The best thing I got out from my past employment at IBM is an eye-bee-m t-shirt that I (obviously) bought at the company store.
This t-shirt, the all-IBM I-shaped brutalist building I worked at, and the customer demo mainframe idly blinking in the lobby all evoked the mighty past of a company bled dry by its senior management. Even the company store selling branded knick-knacks, it somehow made me very proud to work at such a centenary company.
The company I left IBM for? Yeah, it's just another Fortune 10 soul-less corporation in a nondescript glass building. Not that IBM wasn't, but at least you could see the computing history on the walls.
I was a second generation IBMer and the best thing I got when I left was a big engineer control panel out of a storage controller - all lights, switches and knobs. It's been sitting for 30 years waiting to be turned into a flashing art piece on the wall.
If you have kids or grandkids or even a school nearby why not convert it into a space shuttle control board for them with an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. It would be more useful and inspiring for them.
Ooh, that reminds me that I have a small status lights panel from some IBM mainframe (with tiny bulbs, not LEDs)... maybe my winter project will be to finally convert it to a geeky desk clock.
I worked at Nest for a bit and we moved into the buildings below the hallowed Xerox PARC building. One of my absolute joys was making the winding trek up the hill just to meander outside the building and take in its architecture and history.
It’s strange to think of an organization whose essential imperative is “make money” as being something to consider in some sort of wider sociological, historical or even artistic context, but these places _were_ very important and some of them even harbor beauty.
I suddenly feel privileged for having gotten my eye-bee-m t-shirt as free swag at an event. I did buy my 'Think' coffee mug, and the grand prize to me, a 'Think' baseball cap, to wear when necessary.
I spent eight years at IBM and I too appreciated all the references to their storied history.
A big Swiss re-insurance company, whose C-level somebody loves to buy and exhibit expensive art pieces in their office buildings, gave a $50 Christmas gift to their employees, which was a coffee table book of PICTURES of those art pieces.
Just to make it clear, the $50 was the discounted price for the book that the employees had to PAY.
The gift was the discount. On the book. Of photos of $M++ art.
The cafeteria vendor drama was also a fun way to feel the bean counting penny-pinching machine at work.
The company store was there mostly to sell swag to give them to customers. I’ve expensed plenty of branded stuff, and well, that eye-bee-m t-shirt is classy. Every end of quarter or so they also had a sale that sold stuff below market rates, so it was a cheap way to get nice suitcases and backpacks.
Company I worked for had a bucket of quarters at the receptionists desk so if you had representatives/clients from other companies come over you could get some so that they could get themselves a coffee.
They finally made coffee free when the sales guys said it was too embarassing.
At least here in Australia, (about 2 decades ago) they seriously stopped having free coffee - or any other drink except tap water - for their employees.
Yep, it's as brain damaged an idea as it seems, and yep it's also an accurate depiction of how little they think of their employee productivity.
Mid 2010s I worked in the UK office and we had to bring our own tea/coffee/milk. I don't think we had any 'benefits' that you'd associate with modern tech companies.
The team I was in had no money to expense so for the first few months I worked using just the company provided laptop with no peripherals, and had to wait for someone leaving to be able to grab their external monitor and a laptop stand. Team/Company morale was very low in my time there.
I'm currently enjoying free coffee here at the IBM RTP, NC office. We have free soda machines, free snacks, and free Taco Tuesdays (today, yay!). Pre-pandemic we had more free snacks including fresh fruit, but for some reason they got rid of the fruit. It's not that bad honestly. Not a big fan of the RBA though :(
Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (USA). It sits between 3 cities, Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill which each contain very well known universities, NC State, Duke, and UNC Chapel Hill. Lot of tech, bio/ag, and research hubs here.
Yes, most of IBM charged you for coffee. And this is when they were still doing okay. The real gem was around 2010 when my location stopped picking up trash from offices and cubes. You had to dump your bin into the big one at the end of the building.
Perfect example of missing the forest for the trees business practices based on seeing only numbers and missing any sort of coherent picture.
The money wasted on the employees dumping their own bins probably offsets the money saved on cleaning staff directly by an order of magnitude, not to mention the indirect losses of people being annoyed/pissed and leaving.
I worked at a US IBM site for a couple weeks a few years back and they had an engineer assigned to my group who would walk with us to the kitchenette and pay for our coffee from the machine each time. I hope he was reimbursed!
