IBM Management Culture Has Always Been Penny Wise and Pound Foolish
During the late 90s and mid 2000s I worked as a contractor for IBM. I was managed from one location, and worked with people from another location at a customer site. My local colleagues (both IBMers and contractors) had a laptop each and a customer supplied desktop. I had a customer supplied desktop. There were two tasks I did periodically which required certain software to be installed on the desktop. Unfortunately, both pieces of software could not be installed at the same time because the desktop's hard disk did too small. So, I went to my IBM manager and asked for a disk upgrade to be able to do both tasks without going through the install/uninstall process. I was spending eight hours a week installing and uninstalling. Naturally, no hard disk upgrade! So, for the next year IBM paid for eight hours of my time to swap the software. The hard disk upgrade would have paid for itself in a week.
After a year I was able to convince the customer to give 'me test' PCs for various project work, so that I was able to do my job since IBM still would not supply me with an actual IBM (Lenovo hadn't bought IBM's PC division yet!) laptop. Eventually, I needed a memory upgrade for work tasks and after a few weeks a new IBM manager approved it! That would have been great, but it took three months to get approval from the higher management and by the time I received the memory stick, I had been supplied by the customer with a different machine for a different project and the memory was no longer compatible!
Finally, after nearly eight years I was told by my tenth IBM manager that I was finally getting an IBM laptop!! Unknown to the manager I had access to the shipping and inventory system and noticed one day that the new laptop was mysteriously heading to Ohio instead of Seattle! After a few days, it headed towards Seattle, but had magically become a much older laptop! Five days before it was due to arrive IBM lost the contract with the customer and another company took the contract over. I was given the news that I would not get the laptop due to IBM being terminated from the contract. So, with nothing to lose, I confronted my manager as to whether his wife liked her new laptop (his wife worked for IBM and they lived in Ohio) and what kind of con was he trying to pull? Did he think I would not notice the difference in laptops? He hung up and I never heard from him again.
Working for IBM as a contractor was the worst work experience I ever had - they did not supply the equipment to do the job, and in the later years they started to reduce contractor rates - usually just before buying another company! I would have quit, but I had to stay in the job until my Green Card was approved.
So, I will never work for IBM again in any capacity as these anecdotes are just the tip of the iceberg as to how IBM managed to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.