Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B • Hacker News Board

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#321

Post by stochastic_monk » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

kev009 wrote: post #299

stochastic_monk wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m surprised the Stratix FPGA platform isn’t getting more marketing. Half a TiB/s memory bandwidth [0] (white paper) when GPU’s memory transfer is the bulk of the overhead could help Intel make up for lost gains in SIMD application marketshare. [0]: https://www.altera.com/content/dam/altera-www/global/en_US/p...

Maybe misparented comment? HP has GenZ, IBM is going to move from DDR or DDR buffers to CAPI attached RAM -- expect to see HBM2 attached to CPUs in 2019. I'd be happy to discuss that kind of thing in email.

Certainly misplaced! It was late, and somehow I scrambled IBM Research and Intel. I was thinking about how Intel's marketing is generally quite bad, whether it's unfair benchmarks or not knowing which products to actually push.

Please disregard.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#322

Post by Spooky23 » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

Arnt wrote: post #279

tobtoh wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sales guys are at the top. They are generally competent. Proof = they sold a massive deal. Seems very flawed logic. Anyone can make a sale if you promise everything, charge a low price (that can't sustain your organisation/solution), and have no responsibility for actually being able to deliver within the timeframe they promised. I fail to see how that shows the sales person is competent.

Pretend you're a customer. Would you buy from someone who promises everything at a price that cannot sustain his organisation and accepts no responsibility?

Pretend you are a CIO with an average job tenure of 18-24 months.

Do you give the CEO the right, expensive and difficult answer? Or assign accountability to a third party, bug out and leave the mess to the next guy?

In most companies with mediocre the latter is the answer.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#323

Post by SFjulie1 » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 5:38 PM UTC

goodroot wrote: post #141

happyopossum wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IBM isn't a successful technology company with a proven record building good products. Whoa, what? Sure, some of their achievements are in their past, but that claim really overlooks a ton of history.

You're right. That was too sweeping, in fairness. I've edited in 'good software products'; that record is categorically abysmal. IBM makes amazing mainframes and physical technical systems, and conducts some fascinating cutting-edge research, and even built really effective punch-card machines for use within Nazi concentration camps. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust )

IBM has branch prediction (and Out of Order Execution) in their mainframe architecture: the Z series.

I strongly suspect they are subject to a variant of spectre meltdown. Yet, no news were made public on the topic. A tinge of "same cause produces the same effects" makes me think that they are immune to the scrutiny of security research on the topic because there is a tad of security by obfuscation, and secondly university and google don't care about mainframe. It does not mean attackers don't care about the backbone of banking system.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#324

Post by TimJYoung » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #286

xienze wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That stuff is toxic, and I pity any organization that Oracle got its claws into using that junk. In my experience, no one is really duped by these big companies. The people writing the checks generally start their search with magic quadrant leaders and then further narrow it down to the biggest players because "we can't trust our business to some no-name." It's really a situation that companies willingly put themse…

My father was accused of being "anti-Microsoft" sometime in the early 90s, because he kept pushing for cheaper alternatives. He was writing Windows books at the time, so he ended up bringing in a book to show them. A lot of this purchasing is purely "cover your ass" thinking. Going with IBM, Microsoft or Oracle won't get you fired.

I don't have a lot of love for MS today, but you'd be hard-pressed to compare the MS of today to the MS of the early 90s. Find some developer magazines from that time and check out their ads - they were still scrambling to grab market share in areas other than DOS/Windows for client PCs, and had a lot of competition in the form of Borland, Lotus, Novell, and Oracle, as well as smaller fish like Watcom, Gupta Technologies, Fox Software, etc.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#325

Post by iamleppert » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

wahern wrote: post #235

dpweb wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales and Engineering - very different competencies. Companies like IBM are NOT technology companies. They are sales-culture oriented, and their product HAPPENS TO BE technology. In fact you could argue, the only way to win big enterprise contracts in the first place, is to be a sales-culture company. But after selling the deal, their workers have to solve a difficult engineering and organizational management problem…

Early in my career I had a brief stint as an engineer at a consulting company in the ERP industry. Our projects always had at least one functional consultant whose expertise was _using_ the ERP systems and understanding how they integrated with other systems and procedures. This was a different position than PM, who was often an employee of the client company who drew the short straw. The functional consultants had v…

Amusing to me that people consider a ton of modules to be a sign of high code quality.

What was your role in the project? Did you swoop in and do a copy and paste refactor into a bunch of tiny files and declare your victory?

I’m going out on a limb here but I’m going to say you’re a little bitter at the value of the consultant vs. your own textbook, indignant idea of value.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#326

Post by someguy12 » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 10:11 PM UTC

stochastic_monk wrote: post #263

kev009 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, IBM is a multifaceted company. These kinds of projects fall under what used to be called IBM Global Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Global_Services . It could be compared somewhat to EDS (HP), Accenture, Perot Systems (Dell) etc. I've never heard of over-delivery from any of these kinds of outsourcing arrangements, they always seem so obviously destined for boondoggle. IBM proper, the one that…

I’m surprised the Stratix FPGA platform isn’t getting more marketing. Half a TiB/s memory bandwidth [0] (white paper) when GPU’s memory transfer is the bulk of the overhead could help Intel make up for lost gains in SIMD application marketshare. [0]: https://www.altera.com/content/dam/altera-www/global/en_US/p...