I know that it seems surprising but at least he (she?) paid to wear a shirt advertising the company he was working for. Many people pay for the privilege to advertise companies that won't give them a penny, only taking more money from them.
Sweet summer child working at a West Coast tech startup. Why give away swag when you can have your employees buy it? This is how it usually is outside the bubble.
I worked the occasional temp night shift at an Amazon warehouse shoving boxes around while working on a startup and they gave out a fair amount of swag. One could call them a tech company and therefore in the bubble but this is about as low on the totem pole as you can get. To their credit, they at least had to foresight to realize that free swag is free advertising. Enlightened self-interest if you will.
Company swag is usually the kind of gear you are wearing while doing stuff that could make you dirty. Lawn mowing, doing house shores, home renovation, fixing a bike or car....
Not something you would willingly spend money on and this is definitely stuff companies give away for free. It seems to be changing a bit now with companies having an environmental committee for all stuff that is made in plastic.
For context I work at a startup that was bought by a megacorp but had a west coast swag mentality for years... the swag I got:
- T-shirt, nice water bottle, backpack pins for interviewing (we got them on the swap over)
- Hoodie and very nice ~$120 backpack on start
- Hoodie at 2 years
- Hoodie at holidays every year
- T shirt & hoodie at every con I worked
- Backpack at 2 years
- Team hoodie, 3 t-shirts, or nort face soft shell every year with team logo on it
- Yeti coffee cups for each team I founded
- Custom yeezies
I have around 20 hoodies now, 3 backpacks, 30 shirts. This doesn't include the electronics we got every year. All of this stuff is american apparel (pre-issues) or nicer.
From megacorp I got a bad t-shirt and a paper thin targus backpack and the option to buy swag. When I rolled over to acquired startup we got a swag budget to bribe megacorp employees into meetings with us. It worked very well. We'd get Sr VPs in to a room with just a t-shirt for their kids.
I don't work on the west coast though I am originally from there. I've worked at 4 companies in Texas in the last 10 or so years ranging from 10s of thousands of employees with international presence down to only 35 employees when I started.
Every single one had free coffee and snacks as well as free swag at least once or twice a year. Meaning shirts, sweatshirts, hats etc. Mostly lowish quality if I'm being fair, but my last company would give everybody really high quality stuff like 3-4 times a year.
Idk. I worked for a massive company that is as east coast as they come. We'd still get free swag all the time. Usually for participating in events or coming to talks and stuff.
Same thing with the startup I worked for, and the midsize/small company I work for now.
From my experience, this is not how it is outside the bubble of SV.
I went to my local Goodwill store looking for the final touches of my Halloween costume. I was disappointed to find the t-shirt bins were completely filled with tech company T-shirts, barely worn.
I got to spend an afternoon entertaining a logo designer a few years ago. It was really fun and educational. I had some sense of _cool_ logos, and why the FedEx logo was so neat.
Learning from that guy though was really eye opening. He had a fondness for the I guess 60's ish design. How do you make something that looks good on the side of a pen, and also looks good on the side of a plane? .5 cm to 5m maybe? familiar? recognizable?
This one is a cute puzzle. It doesn't do much for me, but I'd bet back in the day it was amazing to see a company as uptight and powerful as IBM doing something, I guess, whimsical. Yeah, that tape drive is full of dull grey boring tax records. But it's got a sense of humor about it.
Logo's are tricky.
A good design guideline book is a pretty amazing thing, and there's some of that in the do's and don'ts section. There's something comforting (to my disorganized programmer mind) about seeing the idea fully thought out, how it's supposed to be, and stuff to not do.
The design do's and don'ts always stress me out because once I know the rules, I can't un-see all the violations coworkers make, even if I do my best.
Former coworkers will probably recall that I was quite the stickler for the particular shade of red at a previous startup. I hope I didn't get on too many people's nerves :)
Some dos and don'ts change over the year. The modern fashion of colorful gradients was frowned upon in the 90s and 2000s as cheap, amateurish, gross. But time passes, memory fade, eventually to stand out you have to start with something from far enough in the past.
Rules about scaling logos and making them work in monochrome and color are constant though.
> A rebus (/ˈriːbəs/ REE-bəss) is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+) and the letter "n". It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames.
That's a neat article, but the picture referencing an "escort card" has sent me down a crazy rabbit hole. This is some grade A 19th cringey, red-pill style flirting! I can just see the catalog saying "Cat got your tongue? Women looking at other men? Order our stylish escort cards and you won't be left sitting on our fence! Only five cents!" Look at these insane things: https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/04/21/the-19th-century-e...
