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

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

#101

Post by xylophile »

MisterPea wrote: post #83
ASalazarMX wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're spot on about simplicity, and it's the reason AWS may not remain the top cloud provider for much longer. There is no effort to implement any sort of consistency across their famed two-pizza teams -- that wouldn't be "Day one". So each service has its own IAM quirks, making basic security at scale a nightmare, and in some cases impossible.

Azure policies are comparatively a breeze, making it the smart and increasingly obvious choice for any regulated (read: large) corporation.

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

#102

Post by LaSombra »

survirtual wrote: post #77
opportune wrote: post #75

Earlier 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.

You can run Kubernetes on mainframes as well as Linux, so developing for mainframes has become easier these last 20 or so years.

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

#103

Post by pjmlp »

skissane wrote: post #98
ASalazarMX wrote: post #43

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.

I find them really interesting because they are a whole other world, the "road not taken". They are very different from Unix/POSIX/Linux/*BSD/macOS/etc, even moreso than Windows is. Windows is not a Unix, but it has borrowed a lot of ideas from Unix–and is arguably growing more Unix-like as time goes by, borrowing more and more ideas from Unix-land–Windows is a lot closer to Unix than most mainframe operating systems…

And language environments, which keep oldie programms running on modern hardware without recompilation.

Something that neither UNIX nor Windows have fully embraced to the extent of mainframes/micros.

All the deployments from Java and .NET workloads end up with some kind of compromise to classical UNIX/Windows development.

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

#104

Post by pjmlp »

survirtual wrote: post #77
opportune wrote: post #75

Earlier 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.

Bad news for you, the mainframe business in 2022 actually increased sales, contrary to the regular PC market.

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

#105

Post by pjmlp »

thwayunion wrote: post #32
scottLobster wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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. IBM has failed to build a reasonable cloud platform, and not for lack of trying -- for over a decade at this point -- through both internal work and acquisition. Create a cloud.ibm.com account and p…

While IBM Cloud doesn't provide a good experience for Windows workloads, for UNIX and mainframes, it is quite alright.

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

#106

Post by skissane »

pjmlp wrote: post #103
skissane wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find them really interesting because they are a whole other world, the "road not taken". They are very different from Unix/POSIX/Linux/*BSD/macOS/etc, even moreso than Windows is. Windows is not a Unix, but it has borrowed a lot of ideas from Unix–and is arguably growing more Unix-like as time goes by, borrowing more and more ideas from Unix-land–Windows is a lot closer to Unix than most mainframe operating systems…

And language environments, which keep oldie programms running on modern hardware without recompilation. Something that neither UNIX nor Windows have fully embraced to the extent of mainframes/micros. All the deployments from Java and .NET workloads end up with some kind of compromise to classical UNIX/Windows development.

> And language environments, which keep oldie programms running on modern hardware without recompilation.

I think we've had this discussion before. The Language Environment (LE) on z/OS doesn't do that. The Integrated Language Environment (ILE) on OS/400 [0] does do that. But while one part of ILE (the CEE runtime and its API) is common code between z/OS and OS/400 (and also VM, VSE, TPF and OS/2) – that bit doesn't do any of the "keep oldie programs running by recompilation" stuff. Whereas, the parts of ILE which does do that (the OMI to NMI translator, and the NMI to POWER translator), is 100% OS/400 specific, and has no equivalent on any other IBM platform (z/OS included). You seem to be getting led astray by the fact that "Language Environment" means a lot more in OS/400 than it does in MVS – it is a mistake to assume that just because the later uses the same phrase, that it uses it to mean anywhere near the same thing. LE on MVS is just one (relatively small) part of the capabilities provided by ILE on OS/400.

(Also, this "platform independence" doesn't really have anything to do with anything "Language Environment", since it pre-exists ILE entirely – EPM and OPM before it had the same ability. You are associating "Language Environment" with something which was never actually the selling point of ILE, since it was something OPM and EPM already could do, at least in principle. The real selling point of ILE is that it could support recursive/stack-based HLLs such as C and Pascal more efficiently than EPM, and support mixing code from multiple languages much more easily than OPM and EPM allowed. Plus, a lot of its implementation was shared with z/OS and AIX, which was a bonus for IBM – not just the CEE runtime, but also the compiler backend–the later is not considered part of LE on z/OS, rather part of the compiler products)

[0] Yes, IBM i, I know – but I hate that name, it is confusing. IBM should have just stuck with OS/400, it was far more memorable and distinctive.

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

#107

Post by survirtual »

pjmlp wrote: post #104
survirtual wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bad news for you, the mainframe business in 2022 actually increased sales, contrary to the regular PC market.

Bad news for everyone

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

#108

Post by RickJWagner »

chr15p wrote: post #17
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…

"Transaction processing" means CICS. It's a mainframe transaction processor, ensures integrity in banking, airlines, etc.

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

#109

Post by ASalazarMX »

skissane wrote: post #98
ASalazarMX wrote: post #43

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.

I find them really interesting because they are a whole other world, the "road not taken". They are very different from Unix/POSIX/Linux/*BSD/macOS/etc, even moreso than Windows is. Windows is not a Unix, but it has borrowed a lot of ideas from Unix–and is arguably growing more Unix-like as time goes by, borrowing more and more ideas from Unix-land–Windows is a lot closer to Unix than most mainframe operating systems…

> I find them really interesting because they are a whole other world, the "road not taken".

This is so interesting, having witnessed the commoditization of PCs, the Cloud, and now virtual desktops on the cloud. We're basically reinventing the multiuser mainframe after discovering it actually had good proposals.

The problem is, it's being reinvented with a monstrous degree of complexity and fragility. It's retaking the road not taken, but carrying the other road with as well.

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

#110

Post by lucianf »

phonon wrote: post #39
jablala wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of that was spun off to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyndryl

That is so wrong. Kyndryl is (was) just infrastructure maintenance and consulting. Business services (IBM Consulting) is that ~5B/quarter thing while Kyndryl keeps sinking.
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