In 1985, when I first starting teaching computers here in Atlanta with IBM, we had a lot of nice perks. The building was only two years old and it had been built for education. We had a subsidized cafeteria run by Marriott. It was so good, IBM’ers from other buildings came to eat so we had to stagger when we sent our students to lunch. On the first day of class, if the class started in the morning, there were coffee and pastries. If the class started in the evening there were cookies and soft drinks. All the first aid kits in the labs were full. IBM was making a lot of money. Life was good.
But then things changed. IBM quit making obscene amounts of money. Where our students stayed, they got a continental breakfast so our Education Center Manager said that he didn’t like paying double for stuff so he stopped the first day coffee and pastries. This was like a major event because this had been done at hardware education centers for like forever. It really pissed off a lot of students.
Then, the new administration manager changed cafeteria vendors to save money. Out with Marriott, in with ARA. Prices rose, quality dropped. I cracked a joke to one of the secretaries that Loretta (the admin manager) fixed the crowded cafeteria problem. Unfortunately for me, she overheard me. I was up for an IBM Means Service Award but was blackballed by Loretta. Obviously, she didn’t appreciate my sense of humor. Bitch!
Also the hardware was getting more reliable and smaller. Processors were getting smaller and faster. More stuff could be stored on DASD boxes so less were needed. Less floor space was required so another education center merged with us. Less CEs needed to be trained. The PC revolution hit. We had two major purges. Each time more than thirty instructors were laid off.
An interesting story about this time. We were going through sumpin’ called Market Driven Quality and had to take a class called Transformation Leadership. I wrote about it here. (Holy crap! I wrote that over twelve tears ago!) It was pretty much a waste of time and money, at least for me it was. It gave Ken and Barbie a job. As a part of this Market Driven Quality Program. we put together a number of committees made up of instructors to do some worthless tasks like write a mission statement. Write a vision statement. Two other insignificant tasks that I cannot remember. I didn’t have time to volunteer for any of these committees ’cause besides being a programmer, I also taught multiple classes both in Atlanta and on the road. The other instructors in my group did a lot of teaching as well. Because of that we survived the purges. They said our manager was a slave driver but none of us got laid off. They would send out minutes of these committee meetings and the names of the instructors on them. I would see some instructors who were on two or three of these committees. I naturally thought that these folks had way too much time on their hands. Most of them wound up getting laid off so maybe there was a reason for these committees after all.
As things got worse, the first aid kits in the labs were no longer stocked.
One of my fellow instructors had a friend who had left IBM and went to Microsoft and kept trying to talk him into doing the same. After having to spend a winter in Poughkeepsie doing course development and teaching IBM’s first processor using CMOS technology, and putting up with some of the stuff going on here in Atlanta, he had finally had enough. He left IBM and got a job with Microsoft.
A year or two later, I was on the road a lot teaching a class (HCD/Dynamic I/O) that I had written (that is still being taught today, I might add, altho there have been some changes), and I was in Dallas where Mike was working with Microsoft. We arranged to meet and went out to a Brazilian steakhouse. After pigging out on meat, he took me to his office to show off. “Look”, he said, opening up a first aid kit. It was full. “Do you want a Coke? They’re free.” How neat was that?
I told him that one day Microsoft would be like IBM and when that happened, the first aid kits would no longer be stocked and the soft drinks wouldn’t be free.
I read last week that Microsoft laid off 18,000 workers last week. I wonder if the cokes are still free?
I remember being the end user of IBM products in the 70’s when I ran a wholesale company and we set up to receive orders transmitted over regular phone lines through hand held inventory machines in stores. I paid $30,000 for a Series 1 machine that was about two feet square by five feet tall and it came on a special truck and a guy in a suit, white shirt and tie came out to supervise the unloading.
He plugged it in, ran some tests and then my independent programer came out and stayed for a number of months doing stuff to get it to work and every once in awhile he would come tell me that we need to buy some more DOS because ours was not good enough and that really pissed me off. Of course once he got the thing running he had to train my employees how to enter all of the data for the items to be ordered, on my time and my dime and finally we had it all up and running and it really worked.