Half of them have the gall to ask that they be returned if the lady doesn't want to go home with them. Those cards aren't free, after all! And the default-yes "do nothing if you want to sleep with me" wording, my god!
I joined IBM straight from university about 18 months before Watson at Jeopardy happened.
I couldn’t understand what a mess IBM was. I was there for about 30 months.
During my time they removed tea bags and instant coffee from the “kitchen” at the office to cut costs.
They voluntold me to take a Lean Six Sigma course and I ended up working with a senior colleague on interviewing employees on what they spent their days doing so we could “help them be more efficient”.
My god I was so “green”.
Finally I saw the light and got the fuck out and joined a ln up and coming SaaS company and the difference was night and day.
Jack Donaghy : There they are, the Six Sigmas themselves!
Liz Lemon : They're dudes?
Jack Donaghy : Each of them embodies a pillar of the Six Sigma business philosophy: Teamwork, Insight, Brutality, Male Enhancement, Hand-Shakefulness, and Play Hard.
Lots, but very little of it faces the direct public and what little does isn't advertised as from IBM. The company is largely divided into a consulting, research, product development, and mainframes with that last one on its way out (though in all fairness it's been "on its way out" for 30+ years). As other commenters noted, a big portion of the consulting work is for governments because IBM is a trusted brand in the US and frankly is already large enough to have lots of salespeople to work on RFPs and developers who are already used to working slow. They also do a lot of B2B work though. The consulting work IBM does obviously varies per client but it's more modern than the sibling comment insinuates. Their strategy was focused on hybrid multicloud for a few years (the Redhat acquisition was a major part of this so they could push Openshift on customers) but very recently they're trying to make a hard shift to generative AI. IBM's research is even less public than their consulting projects but they love to advertise their work in quantum computing and I've heard they work on patents for chip manufacturing to sell to TSMC and others (don't quote me on this one, it's definitely not my area of expertise). Product development is responsible for maintaining all the proprietary IBM software that they promised to upkeep for god knows how long even though nobody in their right mind actually uses it anymore. At least that's my understanding. They probably do other more relevant things too. IBM does truthfully do interesting work, but they don't really sell to the public anymore so the public only knows them as "that big company that made computers in the 80s and somehow still exists." They also have a big multinational presence I've heard. Lots of expansion in India.
It's an incredibly beautiful book, not so for the corporate stuff, but for the elegance in Rand's designs. There's even a section in how all sorts of stationary is supposed to look.
i remember reading about how IBM was consistently granted the most patents by the USPTO for over 25 years; this thread made me take a look and turns out Samsung bested them last year. and, of course, IBM spun it as a shift to "focusing" and that they did it "on purpose". feels like a sign of the times
They spend their time navigating the bureaucracy of DoD contracts. IBM is still around because they have contracts with the pentagon. Bidding upon these contracts is a route very rarely taken because it is the kind of process that takes years and knowledge that usually can only be recovered using a pentagram. As a result IBM will continue to exist as long as they continue to hold those Defense contracts that are 1. Extremely lucrative, 2. Long term and 3. Very difficult for anyone else to get involved in.
But rest assured the entire nuclear arsenal of democracy is currently probably running on an old ASM/400 sitting in the broom closet in some Air Force base somewhere.
Government contracting. Those Z series mainframes are pretty much ideal for tasks like running government payroll and pensions. Including in the face of the inevitable congressional brinksmanship.
The side menu, even collapsed, overlays the content.
This is a website lauding IBM design, and yet ...
IBM succumbed to financial capitalism around 2000, maybe before (the usual mix of stock buybacks, reorganizations, senseless acquisitions, debt etc, etc, all accompanied by lavish management rewards), and has been been on a slow march to the grave ever since.
And this is where we are now, the website, about IBM's design prowess, is not designed to actually work.
The point is, getting a website to render correctly across a range of browsers and their specific configurations is not too much of an ask (Well, it's not easy, but the vast majority of other sites manage it), and this one fails.
This t-shirt, the all-IBM I-shaped brutalist building I worked at, and the customer demo mainframe idly blinking in the lobby all evoked the mighty past of a company bled dry by its senior management. Even the company store selling branded knick-knacks, it somehow made me very proud to work at such a centenary company.
The company I left IBM for? Yeah, it's just another Fortune 10 soul-less corporation in a nondescript glass building. Not that IBM wasn't, but at least you could see the computing history on the walls.