Not only will they save money on office space but many of these companies are requiring employees to take pay cuts if they move to a lower cost area. Like all the sudden your value to the company changes because you moved?
> But if you're single, staying cooped up alone at home can be a disaster.
During COVID I would say this is more of a problem but in my 8 years of remote work I don't really miss the office at all. In normal times you can get out if you want to head to a coffee shop or something. We do video calls which seems to help some of the team members feel better about the situation. Having a commute was absolutely the most stressful thing for me.
I do most of my socializing outside of working hours. Being alone and remote doesn't seem to effect me but I'm also super introverted. I understand this may effect extroverts differently.
> which is problematic for building teams and culture;
Why? I've been remote for about 8 years. I don't think I've had any problems building relationships. The only thing you miss from the office is the time spent screwing around with co-workers. I guess you could consider that "Team building".
If you are genuinely asking, there are people, myself included, who don't think virtual interactions are a substitute for building relationships. It's the same reason I want to transition to meeting someone in person after talking to them on a dating app. I can totally understand that everyone is different and may not think the same. For instance, if the only advantage of in-person interactions at work you can think of is goofing around, I suspect you are better suited for remote work.
The reason to transition to in-person for a dating app is because the relationship is supposed to become physical. Not so in an office - I don't think the analogy makes sense, because they types of relationships are so different.
My first month of work, I inadvertently got pulled into a playing soccer with a few coworkers. I didn't know many of them but by the end of the day I felt close enough to a lot of them that I was a lot more confident talking to them whether it's for help with a product, general programming questions, or in some cases personal stuff.
I'm sure I could have cultivated those relationships over the course of working there much longer but I don't think there would be any virtual substitute for that one soccer game.
That was my exactly my experience. Many of those soccer team mates became the closest colleagues ive had largely BECAUSE of the time we spent winning and losing!
The best friends I've made in my career were from remote only teams. I guess you could say full remote is problematic in the sense that so is in-office for building relationships/teams. It's a trade off and I suspect the winning strategy is the one that is invested into the most, rather than one being inherently better than the other.
We've been doing a couple of things now that everyone is wfh. We have these mixer meetings on Friday where you meet with people you never work with normally, in small groups, and talk about what you're working on. We also have online trivia contests and other games sometimes it just shoot the breeze (as sanctioned, boss scheduled meetings).
As someone so has worked from home a lot over the last 20+ years and had been working from home for a few years prior in a business where everyone else was in the office (until this Spring), I appreciate the extra time hanging out.
I was fine before but part of that is that I transitioned from full time in the office to wfh when my spouse was relocated.
I think that's what they attempted to do with Watson and Watson Health, but it didn't take off the way they were hoping. It seems like they were early in the "AI" space.
Speaking as a former IBMer. I understand IBM wanting to be a player in the cloud space but I'm not sure they ever will be. Like who seriously uses IBM Cloud? I know some big corps probably accidentally get IBM cloud credits with their large IBM contracts but does anyone actually choose IBM in this space?
Also a former IBMer. IBM cloud has really good compliance for "legacy type" customers. Things like banks and governments where all of the hoops discredit other cloud providers.
Much of IT spending is controlled by people that aren't technical and don't really understand what they're buying. No tech firm is going to choose IBM cloud but plenty of corporations will.
Anyone who has been connected to the internet knows the current cloud standards are set by AWS and Azure (maybe with Google and Oracle thrown in there as decorations).
Not really. If you’re eg a Retail corporation, you would not want to spend a dime on AWS. So it’s usually not just tech that’s involved in making these decisions.
IBM bought the best hosting company, at the time, SoftLayer, and transformed it into a the absolute worst.
I see where they’re going, if they’re trying to learn from what went wrong with SoftLayer. IBM culture destroyed SoftLayer, so if they want another go at cloud, they do need that business to stay VERY fare away from the traditional IBM and their consulting business.
Softlayer was a one trick pony. They had the best bare metals in the market. But their product was very poorly built and extremely hard to scale out or add features to.
This is not unexpected. Startups will optimize for a few use cases and deliver, get acquired on those strengths only for the acquiring company to realize that ... the tech isn’t easily scalable.
It also depends on what they mean by cloud. If cloud is their Softlayer acquisition, I am not impressed.
I would love to see them build out a real cloud solution, perhaps even using datacenters full of their z15's. I can't imagine anyone competing with that on commodity hardware in terms of deployment speed and connectivity speed between instances in the same location. It would be crazy expensive though and I doubt they would ever consider it and someone at IBM would have to write a web interface / API into the system that mimics the options of all the current cloud providers.
I think I had my account banned the last 3 times I created a new ad. None were against their policies. My account go reinstated each time but still.