Earlier 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.
Joy to work with... for whom?
IBM, presumably? /s
IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
81–90 of 117 posts
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> The sooner everyone drops anything associated with IBM or Oracle, the better for everyone. Absolute cancers.
If the only alternative is "AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Spark, Aurora, etc…" I might have to think long and hard about it...
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Very interesting. Having worked at AWS in the past, the company had very similar features/principles to what you have mentioned except for simplicity.
I think it's things like these which makes me thing AWS will remain the top cloud provider for the next few decades.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that is $4.5 billion in Mainframe just in one quarter...
It's an interesting thing they have going on. I worked at a large retailer who depended on an IBM mainframe running DB2. That thing was crazy expensive and their migration to their cloud mainframe offering was even more expensive for the raw compute, but made sense when maintenance and everything was added. Something like 90%+ of the top 100 banks depend on mainframes and same with the top 100 retailers. Few customer…
One of the more surprising metrics I've heard from Andy Jassy is that despite trillion dollar companies generating huge amounts of cash from cloud, 95% of enterprise workloads are still not on cloud.
I think it's more than just a few customers.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#85Earlier 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?
A free orders of magnitude in performance?
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#86I 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…
I'm no longer there, but I was at Red Hat for three years and change after the acquisition by IBM was first announced. At least through my time there, this couldn't be further from the truth. Red Hat was operated at a completely independent company. I wasn't even allowed to promote IBM products and services because we didn't want to show favoritism over other partners.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
A piece of my soul died just trying to imagine the depths of boredom this would take you.
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…
Nah it's the same now. IBM was my first tech job straight from construction/concreting. Work environment was a dream, an absolute pleasure. Got opportunities to pump out training and work on many parts of the stack way further up than I expected. I was a remote area hardware tech. This was bout half a decade ago. Best job I've ever had.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an interesting thing they have going on. I worked at a large retailer who depended on an IBM mainframe running DB2. That thing was crazy expensive and their migration to their cloud mainframe offering was even more expensive for the raw compute, but made sense when maintenance and everything was added. Something like 90%+ of the top 100 banks depend on mainframes and same with the top 100 retailers. Few customer…
One of the more surprising metrics I've heard from Andy Jassy is that despite trillion dollar companies generating huge amounts of cash from cloud, 95% of enterprise workloads are still not on cloud. I think it's more than just a few customers.
Realistically, the cloud is just too expensive compared to most other solutions. AWS, Azure, and G Compute are all easily 10x the cost of hiring a good team of sysadmins. When you require a lot of computing power, it just doesn’t scale financially
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
A piece of my soul died just trying to imagine the depths of boredom this would take you.
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…
Well, now you're selling it pretty good.
Re: IBM to cut about 3,900 workers while still hiring in ‘higher growth’ areas
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
A piece of my soul died just trying to imagine the depths of boredom this would take you.
Edit/reply: clearly the top comment did not portray the full picture. Indeed, based on recent comments, it does seem like a good place to work at.