IBM To Kernel Maintainer: "You Are An IBM Employee 100% Of The Time"

[kiffmet]

Neraxa good luck with that. People opposing this idea will just belittle it as "socialism", effectively preventing any serious debate on the topic.

[danmcgrew]

"Pretty strange considering IBM now owns Red Hat..."

Not strange at all. This decision was made by an individual, as are most of the brain-dead decisions made by "managers". Sometimes these things are done at the corporate level (still doesn't make these type decisions "non-brain-dead", however). Read on...

Back in the days when airlines showered travellers with free mileage, Motorola Semiconductor Div. (back in the days there was a Motorola Semiconductor Div.) came out with a pronunciamento, an edict, stating that all those free-travel airline miles, "earned" in the pursuit of service to Motorola (read "business trips") belonged to Motorola, and must be turned over to same, for its use only, and only as it saw fit.
A friend--a Moto sales-force type--dashed off a quick, but politically correct memo to the president of Motorola, stating that he had no problem with this new policy, but as most of his trips were taken after normal business hours (sometimes late-night; sometimes very-early-morning; sometimes all-night, as in California to Boston) so that he was available for business during "normal" hours the following day, he would really like to be compensated for HIS PERSONAL time spent in the pursuit of business for Motorola.

The policy was quietly dropped. VERY quietly.

[King InuYasha]

The timezone on the commit is UTC-5, which corresponds the Central Daylight Time. Lijun either lives in the midwestern US or midwestern Canada. As far as I can tell, the laws in those regions do permit IBM to make such mandates unless the employee contract says otherwise.

Red Hat's employee contracts explicitly give allowances for this, but I would not be surprised that IBM's do not. That said, supposedly, IBM changed their policy a couple years ago to mirror Red Hat's, but I guess that's not really true...

[L_A_G]

So they're basically saying "Activities done during non-working hours are actually working hours".

Am I reading that right"?

I suspect that it was probably just a really badly worded email from the HR department. They're probably unhappy with how it looks like he's an independent contributor not sponsored by IBM in any way when in reality he's doing it all on-the-clock at IBM. In other words they want to be clearly acknowledged as the ones who actually paid for what he's contributed whilst on-the-clock.

[CochainComplex]

That depends on the country you're being employed in. In my country it's limited to 8h a day and 40h/week (5 working days) with anything over that being paid overtime. I'm simplifying of course, but it is limited.

The gentle conservative american citizen is considering this as "socialist country" ...but in fact its just human.

IBM germany is also not so nice concerning their management culture (I have heard that of a retiered employee - just his experience but I dont have any other input).

[r1348]

The gentle conservative american citizen is considering this as "socialist country" ...but in fact its just human.

IBM germany is also not so nice concerning their management culture (I have heard that of a retiered employee - just his experience but I dont have any other input).

Ex-IBM employee in Italy here, I can only say: run, run like hell!

[johnefrancis]

In Ontario, the labour laws very much make anything an employee produces the property of the employer. This comes from the emploees duty of loyalty to the employer. Even pre-existing work, if the employee takes related employment, could become the employer's property.

For these and many other reasons, tech professionals should not work in employment relationships in Ontario unless for a govt or if they have a union to competently bargain for them.

[CochainComplex]

Neraxa good luck with that. People opposing this idea will just belittle it as "socialism", effectively preventing any serious debate on the topic.

Fun Fact this is more or less law in any eu country - from the economical point of view not realy a deep starving socialist country like north korea. But I know the politicians spreading that BS narrative.

Rich company owners financing conservatives. Of course it is not in their interesst because it means people are no modern slaves anymore.

[martinus]

Just accept what you already know in the back of your head: this is not an isolated incident by a misguided manager, this is the ugly face of corporations.

[bug77]

Lets hope it's just a manager over reacting. It would be easy to see if this is a global IBM policy.

It is. I worked for them (as an external) and colleagues who wanted to switch to full-time employment were required to give up any and all participations they may have had in other companies, while IBM reserved their rights to veto your work on any external projects.

The "100% time IBM employee" may stand because there are no 9-5 contracts, but you only have my ass for that interval. Then again, there never was a shortage of idiot managers, was it?