I work in a much more traditional industry than IBM, but I've recently been humored by management's resistance to remote work while hiring personnel in India to handle the "transactional" work.
I worked at a company that was acquired by Corporation Service Company (CSC). First, they assigned our team a manager that "specialized in managing remote teams." Our team wasn't "remote", as we all worked in the same office, with cubicles and whiteboards and all the trappings: it was "remote" in the sense that we didn't work at corporate headquarters.
The import of this nuance would soon become clear. Management then told us, after moving everyone into a brand new office, that it didn't want any technical work done "remotely." And to aid in the transition? Why, hire a developer located in India, of course!
The new owner literally added two genuinely remote people to our team in the name of not being remote. Prior to the acquisition, we all worked within a 50m radius.
Apparently, acqui-firing was such a habit for CSC that disgruntled former employees founded National Registered Agents, Inc. (NRAI), which became one of their major competitors. At some point NRAI and CT, the primary of CSC's competitors, were fused together, along with BizFilings, under Wolters Kluwer. I think the current registered agent market share is about 60% CT and 40% CSC. It takes a special kind of management genius to motivate the people you fired into forming a business from scratch to compete with you, take some of your market share, then merge with your archenemy.
And the thing that makes all this worse is that a nationwide registered agent business must necessarily have more than 50 offices that are not the corporate headquarters. So some companies hate "remote" so much that they can't even stand to have certain employees working together as a team in a satellite office, one that they have to keep open anyway! (But outsourcing to India is still okay.)
Still not the worst-managed company I ever worked for.
My reaction to it is sort of a bitter, FML, hollow laughter.
That's just part of the story that taught me that it doesn't matter how much you like your job, or how good you are at doing it, if some rich asshole can buy it and throw it into the garbage--or move it beyond your reach, or give it to a cousin, or alter it beyond recognition. That was the last job that I actually liked.
Subsequent stories have only reinforced the lesson. Those incidents are why, despite the glaring and obvious flaws of labor unions, I support unions for technical skilled labor unconditionally and without hesitation.
It isn't even about money. I really would have liked to be able to tell the boss at my last job that packing the entire development team and test team around the walls of his corner office while everyone takes turns justifying their existence for a total of at least 45 minutes daily, starting at 8:45 AM, is not a "stand-up meeting". It's not even a status meeting. It's a pointless show of dominance.
I would really like to be able to, if not stop, at least discourage such idiotic behavior, rather than just looking for other jobs and rolling the dice yet again on a different manager that might possibly be less like the high priest of a cargo cult. It would have been nice if voicing my concerns did not paint a target on my back.
I like the argument that they trust me to work on call, in fact they demand it, and all on call work is done remotely over the VPN. So just think of it as being on call during the day.
It also helps if you can ease into flex time. You know I'm almost never here on Friday, but if you need me I always come thru remotely? Yeah, its gonna be like that Mon-Thur now too.
It helps if all your coworkers work at other offices around the country. If you have a position where you mostly work with other teams all over the country, remote is perfect. I have three main "internal customers" each about 1000 miles apart. I don't even know what planet some of my coworkers are on much less if they're in an official office or not. If you have a position where you mostly work with a local team that meets in exactly one office, that's gonna be a huge problem.
