside at one of their IBM facilities.

    There were some interesting products from IBM - apparently an AS/400 can
    run a ton of Linux VMs in their own protected memory space, while
    running a DB2 database on bare metal - meaning you could build an entire
    web infrastructure on one box. They did something like that for one of
    the olympics.



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