Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

finance.yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 223 posts

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#151

Post by zod50 »

fdye wrote: post #74

This is just using the AI hype as cover to not get slammed by the markets. If they came out and said "We are pausing hiring..." the markets would rightly be like "Man they are screwed..." Expect to see more of this from zombie companies in the future, as long as they spend $20/mo on a ChatGPT subscription somewhere they are probably not violating SEC disclosures either.

But the market has actually rewarded companies pausing hiring and doing layoffs. In other words, if company is saving money by reducing fixed salary costs, market appreciates that move.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#152

Post by 1970-01-01 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #11

IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. They are a very large and a former tech company that mostly coasts along on doing expensive consulting projects around me-too clones of things that other people have invented just so they can still pretend to be a tech company. So you can do things with AI, cloud, and databases with them. But they aren't really leaders in any of that for a long time. And havin…

IBM is a company in the same way Hawaii is a state. There's a lot of great of stuff going on, most of it is done "at the other island" and a lot of the stuff will be consumed by a live volcano without anyone really noticing.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#153

Post by sitkack »

jzb wrote: post #37
seu wrote: post #36

AI will not replace humans. IBM's CEOs and managers will replace humans with AI. Shareholders will force IBM to replace humans with AI. Let us stop blaming the only thing that is _not_ making any decision. Capitalism is a powerful idea that will kill the same people that vouch for it.

This makes as much sense as “guns don’t kill people, people do.” AI tech is being driven by capitalism. The reason companies are so eager to embrace it is to replace people. If you’re in the AI business or advocating for it, you’re (at least in part) an arms supplier for cutting jobs.

The end goal is for The Board (maybe) and the shareholders to be human. Everyone else can get replaced with automation.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#154

Post by treeman79 »

kneebonian wrote: post #130
fdye wrote: post #74

This is just using the AI hype as cover to not get slammed by the markets. If they came out and said "We are pausing hiring..." the markets would rightly be like "Man they are screwed..." Expect to see more of this from zombie companies in the future, as long as they spend $20/mo on a ChatGPT subscription somewhere they are probably not violating SEC disclosures either.

You have to understand their competitive moat, DoD and especially Pentagon contracts. Most companies don't have the capitalization, runway or people who are so badly broken as to go through the bidding process for something like that.

Yep was at a small startup and the owner insisted we go with IBM, over the protest of everyone. Months of work and we got infrastructure moved over. Only to find out the stack we were sold on was being sunset. Owner insisted we move to the new stack. Month later we were on new stack. This happened twice more.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#155

Post by fallingknife »

makeitdouble wrote: post #145
gjadi wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There are two types of companies: the ones people complain about, and the ones nobody has heard of."

In which camp do you put TSMC ?

Nobody has heard of. Ask people outside of tech and I bet <10% have heard of this company.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#157

Post by belter »

fdye wrote: post #74

This is just using the AI hype as cover to not get slammed by the markets. If they came out and said "We are pausing hiring..." the markets would rightly be like "Man they are screwed..." Expect to see more of this from zombie companies in the future, as long as they spend $20/mo on a ChatGPT subscription somewhere they are probably not violating SEC disclosures either.

But it seems Watson is concerned and looking for a new job...

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#158

Post by 6510 »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #102
abakker wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd point out at that Ginni Rometty was a bad CEO, but that doesn't mean that people there didn't do good research. Like, they're pretty unrelated. Research and Development is notoriously hard to commercialize. Over here in HN land, we just say that product market fit is poor or that products didn't get traction, but those are just as akin to R&D as anything. A better model was that Rometty was not good at choosing w…

What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized? To me, that is just good research followed by bad development. No one investing in IBM is expecting it to be a public works project. Lookup the saga of HP's memristor followed by "The Machine" for a similar story.

> What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized?

It attracts playful wizards. If you get enough of those no amount of zombies can beat them.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#160

Post by fallingknife »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #115
sidewndr46 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized? To me, that is just good research followed by bad development. No one investing in IBM is expecting it to be a public works project. Lookup the saga of HP's memristor followed by "The Machine" for a similar story.

> What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized? Then I guess we can throw out Xerox Parc's NLS because they never commercialized "windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor." They were commercialized by others later on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos We can also…

Would love to know what the last major breakthrough in social science / psych R&D was.

Archeology / history, on the other hand, definitely have some pretty awesome finds.

Post reply on HN