The fact that I had worked for a chain store that used similar equipment before was an asset because I knew what I wanted my finished product of order sheets to look like and I had good employees who were smart and a decent programmer and IBM people, who we kept in contact with were a little surprised that we were successful and only spent about twice the amount quoted when we started.
Before I left that company I went through several upgrades of equipment and worked with some very personable IBM sales reps during the mid 80’s. One lovely very attractive lady became good enough friends with me to explain how she worked with various government agencies to help them structure bids for computers to meet their needs and it was just coincidence that IBM was the only company that had products to fit those needs. That was the mid 80’s when I left that company and I was surprised to discover that the company I went to used PC’s to do the processing I had been doing on big computers with their own air-conditioned rooms.
I am amused about the change in computers and costs from college days in 1963 when the IBM’s were all rented from IBM and the maintenance man wore a well cut suit, drove and XK-E and carried a fine leather tool-attache kit. Now a computer screws up bad, you hope you have a good back up and you go buy a new better one than the one you bought a few years ago.
IBM did have a good run and they worked hard to keep a strangle hold on the industry for a long time. Now Apple might be reaching a saturation point with their products and the price of memories and processors is so cheap that I don’t even come close to understanding the word used to describe it.
A lot of us end users spent a lot of money over the past 50 years to get here and I wonder where the next decade or two will take us. Beyond that I don’t give a crap because I will be dead and gone.
Series 1 – A GSD piece of crap! I worked on the big stuff but yeah, we screwed our customers on that stuff too. Tom Watson Jr. was shocked when the Johnson administration filed the anti-trust suit in 1968 against IBM to force them to unbundle. Watson was a Dimocrat and had supported Johnson and the Dimocrats. IBM was a great place to work at the high end but sucked at the low end. I started in Office Products where half the CEs and most of the managers were incompetent. A friend of mine pulled some strings and I got transferred to the Field Engineering Division working on the top of the line products. I went from the lowest paid CE position to the highest paid CE position. Of course, that job was 24 hours a day. I worked 5.5 years on third shift because the money was good. I took a pay cut to come to Atlanta because I went off the clock and became salaried. It was a step toward management but I decided I didn’t want to be a manager and it was a good decision. At my age, I wouldn’t have gone any higher than 1st line. After my accident, IBM took very good care of me and paid my full salary until I could come back to work. Even though I was in hardware, they were developing a recovery class for hardware folks and I got into that program which was where I taught myself programming. That would prolly not happen today. I would have been forced onto disability immediately.
Dreamland Management 101………
I have been gone 18 years from the Company which was the largest Manufacturer of Hospital Equipment in the world …Sterilization Equipment, Lights , Beds Etc.
I had 20 years in that place when it was sold out to a competing company.
Just like you the memories of Mission statements with constant revisions , the endless management training sessions , first class cafeteria & free goodies all are familiar.
Just prior to the release of the “Dirty Thirty” the last grandfathered group with retirement health care , a management training session was held with all department heads , managers & supervisors off site for 3 days conducted by a high priced consultant on “How to motivate & develop the professional staff reporting to you” It was a hoot with practice tactical teams, practice cross discipline training & developing company loyalty teams. Oh yeah we all had free sandwiches, donuts & soft drinks.
Anyway we all passed , were awarded glass cube ash trays, a free leather brief case & got our group picture taken. Then back to work & instructed to apply our newly acquired knowledge to our respective staff development efforts.
Within the next several weeks the word came down from our new corporate regime….people in Erie made to much money….wages were frozen , no raises & even though I had received a review of distinction”I was told quite rare” no raise for me either.
Within several more weeks all of us who had attended this last training session received letters stating if you are over 55 with more then 10 years of service you had one year to voluntarily take retirement or lose your healthcare benefits.
Of the 33 who received these letters , 30 chose freedom & healthcare over remaining with no benefits, the”Dirty Thirty” was born……..Corporate human relations was absolutely shocked. Some of us were called in to private meetings in attempts to get us to remain sans benefits but no one budged. We all left on the same day as a group.
The company we once all worked for & loved is now gone , closed down by the new company with manufacturing operations moved out of state , & all employees furloughed.
