I remember my first job with IBM’s “CIC” department. I think it stood for “Customer Innovation Center”, but we always referred to it as the “Cheap Labor Department”. Basically, software engineers stationed in rural america and getting paid way less than our skillset should go for (when I was hired in 2016, my starting pay was 34k), but because it was rural and remote work wasn’t really a thing yet, those developers didn’t really have much choice (it was still the best paying job around, but still not enough to afford a local apt even back then while paying student loans)
Anyway, the most notable thing about that position was that it was not only salaried, but when a dev got put on a contract, they would tell us to work 44 hours/week, whether there was that much work or not. Obviously they couldn’t and didn’t enforce that outright, but it was 100% implied as part of our performance reviews whether we put in those extra unecessary hours. All so IBM could pocket just a bit more of that contract money without paying the people actually doing the work. Fuck IBM.
ETA: reading through the article I remembered that we actually got a nice pay bump soon after I started because Obama raised the minimum salaried wage that same year, then packaged it as generosity lmao. I wonder what calculations they did to say it was cheaper to give us raises than let us work overtime, hmmmmm
I remember my first job with IBM’s “CIC” department. I think it stood for “Customer Innovation Center”, but we always referred to it as the “Cheap Labor Department”. Basically, software engineers stationed in rural america and getting paid way less than our skillset should go for (when I was hired in 2016, my starting pay was 34k), but because it was rural and remote work wasn’t really a thing yet, those developers didn’t really have much choice (it was still the best paying job around, but still not enough to afford a local apt even back then while paying student loans)
Anyway, the most notable thing about that position was that it was not only salaried, but when a dev got put on a contract, they would tell us to work 44 hours/week, whether there was that much work or not. Obviously they couldn’t and didn’t enforce that outright, but it was 100% implied as part of our performance reviews whether we put in those extra unecessary hours. All so IBM could pocket just a bit more of that contract money without paying the people actually doing the work. Fuck IBM.
ETA: reading through the article I remembered that we actually got a nice pay bump soon after I started because Obama raised the minimum salaried wage that same year, then packaged it as generosity lmao. I wonder what calculations they did to say it was cheaper to give us raises than let us work overtime, hmmmmm