Earlier quoted context omitted.
A piece of my soul died just trying to imagine the depths of boredom this would take you.
If you pay me 250k cash I'll have no issue maintaining whatever obsolete tech you wish. Work doesn't need to be fun.
[dead]
IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
71–80 of 117 posts
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the best places I ever worked. Really good engineers, and a really calm workplace where you are given the time and space to do good work. No dysfunctional 2 week sprints or hours of "agile ceremony" madness, etc. Of course this was 20 years go, and maybe it depended on the team you were on. I don't know if it is the same now. The only time I had a problem there is when my manager came in and said I had to take…
Worked there in the 90s. Probably the most professional engineering environment I've ever seen. And compared to what you might expect of the time and place, quite egalitarian. My boss and half the team were women, and there were several people from unusual backgrounds that would be considered economically disadvantaged these days. Everyone had an office. No politics. Just GSD.
Yes - same - one of the most diverse place I worked at and that was 20 years ago. Although my current gig is actually pretty diverse.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#73Not 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 counterp…
>Tech Bros on HN just don't have the visibility and remain in their weird HN echo chamber
As someone who has worked in consulting on the Enterprise side for 25 years, the HN attitudes towards IBM, SAP, Oracle, and even SaaS companies like SF/SNOW/Adobe is baffling. Corporate America would literally cease to function if these companies disappeared one night, but would hardly bat an eye over the disappearance of Facebook, Apple, or even Google.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#74> 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.
> fast-growing cloud-computing market.
Hasn't that already been won by like 3 companies?
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you expand on why they are joy to work with?
You don’t need to wrestle AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Spark, Aurora, etc… to run a batch job. The kinds of tasks that take integrating multiple different providers and software packages to do in cloud architecture are OS-level features on mainframe. It’s less flexible and more expensive, but an order less accidental complexity.
How is that different from a bare metal Linux server?
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Banks love IBM mainframes/midranges. They might not be blistering fast, but they're a joy to work with if you have the budget.
Can you expand on why they are joy to work with?
Tried to edit my original comment because two people asked the same, but it didn't update, so I'll resume it here:
- No devops, you have real sysadmins whose priority is security and system administration, not development.
- Not relearning to invent the wheel every six months. The technology changes incrementally. If you get out of the field for a few years, read the "what's new" sections of the new manuals to catch up.
- Documentation. IBM docs are great, remind me of NASA docs. They have everything you need, you can go days without googling a problem.
- Backwards compatibility. Decades old sources can be compiled, decades old binaries can be run. Architecture changes are handled transparently.
- Simplicity. The interfaces might seem primitive compared to PC OSs, but there's also less complexity, and less attack surface.
- Uptime. Almost everything, including CPUs, is hot-swappable. This doesn't add to the joy, but it's remarkable.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t need to wrestle AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Spark, Aurora, etc… to run a batch job. The kinds of tasks that take integrating multiple different providers and software packages to do in cloud architecture are OS-level features on mainframe. It’s less flexible and more expensive, but an order less accidental complexity.
How is that different from a bare metal Linux server?
It isn’t. It is significantly worse.
IBM is a dinosaur company that exists because of embedded connections in government, banking, and defense. They charge 100x the going rate for ancient tech that’s insecure and an absolute nightmare to develop for.
The sooner everyone drops anything associated with IBM or Oracle, the better for everyone. Absolute cancers.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#78IBM has been mismanaged for the past 20 years yet live off legacy products and licensing to keep $$ rolling in. I spent 6 years working for them on the consulting side and it was by far the worst job I'd ever had because management is just terrible. Crippled at every level from incompetence to poor deals being accepted, it's a losing battle career wise. They will target everybody with high pay and any performance issue ever in their past to get rid of people when it's that time. I'd have all kind of conversations with distinguished engineers who gave you some hope that some smart people existed in the company, but it's nothing more than survivor island. They love to buy companies or take over a large companies organization, document it all and outsource all of it. The sales people are really good at finding ways to get new business by overpromising the world to keep them relevant while in the end losing $$.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#79Not 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…
Most of revenue for IBM comes from consulting, which needs heavy headcount. Up to 2011 IBM was like a leader in consulting making 100+ billion in revenues a year including all divisions , downfall started after that. It’s not even making half of it now. Accenture/Deloitte and others like Cognizant are eating its lunch.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=revenu... https://www.statista.com/statistics/269013/deloitte-revenue-...
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#80Ooo, 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 of today is way past a company that advanced computing. It is a body shop and an American company in name only. Most of their revenue comes from GBS which is basically an offshoring division.