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

[coder]

I'm not sure where this particular employee resides, but there are some fairly recent changes to OT laws in the U.S, where certain salaried employees can be eligible for overtime.

WTF? Must be a state thing.

AFAIK, the only time a salaried employee has a wage claim, under labor laws, is when they work so many hours that their salary doesn't even amount to minimum wage.

[Jumbotron]

I have had the fortune (misfortune) since 1979 to have worked for over a dozen companies from 1 man operations to huge corporations like AOL and Viacom and CSX Railroad. And almost everyone I worked with at the time I worked for them happened to be a time in which they were undergoing extreme stress financially and or corporately. Most eventually failed or were bought out, names changed, influence diminished, etc.

I saw the same desperate, overblown, prickish and in the case of AOL illegal behavior as I sense here from IBM's asshole comments. I'm not surprised to see this. IBM is STILL in hot water for firing a metric crap ton of seasoned highly skilled older workers for a bunch of code monkies willing to be paid a quarter of what the old guys were getting along with a case of RedBull. Not only that, IBM hasn't made a single penny in profit in nearly 10 years. Yes... you've read that right. Since 2012, IBM has not made a penny in profit. Ohhh..they show a couple of three years in green since then but that's because they use what my now deceased accountant father used to call "bullshit artist accounting" .

Make no mistake, IBM is a failed company. It continues to fail today and will continue to fail in the future. Buying Red Hat was a move of extreme desperation. Red Hat is in mortal danger. That email by that IBM manager is just one of many data points in making my statement.

[drjohnnyfever]

So... do non-compete agreements in the US provide you with compensation like in most European countries?

Yes, it's called a job. You are free to take it or leave it.

It's odd to me so many people feel like they should be able to dictate terms. A company can't force you to accept employment terms any more than you can force them to. And frankly that's the way it should be. Employment should be voluntary on all sides, otherwise it's... Involuntary.

[Paradigm Shifter]

This surprises me about as much as the sun rising in the morning.

I was going to write about my personal experiences with things like this, but (a) similar things have already been mentioned by others and (b) it's water under the bridge and is better left in the past.

[cliff]

Unless it's in your employment contract, there's no such thing as "8 hours/day, 5 days/week", or anything like that. Salaried positions don't pay overtime. If you get a salary and you're being overworked, all you can really do is quit.

Are they really salaried? I didn't see that in the article? Either way I don't see myself switching to OS2 any time soon.

[coder]

Are they really salaried? I didn't see that in the article?

Yes. It said they were "an IBM employee" (i.e. not a contractor), so that means a salary. There's basically a 0.0% chance that an IBM employee who's a kernel developer and (formerly) official maintainer of their VNIC driver, would be paid hourly.

[cjcox]

You had to have worked there to fully understand just how anti-FOSS IBM really is. IBM is not your friend.

[moilami]

[reavertm]

Perhaps the guy is doing kernel development not in free time but as part of his IBM job. In such case requiring him to use company email address in commit messages is the most reasonable and non-controversy.

[Alliancemd]

My previous job had in the contract a clause that said that any code I write in my free time is owned by the company as well.
They didn't send me emails though, asking to take down my open source projects or contributions.