A billion reasons never to buy IBM services • Hacker News Board

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#81

Post by devit » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

Can anyone explain what's so complex about a "payroll system"?

Presumably you just have a table with people with salary, and every month you wire the money and record information about the wire or otherwise have a way to record when the person has taken cash.

You might want to have more complex rules for determining schedule and amount of salaries, and support for contractors, unpaid leave, taxes, etc. but that doesn't seem particulary complex either.

How can this possibly take more than 100 person-years (i.e. Not to mention that presumably such software already exists and could be used instead of writing a new one.

[obviously my explanation would be corruption, but I wonder if I miss something]

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#82

Post by ebiester » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

sg0 wrote: post #27

Well, this news that came out last year is somewhat relevant. MD Anderson Cancer Center's IBM Watson project failed, with $62 million paid to IBM and PwC for essentially no results. However, I don't blame IBM, I blame people who dove in without clearly thinking it through. https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-cancer-...

We have all seen a project go wonky with requirements. However, I haven't heard of a successful product that IBM built/managed in the last decade.

On the other hand, talking with friends in the government and government contracting, they argue that IBM and the major contractors have perfected the art of exploiting government into maximizing billable hours at the expense of results.

It's a bit like the metaphorical malicious genie interpreting your request. It isn't possible to write specifications that can't be interpreted malevolently.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#83

Post by blueside » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

kraig911 wrote: post #49

As someone who used to work in/on/underneath websphere. I can tell you I am loathe to even consider anything IBM. I was almost recruited by them and then I recalled how miserable I was on one particular project. The money was good but I said no. I recommend everyone I mean to stay away from IBM and Oracle as best I can. I just don't think the line between open source and enterprise is crystal clear anymore.

As a general rule, if a work task lands on your desk that involves working with a IBM/Oracle/SAP product, preemptively apologize to those regularly around you for your miserable attitude in the near future.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#84

Post by gerbilly » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 9:05 PM UTC

devit wrote: post #81

Can anyone explain what's so complex about a "payroll system"? Presumably you just have a table with people with salary, and every month you wire the money and record information about the wire or otherwise have a way to record when the person has taken cash. You might want to have more complex rules for determining schedule and amount of salaries, and support for contractors, unpaid leave, taxes, etc. but that doesn…

Remembering and tracking all the agreements made with workers and unions going back decades and handling the cases where workers change jobs and union designations (or even move from one union to another).

There are thousands of byzantine rules in the contracts and agreements, some mutually contradictory.

The old code likely contained a lot of business logic that represented an institutional memory of how to handle all these corner cases.

Anyone wishing to reimplement a system like that will have to rediscover these corner cases one at a time in production, while thousands of people complain that their paycheque is short.

Then there are also pensions to keep track of etc...

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#85

Post by wvanbergen » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

devit wrote: post #81

Can anyone explain what's so complex about a "payroll system"? Presumably you just have a table with people with salary, and every month you wire the money and record information about the wire or otherwise have a way to record when the person has taken cash. You might want to have more complex rules for determining schedule and amount of salaries, and support for contractors, unpaid leave, taxes, etc. but that doesn…

Start by reading this: http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#86

Post by ebiester » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

throw7 wrote: post #66

I'm hesitant to just blame IBM and call it the day. What about the U.S. healthcare.gov website? Do we also blame CGI Federal and Accenture? There's probably blame on both sides, but it seems nowadays that "it needs to be a roaring dumpster fire until we do things the right way". Unfortunately, either no one _in_ government seems competent to know that right way or be empowered enough to fight for it (maybe they've al…

It's a combined issue: the big players have perfected the "malevolent genie" process: bid low, then take every requirement and find the way to extract the most billable hours and change requests from it.

On the government side, many of them realize they're playing a losing game, but they don't have the resources to change the system, and it's not a priority for people to get elected, so congress doesn't step in. (And would they know enough to do so?)

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#87

Post by blueside » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

scottLobster wrote: post #11

joncrane wrote: post #4

Does anyone else remember the days when "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was true? You might pay a little extra, but it was never a total fail to use IBM products. I'm not sure when that changed, but I feel like these days, IBM is closer to Oracle than AWS.

Clearly too many people remember. Shows the power of branding. IBM has largely moved out of the consumer space, and occasionally their research labs come out with some cool new tech (Watson and such). In the common consciousness they were the Apple of their day who then ascended out of the market to bigger, cooler things. As a result most people, including non-technical business execs who make purchasing decisions, d…

> some cool new tech (Watson and such)

I'm afraid Watson is very far from a "cool new tech", many companies have described their experience with Watson as a money gouging disaster.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#88

Post by empath75 » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 9:13 PM UTC

throw7 wrote: post #66

I'm hesitant to just blame IBM and call it the day. What about the U.S. healthcare.gov website? Do we also blame CGI Federal and Accenture? There's probably blame on both sides, but it seems nowadays that "it needs to be a roaring dumpster fire until we do things the right way". Unfortunately, either no one _in_ government seems competent to know that right way or be empowered enough to fight for it (maybe they've al…

All things considered, healthcare.gov wasn’t that bad. Having to scale to the size of the entire country on day one is a hard-to-impossible task and the managed to recover impressively quickly.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#89

Post by empath75 » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 9:21 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #79

maxxxxx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience it's mainly that governments don't have a lot of experts on staff so a lot of decision making gets outsourced too. I worked on a gov contract a long time ago and it was pretty obvious that there were several higher ups in government who added their own conflicting requirements to the list. Everybody in the trenches saw that they made things incredibly complex for no good reason but nobody pushed ba…

Another problem with governments is that they're made up of dozens or hundreds of different organisations, and they all make these mistakes on their own. Even if one organisation gets it right, other parts of the government don't benefit from that expertise. I think governments should have a special organisation that just maintains the expertise for handling these sort of big projects all across the government.

You’d think so but then you just have one more organization that doesn’t share anything with anyone else.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#90

Post by alexk » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 9:30 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #76

Historically Slovakia gets lumped with Eastern Europe in popular perception - Slovakia is nothing like Romania, the Ukraine, Albania or even Poland in turning out petty criminals or promiscuous online fraudsters. Not to forget Western Europe, France has a far more unhealthy work culture and fraud at work and as a way of living is far more acceptable than in Slovakia. Germany and Austria tend to value probity far more…

Thanks for calling this out.

I think we should do more of it on HN (and everywhere else). People should try harder to decouple their biases from facts especially in their public writing.