[jobu]

According to a coworker that had worked at IBM for a couple decades it was a great place to work until sometime in the mid 2000s. It was like they suddenly noticed how shitty Oracle was and decided that was the business model they needed to follow. Labeling older employees as "dinobabies" is a perfect example.

[floren]

I visited IBM Austin a few times circa 2009-2011 to collaborate with an IBM employee on a project. Huge campus, absolutely completely dead at all times. I would come in through the main entrance, go past the security guard, and see nobody at all until I arrived in the lab space. The lab itself was a large workspace with all sorts of desks and project space, but the only employee in there was the guy I had come to see. Absolutely bizarre and an incredibly depressing place to be.

[green-salt]

Exact same thing in their Boulder, CO office. Dead. Middle of the day on a weekday.

[mattlondon]

I used to work at IBM in the UK in the mid 2000s and this was fairly accurate at the UK offices too.

We'd joke that IBM stood for I'm By Myself as people would work from home 90% of the time - many would be mysteriously uncontactable/AFK during that time due to "unforseen circumstances" (theat seemed to happen all the time) ... it was very hard to get hold of people when they were WFH.

No regrets - it was a great start for me, but I am glad I left.

[vpb]

Remote working was quite common in IBM when I worked there, ten-ish years ago. I stepped foot in an office only a handful of times.

[stevenwoo]

I co-oped at IBM Austin from 1986-1987, there were some pretty vacant spots then, too. One time a fellow co-op and I followed some full times around to explore and got stuck getting snacks in a break room because our keycards didn't unlock the door to the rest of the floor (kind of a fire issue there in hindsight) and we had to wait 10 minutes for someone to let us out.

[diob]

On the flip side, I had fun just walking around the giant empty buildings during my coop. But yeah, very bleak.

[fakethenews2022]

This is because IBM had huge layoffs in the early 90s but kept the buildings. One upside is that everyone even co-ops got their own office. It was just as bureaucratic and political back then.

[jmspring]

I knew researchers at IBM Almaden. They would avoid going in or duck out when the bean counters were around. The idea was to not draw attention to one's self and one's project for fear of being cut.

At the time, IBM also had a very strong focus on either hiring from east Asia or outsourcing / rerouting work to such.

[rexreed]

That's when they went all-in on professional services as their primary go-to-market, chasing high buzzword quotient stuff that was meant to capture services revenue and lock into proprietary software. Remember WebSphere?

[georgeburdell]

I had a professor in the mid-2000s who always had to get a jab in at IBM because he had worked there in the 90s (somewhere in Florida) and hated it