I ask because I think it shows what a Rorschach test the arguments over DEI have become. I at least found one quote from the Policy Letter #4 which stated "It is the policy of this organization to hire people who have the personality, talent and background necessary to fill a given job, regardless of race, color or creed." Of course, in 1953 that was a pretty bold stance given the widespread official segregation policies in the Southern US at the time. Now, though, it feel like how you view that statement depends on which "tribe" you align with in the DEI debate: Anti-DEI folks say "Exactly, we want to hire people based on merit regardless of race, color or creed, and DEI has basically turned into a policy of racial quotas" while pro-DEI folks say "The policy back then was to fight official and systemic racism, which we still need to combat today."

So I'd just like to find the full original policy document so I can make up my own mind.

Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up.

I think they are looking for scapegoats for some cost cutting. Officially force people back and hopefully some will quit. In practice, many will continue to operate as before.

1: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nickle-lamoreaux_dei-diversit...

Everyone I know there knows this was coming after Nov 2024. IBM just wants to hide the number and age of the people being fired.

> And the mainframe giant last week told all US Cloud employees, sales or otherwise, to return to the office at least three days per week at designated "strategic" locations.

Yep. It's a de facto layoff.

Smart of them to add the DEI statement - as we can see here, everyone is arguing over that while ignoring what is essentially a mass layoff.

I think 3 days in-office and 2 days WFH is the sweet spot, at least for me.

Age bias lawsuit: https://www.cohenmilstein.com/fired-ibm-workers-wrap-up-age-...

IBM audit: https://itaa.com/insights/ibm-audits-lessons-learnt-cimino-i...

What I have consistently seen is hiring standards fluctuating based on company performance: loosening when profits are high, tightening when they're not. The most pervasive bias in hiring isn't DEI-related but rather social network preference, where managers favor friends, neighbors, or people similar to themselves regardless of qualifications. This mirrors the "backdoor" admissions seen at elite universities and extends to government appointments, where connections often appear to outweigh merit...

This statement is not true

But if you're working on cloud, hard to see how working at the office is any more productive than from home.

also, this is significant:

> The employee shuffling has been accompanied by rolling layoffs in the US, but hiring in India – there are at least 10x as many open IBM jobs in India as there are in any other IBM location, according to the corporation's career listings. And earlier this week, IBM said it "is setting up a new software lab in Lucknow," India.

What's the risk calculus here? If I were an apathetic CEO who just cares about the bottom-line, I would wait for the government to at least publicly pressure the company before bending the knee. That way, the company is insulated from lawsuits to a degree, "coercion" could be the defense.

It's almost like they're eager to promote racism now lol.

That said, I've never worked at IBM, and the sales segments they listed in the article (strategic, enterprise, etc.) are notoriously company-specific. But, I can't imagine the ones in the exception list cover all of teams with named accounts.

Deliberately placing your sales teams in different cities than their clients is almost always an incredibly dumb idea, WFH or not. In 15 years of sales engineering/sales engineering management, I remember exactly one account team we deliberately placed outside of their client geography, and that was because the client was so spread out, it made more sense to put the team close to a big airport than pick a single client site to place them near.

edit - I’m talking about dedicated/assigned teams, not inside sales or startups that have one or a handful of teams to cover everything.

In this case it is bad management hiding behind RTO/DEI excuses. WFH works for many and especially on "cloud" stuff I do not see the point of having people systematically RTO to... tweak a few config files (most of the time) or change some hardware (some of the time)

I have the example of a friend in IT who was made to drive 4 hours to change.... the default DNS on a Windows machine at a client's.... a phone call would have done it...

Must’ve invoked a lot of nostalgia for them seeing Musk’s inauguration speech.

Must be hard to generate new sales for their deadass mainframe tech.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

[1] https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/vaccine-passport

How else would they handle the database and personnel backend of the current fascist's database requirements?

Jewish Holocaust victims' tattoos were IBM database primary IDs. and given ongoing federal/government contracting, thus is yet another opportunity to be at ground zero for another genocide.

What in the actual fuck is that supposed to mean? Firing black people to make the president happy?

As if there were any meaningful amount of "DEI" to "purge" from the tech industry in the first place.

Absolutely disgusting.