IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Reactions to IBM’s RTO and “near-customer” mandates

  • Many see the sales-location and cloud RTO rules as a de facto layoff tool and way to shrink expensive US headcount without formal redundancies, especially for older, rooted workers.
  • Some note that being near customers makes sense for field sales, but forcing time in IBM offices when teams and clients are elsewhere is seen as pure control theater.
  • Reports of poor office conditions (stale equipment, no desks, more distractions) reinforce that this isn’t about productivity.
  • Others doubt the article’s “DEI purge” framing and see the headline as rage-bait compared to the actual memo content.

Remote vs Office Work: Does It Work?

  • Experiences are sharply mixed. Some companies found WFH clearly didn’t work (especially for new teams/juniors, onboarding, weak management, open-plan offices), and quietly reversed course.
  • Others report fully remote engineering and consulting working extremely well, with strong onboarding and processes, and view RTO as management fashion or stealth cost-cutting.
  • Fraud and interview cheating in fully remote hiring are raised as real issues; some anticipate more in-person interview checkpoints.
  • Several argue the real divide is by role, seniority, and personality (introvert/extravert), not one-size-fits-all policies.

Stealth Layoffs, Offshoring, and Age Bias

  • Commenters link RTO and relocation demands to IBM’s long history of “resource actions” and age discrimination (“dinobabies”), now combined with visible hiring growth in India and new labs there.
  • Forcing moves or long commutes is described as a legal way to induce older, better-paid staff to resign.

DEI Rollback, Politics, and IBM’s History

  • Many see IBM aligning opportunistically with the current US administration’s anti-DEI stance to protect federal contracts.
  • Others say this is mostly gutting DEI programs (outreach, HBCU events, internal teams), not explicitly firing “DEI hires” – but worry it will function that way in practice.
  • IBM’s historic complicity with the Third Reich and later unethical behavior is invoked as evidence that profit routinely trumps ethics.

Broader DEI and Meritocracy Debate

  • Thread contains a long, conflicted debate:
    • One side: DEI = racist quotas, undermines individual equality, should be replaced by race-blind, poverty-focused mobility efforts.
    • Other side: structural racism and bias (including in hiring and education) remain; DEI is an imperfect but necessary corrective and opportunity pipeline.
  • Disagreements center on: whether diversity improves performance; whether current evidence for that is strong; and whether focusing on race vs class is fair or counterproductive.

Legal and Enforcement Concerns

  • Some argue explicit “DEI purges” or DEI-based terminations would be straightforward discrimination cases—if agencies and courts actually enforced the law.
  • Others point out tactics like forced relocations create “constructive dismissal,” but proving discriminatory intent is hard, especially with weakened labor enforcement.