Although this is misplaced, I'll reply anyway.

There isn't more buzz around the Stratix 10 MX because it's a phantom chip. Intel's December press release clearly states that the chips are available but you can not buy one of these chips today. A blogger did some research and came to the conclusion that the press release claims were simply not true:

https://semiaccurate.com/2017/12/19/intels-claims-fpgas-hbm-...

In contrast, Xilinx released a video of their competing chip working with all channels running at the full 460GB/s on day 1 of silicon bring up:

https://www.xilinx.com/video/fpga/first-virtex-ultrascale-pl...

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#327

Post by Nomentatus » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 11:30 PM UTC

iamleppert wrote: post #325

wahern wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early in my career I had a brief stint as an engineer at a consulting company in the ERP industry. Our projects always had at least one functional consultant whose expertise was _using_ the ERP systems and understanding how they integrated with other systems and procedures. This was a different position than PM, who was often an employee of the client company who drew the short straw. The functional consultants had v…

Amusing to me that people consider a ton of modules to be a sign of high code quality. What was your role in the project? Did you swoop in and do a copy and paste refactor into a bunch of tiny files and declare your victory? I’m going out on a limb here but I’m going to say you’re a little bitter at the value of the consultant vs. your own textbook, indignant idea of value.

Not ton. What was stated was the modules, at all.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#328

Post by Nomentatus » Sat, Mar 03, 2018, 12:00 AM UTC

happyopossum wrote: post #130

goodroot wrote: post #77

As a Canadian who has worked at IBM, I'm not surprised that this didn't find success. In IBMs defense, I don't believe our public sector has the experience or aptitude required to act as a supporting interface for a job of this scale. With that being said, IBM isn't a successful technology company with a proven record building good software products. They were an unwise choice from the get-go. IBM is a successful fin…

> IBM isn't a successful technology company with a proven record building good products. Whoa, what? Sure, some of their achievements are in their past, but that claim really overlooks a ton of history.

It's only a slight exaggeration to say that they're living on a reputation they built doing everything except what they're trying to sell now.

When their other ships were going down, they shifted to a growing area of demand, not an area of their expertise. A brand shell game.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#329

Post by wahern » Sat, Mar 03, 2018, 1:37 AM UTC

iamleppert wrote: post #325

wahern wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early in my career I had a brief stint as an engineer at a consulting company in the ERP industry. Our projects always had at least one functional consultant whose expertise was _using_ the ERP systems and understanding how they integrated with other systems and procedures. This was a different position than PM, who was often an employee of the client company who drew the short straw. The functional consultants had v…

Amusing to me that people consider a ton of modules to be a sign of high code quality. What was your role in the project? Did you swoop in and do a copy and paste refactor into a bunch of tiny files and declare your victory? I’m going out on a limb here but I’m going to say you’re a little bitter at the value of the consultant vs. your own textbook, indignant idea of value.

You obviously never used Allaire ColdFusion, before it got fancy features like functions.

IIRC, a "tag" was the closest equivalent to a function, but it was basically a parameterized textual include. A "module" was a "tag" that didn't need to be installed into a special directory. During development the only easy way to not have the source code for your entire application in a single logical source file (split across unparameterized includes) was to use modules. Using tags was a PITA because of the need to install them in a special location, but for [reasons] people never bothered using modules at the time.

So to better understand the context, s/modules/functions/.

The fact that I uniquely used modules says less about my competency (or the competency of any particular consultant) and more about the general technical competency of the organization. As I said, some of the technical consultants had CS degrees so they fully understood the concept of functions, as well as more difficult concepts. The senior consultant I mentioned had a CS degree. I didn't mean to imply that I thought I was more competent than he was; quite the opposite. I remember what he said to me precisely because he did have a CS degree (which I lacked), was one of the most experienced consultants at the company who had worked with most every other technical consultant, and was someone I generally looked up to.

And you conveniently skipped my larger point which was that the organization was successful without strong technical competency. All things being equal you want strong technical competency, but especially in the world of ERP systems where everything is highly customized and a tremendous amount of code is ad hoc business logic, functional competency is incomparably more important for achieving project success.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#330

Post by poulsbohemian » Sat, Mar 03, 2018, 5:38 PM UTC

didgeoridoo wrote: post #3

The name is just too perfect: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine... To that point, I’m wondering if all IT initiatives codenamed “Phoenix” are doomed from the start, given that the implication is “let’s burn down everything we have that works, and rise anew from the ashes”...

It wasn't a bad book, but if you've read anything by Eli Goldratt on the theory of constraints (The Goal, for example) then Phoenix Project just looks like a watered down, IT-focused, and nearly plagiarized variation.