IBM was legendarily over-managed. This is second-hand but a guy I used to work with told a story of when he interned for a summer at IBM in London during the mid-90s doing what would now be called a QA engineering. At that time everyone wore suits to work but the culture was changing so the interns put in a request to be allowed casual Fridays. Bear in mind that they were locked in a back room somewhere without any customer interaction so they didn't think it was a big deal.

Months later, just before the end of the internship, they received a reply. Their manager had forwarded their request up the chain of command and the email had the full quoted history. Their request had been bumped up 4 successive layers in the London office, then across to the US headquarters where it continued its upwards trajectory, finally alighting on the desk of a VP who, after thanking them for bring the issue to his attention, rendered an carefully considered opinion.

The whole process had taken weeks, presumably as each person in the hierarchy debated whether they had the authority to tackle such a weighty issue.

The email had then been inexplicably bounced back DOWN the chain one link at a time, back across the Atlantic Ocean, and through the local office, down to the suit-bound interns, again weeks later, who by this stage only had days left at the internship.

The answer was no.

In the late 90s I moved from one country to another. As a part of a job hunt I applied to the local IBM office, because I had some OS/2 mileage. Then promptly got three offers from other places, accepted one and completely forgot about the IBM application.

Not 8 (eight) months later I got a call from their HR saying they'd like to interview me next Thursday. And then they got completely flabergasted when I said I was no longer interested. Don't know what they were smoking, but they were exceptionally full of themselves... while not even offering a good pay.

My dad was am IBM lifer, when they said they could wear suits that weren't black he wore a blue suit and his boss asked him if he rode the bus to work.

Mr. Show, "Change for a Dollar": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyocQT4Vn2g

I interned at an IBM R&D site in Winchester (UK) for a year in 1988-89 and none of us interns wore suits, or even ties. I don't recall many of the f/t IBMers doing so either. It was pretty informal really.

(Not disputing your story, just providing a different perspective.)

I have a few of these.

I asked to be excepted from a contract condition giving IBM first pick on any IP I develop in my own time.

Keep in mind, I was working in one of their technical support call centres. I had no access to IBM proprietary information, I had no role in developing it, I was a complete non risk on this front. I had more access to customer systems, no access to RED or BLUE networks, just an IBM lotus notes account I could use to slowly download information from HR.

Everyone I could physically speak to looked at my request and went, hey that's a really reasonable request.

It took 6 weeks for the first no to come back, my direct manager, whose stats I was apparently holding in place, apparently tried to intercede, adding 2 further weeks for a review. The answer was still no. This had apparently gone up through one line of reporting across to the US, branched out into legal and came back down that path. It was crazy.

So I left, so I could work on a small software project with a friend without risking IBM having an interest in it.

Another one. The HR forms were all written in the early 80s and digitised sometime in the 00s. Our team, not being customer facing, was super diverse. I know there was an attempt to try and get the HR forms updated to recognise other gender/pronoun combinations. This took like 12 weeks to be reviewed, and I think the eventual no was based entirely on the fact that no one wanted to try and figure out whose job it was to update the forms. Our team was full of LGBT people, and retention of them appeared to be critical. Hard no.

Also, our sexual harrassment training came on tape (in the year of our lord two thousand and ten) and implied that it was the updated version, previously it might have been vinyl or something.

Was? Is.