https://www.reddit.com/r/IBM_Employees/s/5xdW10ZiJ0
Is this true?
6 replies (most recent on top)
Mukesh, Huiming, and Hemanth are also execs and the biggest bullsh-t artists of the highest caliber. All talk, no substance. Nothing they say stands up to meaningful scrutiny.
It sounds like both sites have a serious, unchecked favoritism problem.
@Brenda Swatek as Executive VP of HR overseeing these sites, how about stepping in and addressing these issues? At the very least, take meaningful steps to rein them in. The situation has gotten way out of control, and employee surveys over the past several years have highlighted these concerns unambiguously.
At what point does leadership take accountability and act on the feedback employees have been providing for years? You know what’s going on, and the evidence is there. It’s time to stop turning a blind eye and start holding people accountable. Just follow the literal guidelines in our own training on these topics, verbatim, and apply them consistently.
@er As long as they’re safe and protected from accountability and their favorites keep nodding and saying ‘yes’ and are keeping them happy, they simply don’t care about anyone else.
@bq
This, 100%
“ it’s the consequence of a culture that has steadily eroded trust, recognition, and confidence in the future.”
Yorktown is a large site. Lots of people, lots of different groups, lots of different opinions. Also lots of extreme and poorly directed micromanagement by higher ups whose egos are distinctly larger than their IQs. Micromanagement has gotten so tight that they’ve removed a good chunk of 2nd line and 1st line management … because they too often got entangled in the puppeteers’ puppet strings.
Many parts of the building are almost tied now morale wise with my career low point at Yorktown in 1993 when Mr. Akers was breaking IBM into the six planned Baby Blues and fired a huge swath of the physical sciences and math plus some CS in Yorktown. Luckily Gerstner came in April, and four years later things were better. (Unlike Akers, Gerstner’s housecleaning was biased somewhat towards removing deadwood.)
The Yorktown barometer reads stormy weather. This gauge is easily read. Walk all 120 aisles in the building, and count the number of new cartoons on office doors that show actual wit and cleverness. Reading the doors was great fun once. Now it often takes several minutes to get from one new cartoon to the next. You can also walk some distance without encountering another human being.
Researchers are hunters. They live for the pursuit, for the chase, for the hunt. If you deny them the hunt and force feed them predigested dead ideas from the puppet masters, they become irreversibly domesticated and begin to wither. Hunting skills honed for decades atrophy irreversibly in a year.
These Researchers are compensated far, far below what high tech companies pay. They sound cheap. But Indian, Mexican, and Irish labor are cheaper yet.
Albany is at historic lows, and I personally believe people are simply fed up with the work environment and culture. It has become a place where the rich get richer, the same select group receives accolades they haven’t necessarily earned, and the majority see little to no legitimate path for career growth or advancement. Meanwhile, favorites continue to receive promotions, often backed by flimsy justifications that do little to conceal the underlying favoritism. Frustration is reaching a boiling point, and everyone’s bullsh-t meter is completely maxed out. And it’s exhausting.
Also week after week, more people are leaving for better opportunities elsewhere. Attrition has to be at all time highs here. At some point, leadership needs to recognize that this isn’t just a temporary morale issue, it’s the consequence of a culture that has steadily eroded trust, recognition, and confidence in the future.