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

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They spun off only Global Technology Services, which was only IT infrastructure consulting. Most of the business consulting, including outsourcing software engineering, is still with IBM.

So they're a consulting company now? I know they got rid of OS's and laptops a while back; I assume they don't make or service mainframes/minicomputers anymore. Do they do any software/hardware development, or is it all consulting?

Through their various acquisitions over the years they are basically now a "Big 4" consulting Co with a name we typically don't associate with that industry

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

#212
post #171

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 as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. I started my career at IBM in the 1980s. My dad worked there before me. It's impossible to convey how much hubris existed in the company then, at the peak of the "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" days. IBM was a god. The company had never laid off a single employee. The talk was that the R&D divisions had multiple generations of innovative tech up their…

> The talk was that the R&D divisions had multiple generations of innovative tech up their sleeves and if any competitor ever got close, well they'd just pop something out like from a vending machine to kick their ass.

It's amazing that this story just keeps popping up over and over. People also said this about Intel (nope, 10nm was a total wash and during that time AMD and ARM started eating their lunch) and Google (no, there is no secret Google lab with the "good AI", it's just Bard and it sucks compared to GPT-4).

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no idea what you are talking about. IBM does more cutting edge research than the entire HN bubble combined. Hard research like materials science and semiconductors. Consulting is less than a third of their revenue and regardless of how you feel about consulting, it seems kind of idiotic to claim that this "barely makes sense at all at this point". Are the only companies that make sense the ones that work on…

Former IBM Research employee here (At the turn of the last century, and I did database stuff for them, not research). They spent 6 billion dollars a year on research. They had a chip fab in my building (Yorktown NY) had chemists, physicist, mathematicians... The really seemed to be struggling to try and turn that R&D into profits though. The hot new thing at IBM was "global services" consulting. Since I left they've…

acomjean how long did you work on databases at IBM?

Did you get to work with Edgar Codd or do you know someone who might know someone who worked with him?

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

#215
post #181
post #80

IBM felt to me like the last holdout of the shiny shoed salesmen when I briefly worked for them. Before the internet and big tech companies with leaders who were theoretically technical there were the companies dominated by salesmen because selling was the critical part. I imagine that getting a board to spend a lot of money on some project is hard and you need the support of the kind of people that can influence boa…

I am more of a Debian/Ubuntu guy, but it is indeed unfair to call RedHat's distribution super complicated. RHEL is not that difficult to maintain. CentOS was the default OS used by many hosting companies in the past, before technology changes occurred. It was fairly easy to maintain. Agree with you that many of the salesman are typically technology-agnostic [I use the term "agnostic" in the sense it is used to define…

I use Artix now - love it because it is so easy to make packages or at least update one that you need to update for some reason. RPMs are super super difficult much of the time.

I think the most horrible bit is selinux - that really upped the level of difficulty a lot. I'm also really fed up with Fedora's frequent releases - so hard to keep your machine current because upgrading usually only works properly once or twice and then you need to do a reinstall. That might be harsh - maybe 3 times but you still end up having to do it or lose updates.

For me this feels liked they've reached a peak of complexity. Now there are flatpacks and other things to torture us with and it's obviously not just them.

I found something that suits me at last and am typing to you from it now. Rolling updates so I NEVER have to do a full upgrade - it's so liberating. I can make choices like not having systemd - I use dinit and it's fine. Development packages are always installed so I want to build something from source and I never have to worry about whether the header files I need are there.

So far I cannot find a negative. OK it was a nuisance to make pipewire start automatically and I probably haven't done it right yet - not good for any new users - but that's it.

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

#216
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. I started my career at IBM in the 1980s. My dad worked there before me. It's impossible to convey how much hubris existed in the company then, at the peak of the "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" days. IBM was a god. The company had never laid off a single employee. The talk was that the R&D divisions had multiple generations of innovative tech up their…

> The talk was that the R&D divisions had multiple generations of innovative tech up their sleeves and if any competitor ever got close, well they'd just pop something out like from a vending machine to kick their ass. It's amazing that this story just keeps popping up over and over. People also said this about Intel (nope, 10nm was a total wash and during that time AMD and ARM started eating their lunch) and Google…

I would love to know why Google appear so behind GPT-4.

The vibe is that they are not releasing stuff until it's trustworthy.

My initial playing with ChatGPT is that it's amazing. Would I trust it to recommend medication? Likely not. Is it useful? Hell yeah.

Google should be taking a good hard look at how they have missed this boat, it could help them flush out their internal arteries.

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing ironic about it. They invested only in the marketing of AI, but not in the serious R&D of it, pretty sure internally they never believed in their own AIs. Plus they got the publicity benefit from Watson, which is important for a consulting company.

IBM had / has an army of sales types running around trying to insert Watson into health care, always reminded me of the Dick Jones character from Robocop trying to pedal the fundamentally flawed ED-209: "I had a guaranteed military sale with ED209! Renovation program! Spare parts for 25 years! Who cares if it worked or not!" Such an ethically questionable decision, trying to push unproven / non-functional tech into l…

Not usually in this habit, but really needed to commend you bringing in not only Robocop, not just stopping with Dick Jones, but including his quote as well. This really made my day.

Signed, A fan of Robocop as dystopic corporatocracy preview

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM had / has an army of sales types running around trying to insert Watson into health care, always reminded me of the Dick Jones character from Robocop trying to pedal the fundamentally flawed ED-209: "I had a guaranteed military sale with ED209! Renovation program! Spare parts for 25 years! Who cares if it worked or not!" Such an ethically questionable decision, trying to push unproven / non-functional tech into l…

Not usually in this habit, but really needed to commend you bringing in not only Robocop, not just stopping with Dick Jones, but including his quote as well. This really made my day. Signed, A fan of Robocop as dystopic corporatocracy preview

Thanks!

"Always seize the opportunity to take a divebomb shit on corporate malfeasance through the medium of film quotes." - Wesley Snipes, Passenger 57

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM had / has an army of sales types running around trying to insert Watson into health care, always reminded me of the Dick Jones character from Robocop trying to pedal the fundamentally flawed ED-209: "I had a guaranteed military sale with ED209! Renovation program! Spare parts for 25 years! Who cares if it worked or not!" Such an ethically questionable decision, trying to push unproven / non-functional tech into l…

Not usually in this habit, but really needed to commend you bringing in not only Robocop, not just stopping with Dick Jones, but including his quote as well. This really made my day. Signed, A fan of Robocop as dystopic corporatocracy preview

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