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IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

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Re: IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

#81
post #22

Another Indian-born tech CEO? It's incredible. IBM joins Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Nokia, and Harman in this regard. Also, MasterCard and PepsiCo (until 2018). I wonder how much it's a cultural thing.

This is a biased, but honest observation that I'd like to share. I've been working for a big corp for about 5 years now. I was born in a SE Asian country and came to the US for college. I have worked with a lot of India-born people. As a fellow foreigner and as an Asian, I can tell that more often than not Indian people are bolder and more aggressive in asking for what they want (e.g., one of my Indian colleague aske…

This feels somewhat strange. A more plausible explanation (one given in some of the sibling threads) is that most of these folks are immigrants, and simply being an immigrant tells you something about the nature of this groups of people.

But there is a twist: most of the immigrants from South Asia are also highly educated and here legally.

That is quite a powerful combination in itself. Considering the large population of India, there are bound to be a ton of smart, driven people that immigrate to the US. And in a system that doesn’t actively discriminate against them based on their race, they do well.

I am not sure why this is surprising. South Asia has a LOT of people. Many of them are well versed in English because colonialism. A small (but still significant) number of them emigrate to the US and do very well.

Re: IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

#82
post #22

Another Indian-born tech CEO? It's incredible. IBM joins Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Nokia, and Harman in this regard. Also, MasterCard and PepsiCo (until 2018). I wonder how much it's a cultural thing.

I attended an interview of a major non-tech CEO and he attributed the cultural attitude of Jugaad [0] as the reason why so many CEOs are of Indian descent. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad

Makes a lot of sense, an infectious can-do attitude as it may.

https://www.reddit.com/r/redneckengineering/top/?t=all

Re: IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is SOP for borgifying acquihires. IBM isn't capable of operating in a cohesive way. Shuffling the org chart won't change that.

>This is SOP for borgifying acquihires Translation?

SOP: standard operating procedure

Borgifying: bringing into a collective mind space (pejoratively)

Aquihire: buying a company for its people rather than its products

Re: IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

#84
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a biased, but honest observation that I'd like to share. I've been working for a big corp for about 5 years now. I was born in a SE Asian country and came to the US for college. I have worked with a lot of India-born people. As a fellow foreigner and as an Asian, I can tell that more often than not Indian people are bolder and more aggressive in asking for what they want (e.g., one of my Indian colleague aske…

This feels somewhat strange. A more plausible explanation (one given in some of the sibling threads) is that most of these folks are immigrants, and simply being an immigrant tells you something about the nature of this groups of people. But there is a twist: most of the immigrants from South Asia are also highly educated and here legally. That is quite a powerful combination in itself. Considering the large populati…

I think explains it. But there are more south Indian people than north Indian people as well, despite there being lesser population.

Re: IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

#85
post #22

Another Indian-born tech CEO? It's incredible. IBM joins Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Nokia, and Harman in this regard. Also, MasterCard and PepsiCo (until 2018). I wonder how much it's a cultural thing.

It's indeed impressive. However, from working with many Indians, I think they succeed mainly because there are so many of them. They are also great socially and speak English, which gives them an edge over asians. Professionaly they have many problems.

Please don't post racial flamebait, or whatever this is, to HN. It just leads to boring flamewars, which we're trying to avoid on this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

#86
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels somewhat strange. A more plausible explanation (one given in some of the sibling threads) is that most of these folks are immigrants, and simply being an immigrant tells you something about the nature of this groups of people. But there is a twist: most of the immigrants from South Asia are also highly educated and here legally. That is quite a powerful combination in itself. Considering the large populati…

I think explains it. But there are more south Indian people than north Indian people as well, despite there being lesser population.

Education, literacy rates and standard of living are generally higher in Southern India.

Re: IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

#87
post #22

Another Indian-born tech CEO? It's incredible. IBM joins Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Nokia, and Harman in this regard. Also, MasterCard and PepsiCo (until 2018). I wonder how much it's a cultural thing.

As an Indian person I frankly don’t think there’s anything special about Indians. The immigrants you meet are not representative of the country as a whole... in India you will meet plenty of lazy imbeciles. It’s just that India has a vast population of technically educated people, and in contrast to China, these people have grown up in a heavily British-influenced society (esp. language) so they integrate in the US and UK better than Chinese.

Re: IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a biased, but honest observation that I'd like to share. I've been working for a big corp for about 5 years now. I was born in a SE Asian country and came to the US for college. I have worked with a lot of India-born people. As a fellow foreigner and as an Asian, I can tell that more often than not Indian people are bolder and more aggressive in asking for what they want (e.g., one of my Indian colleague aske…

Don't forget the infamous in-group preferences they bring as soon as they take over.

Not sure why you were downvoted. There have been lawsuits [1][2] about Indian nepotism in US companies. As always, people are quick to claim "racism".

[1] https://qz.com/india/889524/the-us-says-oracle-is-encouragin...

[2] https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/09/09/h-1b-san-jose-tech-fi...

Re: IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

#89
post #11

It’ll be interesting to see where the new CEO takes IBM and what his strategy is to make IBM relevant again. The last decade has been stagnant (if you’re being nice) and abysmal (if you’re being honest) for IBM, missing out on all the forecasted tech growth categories. Cloud services, they’re never even in the discussion. Mobile - forget it. AI...maybe. They need to find a niche they can excel in, 1 least, in order t…

I'm not going to argue that IBM is currently healthy and performing as they should but they did have over $22 billion in cloud revenue for 2019 so they are evidently in the discussion somewhere.

Having compared IBM's cloud offerings against AWS, Azure and GCP... the vast majority of what IBM is calling cloud is a stretch. In my current engagement them running another companies servers in that companies datacenters == "cloud".

Re: IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

#90
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was surely most Red Hatters' dream, but Arvind Krishna as CEO is probably the best possible outcome for Red Hat among the realistic ones (not counting that Whitehurst will be President, while Ginny Rometty was President and CEO). Arvind Krishna was "Jim Whitehurst's boss" until now (Red Hat is under the IBM cloud division), and back when the acquisition was announced in 2018 he visited one of the Red Hat offices…

> Arvind Krishna was "Jim Whitehurst's boss" until now Not true. Jim (and Red Hat under him) reported directly to Ginni. Red Hat was under IBM cloud for revenue reporting, though, but the distinction is material.

He reported to both.
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