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IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

theregister.com

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Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#131

Post by throwaway-ibm »

ElViajero wrote: post #127
throwaway-ibm wrote: post #51

IBM-er here. yep, it's kinda a disaster, but tech savvy people can access their mail (clearing cache & cookies every few hours helps for some folks). Funny thing, IBM tried to move to Exchange for years , but it failed every time. Turns out, calendar integration (between Exchange and Verse/Notes) is tricky. Especially if you have to do it for 300000 accounts. To be frank, I haven't received any meeting invites in 3 d…

> IBM-er here. What do you think that it is the level of competence of people at IBM? For what I read here in Hacker News, it would seem that you have very incompetent colleagues. I am old enough to remember IBM with certain sympathy/nostalgia and I hope that the situation is not so dire.

IBM is huge... It's not really a single company, but like a bunch of independently operating companies that share (some) resources, and of course their name.

We have fairly high hiring standards in our office, but when it comes to interacting with people from other offices, I've worked with people I'd never hire. I work on the IBM Cloud platform, which seems to be one of the most innovative places at IBM currently (compared to GBS/GTS, the latter became Kyndryl recently).

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#132

Post by ElViajero »

throwaway-ibm wrote: post #131
ElViajero wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IBM-er here. What do you think that it is the level of competence of people at IBM? For what I read here in Hacker News, it would seem that you have very incompetent colleagues. I am old enough to remember IBM with certain sympathy/nostalgia and I hope that the situation is not so dire.

IBM is huge... It's not really a single company, but like a bunch of independently operating companies that share (some) resources, and of course their name. We have fairly high hiring standards in our office, but when it comes to interacting with people from other offices, I've worked with people I'd never hire. I work on the IBM Cloud platform, which seems to be one of the most innovative places at IBM currently (c…

>It's not really a single company

I heard similar things about Ericsson, here in Sweden.

> I work on the IBM Cloud platform, which seems to be one of the most innovative places at IBM currently

That makes sense, it is a newer technology. I think that as an engineering discipline we are quite bad at maintaining our systems. "old" systems become hard to work with and people just gives up. It should not be like that.

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#133

Post by ElViajero »

kmarc wrote: post #130
ElViajero wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IBM-er here. What do you think that it is the level of competence of people at IBM? For what I read here in Hacker News, it would seem that you have very incompetent colleagues. I am old enough to remember IBM with certain sympathy/nostalgia and I hope that the situation is not so dire.

ex-IBMer here. I was at IBM research (as an engineer), and thankfully I can say most of my direct colleagues were great and highly competent ...when it came to actual research. I think we had a good engineering core team too, but whenever we had to interact with "big IBM" (outside research) we mostly bumped into incompetent people, and career(money)-focused managers. Fun fact, due incompetent management 90%+ of my te…

> Fun fact, due incompetent management 90%+ of my team left in the past 5 years.

Not fun, but I get the idea. That is never a good situation. I has been a manager in the past, and I have seen many people that despises the position. I think that it is more important that people gives credit for, and that everybody seems to call out bad management but few appreciate good management because is "transparent" and it seems that everything will work without them.

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#134

Post by kmarc »

ElViajero wrote: post #133
kmarc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ex-IBMer here. I was at IBM research (as an engineer), and thankfully I can say most of my direct colleagues were great and highly competent ...when it came to actual research. I think we had a good engineering core team too, but whenever we had to interact with "big IBM" (outside research) we mostly bumped into incompetent people, and career(money)-focused managers. Fun fact, due incompetent management 90%+ of my te…

> Fun fact, due incompetent management 90%+ of my team left in the past 5 years. Not fun, but I get the idea. That is never a good situation. I has been a manager in the past, and I have seen many people that despises the position. I think that it is more important that people gives credit for, and that everybody seems to call out bad management but few appreciate good management because is "transparent" and it seems…

FWIW, my direct manager was indeed "transparent", as in, he wasn't managing us textbook-properly, but he definitely shielded us from upper management BS, while helping us out to achieve our goals and enable our engineering work.

I usually try to avoid assessing management as "bad" (it's just a downward spiral, everyone just says it, and trigger each other), but in this particular case it was so exceptionally bad that we all went into long discussions and analysis of it.

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#135

Post by benhurmarcel »

a3n wrote: post #80

From the comments: > These guys were important once, right? I don't think I'm old enough to remember such a time. I thought they were a law firm for a while because they only seemed to be mentioned in court cases. Ouch.

Everybody is in its own bubble. You can be working in tech and be under the impression that Microsoft Office or SAP aren't used anymore.

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#136

Post by soco »

quantified wrote: post #97
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe IBM should hire one of those big IT companies that specialises in consultancy and service design.

Which would likely lead to exactly this outcome?

Big IT company which specializes in yada yada here. We did years ago our own migration away from Notes (>100k accounts), and also for customers. Painful? Probably. But it can be done.

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#137

Post by chris_j »

spec-obs wrote: post #126
throwaway-ibm wrote: post #51

IBM-er here. yep, it's kinda a disaster, but tech savvy people can access their mail (clearing cache & cookies every few hours helps for some folks). Funny thing, IBM tried to move to Exchange for years , but it failed every time. Turns out, calendar integration (between Exchange and Verse/Notes) is tricky. Especially if you have to do it for 300000 accounts. To be frank, I haven't received any meeting invites in 3 d…

As a RH'er who has started to see a creep in contact coming from IBM'ers the past few days have been very peaceful.

Pardon my ignorance; what does RH mean in this context?

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#138

Post by justinclift »

chris_j wrote: post #137
spec-obs wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a RH'er who has started to see a creep in contact coming from IBM'ers the past few days have been very peaceful.

Pardon my ignorance; what does RH mean in this context?

Red Hat

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#140

Post by throwaway_ibm_1 »

ElViajero wrote: post #127
throwaway-ibm wrote: post #51

IBM-er here. yep, it's kinda a disaster, but tech savvy people can access their mail (clearing cache & cookies every few hours helps for some folks). Funny thing, IBM tried to move to Exchange for years , but it failed every time. Turns out, calendar integration (between Exchange and Verse/Notes) is tricky. Especially if you have to do it for 300000 accounts. To be frank, I haven't received any meeting invites in 3 d…

> IBM-er here. What do you think that it is the level of competence of people at IBM? For what I read here in Hacker News, it would seem that you have very incompetent colleagues. I am old enough to remember IBM with certain sympathy/nostalgia and I hope that the situation is not so dire.

Ex-IBMer here. I used to work for what was then called IBM Software Group in the early 2000s. I worked with some brilliant engineers, some of whom had spent their entire careers at IBM and achieved some amazing things. I worked with some brilliant managers as well. But the place felt rotten to the core.

I don't think there was a problem with the people so much as with the system. IBM, as you might expect for a company of that size and age, felt incredibly bureaucratic. Whatever you wanted to achieve, there was a process that made it hard to achieve it. Whatever good idea you had, there was a committee of people who would dilute and ruin that idea or simply forbid you from pursuing it. Whatever industry standard tool you wanted to use, you couldn't use it because there were IBM tools that you were required to use instead, tools that slowed you down and frustrated you (I'm thinking of stuff with Lotus or Rational in the name). Whenever you needed to make a decision, it felt like no one was empowered to use their initiative to make that decision. Frankly, it felt like doing good work meant having to go under the radar because IBM wasn't set up to allow you to do good work.

I did have good times there and I hear good things about the way that IBM has dragged itself into the 21st century since I left but I regret having spent so many of the best years of my career at that company.

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