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Comment by chrisbennet | Hacker News Reader

I imagine that the real reason for IBM's "everyone must work in the office" was to get staff to quit rather than laying them off.

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And their research even supports the goal:

> work-from-home talent tended to be “more engaged, have stronger trust in leadership and much stronger intention to stay.”

Stronger intention to stay is a problem if you're trying to shrink the workforce!

I've mentioned this before, but I think it's pretty clear now that IBM is undergoing a slow-motion, manual liquidation (or winding-up). No big drama, no bankruptcy, just slowly and steadily shedding employees and buying back the stock until the whole thing goes poof.

there is a massive reorientation to cloud computing services occurring

What does that actually mean tho'? IBM's churn is such that they have to sell people with 1-2 years experience as "cloud experts". Any real company i.e. not a bodyshop can easily hire people with 3-5 or more years, for waaayyyy less than IBM's hourly billing rate. IBM made sense when you needed 6 months of time from an engineer with 20-30 years COBOL expertise and a direct line to the hardware snd OS engineers. The only way they make sense now is as a TUPE vehicle and that's a legal not a technical service...

Top line revenue at IBM is down to 79B from 105B over the last five years.

This is the ploy that Yahoo used to shrink their workforce. It was my first thought that IBM is doing the same thing.

Sounds like a milder version of this: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il...

A friend whose knew someone working in Toyota HQ in Torrance, CA said that was why they moved the HQ to Texas. It was a way of encouraging unmotivated workers to quit.

It's also easier to pay a strong living wage in Texas than in California. They also already had management staff and lots of production staff in Texas, so there's some consolidation happening.

http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/plano-tx/torrance-c...

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/business/2014/04/29/toyo...

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-toyota-move-2014...

Not always. They laid off people who were not interested in working in the office fulltime.

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