It is all memories now with occasional former employee get togethers. We read the increasing obituaries of former colleagues lamenting their passing but those 25 who remain from the “Dirty Thirty” still have our heath care benefits & you know what ….we can afford to pay for our own cokes.
dudley – It was always incomprehensible to me that management never stumbled upon the best quality program in the world.
1. Hire competent employees. In many companies, aptitude tests have been abolished because they discriminate. Yeah. They discriminate against incompetent people. I went to IBM computer basic school with a black guy who had absolutely no business being there. He was a nice guy but didn’t have the intelligence, aptitude, or knowledge to do the job. He washed out. We had a girl who had absolutely no electronics training. She had never heard about Ohm’s Law fer chrissake! And this was in 1978 before things got really bad. She washed out. We had a Vietnamese dude who had language problems. He was my lab partner during Systems Concepts, which is some basic programming. He had problems with symbolics in instructions. I got way behind trying to explain them to him. He kept wanting to take them literally. They had to assign an instructor to me to catch me up (only took one day) and an instructor to him to get him through that portion of the course. He washed out. He later sued IBM. Don’t know the result. Three people who shouldn’t have been hired and wouldn’t even been considered had they been given an aptitude test since all three would have failed.
2. Promote competent people to management. Skin color or vaginas should have nothing to do with it.
3. Give employees clear goals.
4. Reward them if they make their goals and pay them appropriately. If they don’t make their goals, counsel them. If they consistently fail, fire them.
How fucking hard is that? That’s the way a meritocracy should work. That’s what they do in sports. The teams that win have the best players, regardless of color and the best coaches or managers. We don’t see any programs to get more whites, who are way under-represented as players, in football or basketball do we? Of course, the Diversity (All Hail Diversity!) police do go after teams for not having enough blacks in management positions.
I don’t remember how many quality programs we had at IBM but all of them were a waste of time and money.
Denny,
I live about a mile from Microsoft building 1 and several of my neighbors work there. Yes, the cokes are still free (and the cafeterias are still subsidized, and still good!)
Russ
Awesome! Glad they’re still taking care of you in spite of the layoffs. I’m one of the lucky ones who still was on the old pension plan at IBM. My periodontist is married to a third generation IBMer and she just missed the old pension plan by a few months. It took over 80 years for IBM to change their benefit plans. A lot of pissed off employees when it happened.
I am also an IBM retiree – started in the good old days and went through the changes and programs that started about 1990 or so. What I remember most from the Market Driven Quality (MDQ) program was the slogan:
“IBM = MDQ + You!”
Then the buyouts began followed by the first layoffs in company history began in 1993. Around that time some electronic graffiti began to show up on the online forums and other places in the form of the following pseudo-code:
If IBM = MDQ + You
then MDQ = IBM – You
Slogan seemed to disappear shortly after that.
Remember six sigma and five ups?
I worked over 30 years for a local phone (Bell System) before and after divestiture.
It seemed like every two years that there would be be a new flavor of management every couple of years:
Peter Drucker – MBO
Noel Tichy – can’t remember his claim to fame
W. Edwards Deming – Quality Improvement
MASTERS – don’t remember the acronym, but I got to set in a classroom for two days.
Rosabeth Kantor – Change Masters
— more that I have forgotten about
You could always tell what was coming by checking the new reading material on management desks as the psychobabble flowed down through the organization.
Not sure any of it helped — good managers inherently knew how to train and lead; mediocre managers were dependent on the skill and work ethic of subordinates; and bad managers ended up driving good people from their teams.
Cokes are only free if you have to do work for Coca-Cola at one of their buildings… Otherwise you are on your own….
18,000 laid off? What about this fine recovery we have going on here, courtesy of our President? Or is that just a bunch of Bullshit? Oh yeah that’s what I thought. I hope those people saved up some money and have their resume’s in order.
All companies which experience a meteoric growth reach a plateau where they grow stale & lose the dynamic which fueled their success. When this happens & management does or cannot respond to the market they are surpassed by the competition.
Given the focus of its founding leadership has been askew for about 10 years & Microsoft has basically been repackaging old technology….this downsizing is long overdue & should have been expected.
“What about this fine recovery we have going on here, courtesy of our President? ”
My thoughts exactly. If the economy is so damned good, why is the news filled with reports of home invasion burglaries over the last four or five years?