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IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

latimes.com

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Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#11

Post by alephnerd »

danrocks wrote: post #8

Not to be snarky or anything, but a legitimate question: what does IBM actually do? I used to work for a partnering engineering team at and met with dozens of enterprise clients (think Fortune 100) and I never heard anybody ever mention any IBM products. I am really intrigued to understand what keeps this company afloat. My main hypothesis is selling to government and acting more as a holding of acquired companies th…

Based on my interactions with specific IBM teams:

They are a major systems integrator in the financial and govt world, they have a massive professional services team ensuring everything from AIX to RHEL7.2 is running and not breaking for customers, they have very smart HPC and Quantum Chemistry people working on building Quatumn Computing algorithms, they are building features in IBM Cloud for our EU banking counterparts (too big to fail French banks seem to have converged on IBM cloud as their platform of choice), managing a major Docker Hub competitor (Quay), building out and managing the primary on-prem Kubernetes orchestrator (OpenShift), and are managing the primary incident response platform used by enterprises.

There are a lot of issues and gripes to have about IBM, but they are a very critical player in the industry. Tech Bros on HN just don't have the visibility and remain in their weird HN echo chamber.

And IBM 100% does still have a middle management problem - no way I'd ever work there unless I was at least a VP.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#12

Post by alewi481 »

danrocks wrote: post #8

Not to be snarky or anything, but a legitimate question: what does IBM actually do? I used to work for a partnering engineering team at and met with dozens of enterprise clients (think Fortune 100) and I never heard anybody ever mention any IBM products. I am really intrigued to understand what keeps this company afloat. My main hypothesis is selling to government and acting more as a holding of acquired companies th…

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fairly popular at the company I work for and they've been an IBM acquisition since 2019.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#13

Post by jablala »

danrocks wrote: post #8

Not to be snarky or anything, but a legitimate question: what does IBM actually do? I used to work for a partnering engineering team at and met with dozens of enterprise clients (think Fortune 100) and I never heard anybody ever mention any IBM products. I am really intrigued to understand what keeps this company afloat. My main hypothesis is selling to government and acting more as a holding of acquired companies th…

An IBM recruiter reached out to me a while back which caused me to go and have a dive into IBM. From what I found IBM is mostly consulting.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#14

Post by StevePerkins »

myth_drannon wrote: post #7
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #2

Ooo, this sounds like a nice recipe for company collapse. You hate to see giants who advanced computing get taken over by MBAs who play that "cost center" and "revenue center" bullshit. I'm sure all their enterprise customers will be understanding of the unfixed bugs when the service agent explains how they made Watson 0.03% more effective at capturing pet names this fiscal year

IBM has been a dead company since about late 80's/early 90's.

In terms of developer credibility with the entrepreneurial community? Sure.

In terms of being a going concern for large customers and investors? The make billions of dollars of profit per year, have a P/E valuation better than Apple's, and pay out 4-5% dividends annually.

I'm not sure what it really means to "be dead" for 40 years. In a sense, the average human is "dead" for 70-something years. But periods of time at that scale are called "life", lol.

IBM will be here long after everyone reading this is gone. They aren't relevant to the environments in which most of us work (they're basically a professional services consulting firm), but we aren't everything.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#15

Post by saltymug76 »

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #2

Ooo, this sounds like a nice recipe for company collapse. You hate to see giants who advanced computing get taken over by MBAs who play that "cost center" and "revenue center" bullshit. I'm sure all their enterprise customers will be understanding of the unfixed bugs when the service agent explains how they made Watson 0.03% more effective at capturing pet names this fiscal year

I'm a developer at IBM for one of their enterprise OSs. The lack of funding in retaining and finding talent is slowly killing an already anemic product. The amount of institutional knowledge that has disappeared over the past decade gives me little hope in it ever recovering. More and more bugs are being marked as 'permanent restriction' as there isn't enough time nor experienced developers to fix them anymore. My department is basically surviving on legacy contracts and customers too scared or lazy to migrate to a modern Linux or Windows infrastructure.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#16

Post by FireBeyond »

alewi481 wrote: post #12
danrocks wrote: post #8

Not to be snarky or anything, but a legitimate question: what does IBM actually do? I used to work for a partnering engineering team at and met with dozens of enterprise clients (think Fortune 100) and I never heard anybody ever mention any IBM products. I am really intrigued to understand what keeps this company afloat. My main hypothesis is selling to government and acting more as a holding of acquired companies th…

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fairly popular at the company I work for and they've been an IBM acquisition since 2019.

And they (we, I should say, I work at Red Hat, but not in RHEL) as a company improved profits 10% after adjustment for inflation.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#17

Post by chr15p »

danrocks wrote: post #8

Not to be snarky or anything, but a legitimate question: what does IBM actually do? I used to work for a partnering engineering team at and met with dozens of enterprise clients (think Fortune 100) and I never heard anybody ever mention any IBM products. I am really intrigued to understand what keeps this company afloat. My main hypothesis is selling to government and acting more as a holding of acquired companies th…

For Oct-Dec 2022 (according to https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-4Q22-Earnings-Chart...)

Mainframes: $4.5 billion

Consulting: $4.8 billion (even after selling off Kyndral)

Software: $7.3 billion

Software includes all of Red Hat, a pretty big security business, and "transaction processing" which isn't explained but I guess is running payroll and the like for other companies.

So lots of un-sexy stuff that never makes HN but keeps the world running.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#18

Post by FireBeyond »

marktangotango wrote: post #3

I think the notable thing here is; this is really a Redhat layoff since IBM "subsumed" or reverse merged or whatever it was with Redhat. My take is that IBM has been a barely warm carcass for > 20 years already and the Redhat deal did nothing to change that. Here I'm certain that the layoff will be onshore, and the continued hiring will be offshore. That's what they've been doing forever, and their lack of growth and…

My area (OpenShift) is seeing no layoffs. Red Hat as a whole improved profitability 10% after adjustments for inflation.

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#19

Post by alephnerd »

yardie wrote: post #5

> Chief Executive Arvind Krishna has been trying to pivot Big Blue from its traditional business of infrastructure and information technology services to the fast-growing cloud-computing market. Skating to where the puck has been. While other companies are taking a look at how much they are spending on cloud. It's already a commodified market yet IBM sees itself as the one to grow into it.

You don't need to be #1 in every category. Having even a 4th place presence can become a 1st place presence if bundled correctly (eg. with IBM Security's managed security portfolio and IBM's professional services team - this gives a much more hand held experience than AWS or GCP, and better for those orgs that are Linux/Unix heavy because Azure won't fit their needs as well from a PS standpoint)

Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas

#20

Post by scottLobster »

yardie wrote: post #5

> Chief Executive Arvind Krishna has been trying to pivot Big Blue from its traditional business of infrastructure and information technology services to the fast-growing cloud-computing market. Skating to where the puck has been. While other companies are taking a look at how much they are spending on cloud. It's already a commodified market yet IBM sees itself as the one to grow into it.

Given their existing relationships they can leverage and the romanticism finally bleeding out of FAANG's reputations, if they can put together a stable, fundamentally capable platform they could definitely grab a chunk.

Toyota has made a multi-decade business model around "skating to where the puck has been". Why can't IBM?

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