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IBM says 'several thousand' layoffs on the way

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Re: IBM says 'several thousand' layoffs on the way

#101

Post by needusername »

CHY872 wrote: post #49
aragot wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes the most interesting revelation in Cringely's rumor was that IBM made software. Let's be honest: An big IT product is about 25 programmers and 25 diverse people (incl marketers, designers, accountants) working for 3-10 years. With this you make a GitHub, a Word, an IE. IBM could be owning the planet today. But no, they're in the business of hotels, golf, and conferences.

I think you have an incredibly short-sighted view of the difficulties associated with software engineering. In particular, your view of how hard it is to write large pieces of software seems to be way, way off.

Every other JavaEE application server is better than WebSphere.

Re: IBM says 'several thousand' layoffs on the way

#102

Post by AlisdairO »

easytiger wrote: post #94
AlisdairO wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do make many billions profit on software every single quarter. Who cares if the market is not very sexy? If you think there's only 25 people working on Word, I think you're off by an extremely large margin.

They make billions by corporate lobbying and political marketing

I wasn't commenting on IBM's methods - although I think attributing the entirety of their profit to scammery is extremely far-fetched - but on the choice of market. My comment was simply to point out that I don't think there's any shame in targeting boring market segments, and that there's clearly plenty of money to be made.

Re: IBM says 'several thousand' layoffs on the way

#103

Post by AlisdairO »

aragot wrote: post #65
AlisdairO wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do make many billions profit on software every single quarter. Who cares if the market is not very sexy? If you think there's only 25 people working on Word, I think you're off by an extremely large margin.

If you planned on making a competitor of Word, would you copy all its features and throw 5,000 people at it? Of course not. No, I don't think Word is 25 people. But a relationship of mine made an Excel in js with 3 people and sold enough copies. Before you say I'm wrong again, no this Excel-in-js isn't isofunctional. It's just what the customer needs. Point being: You can make great software with few people, and IBM…

> Before you say I'm wrong again, no this Excel-in-js isn't isofunctional. It's just what the customer needs.

isofunctionality is implied by saying you could make 'a Word'. I wouldn't dream of disputing that you could make a word processor that offers some limited subset of Word's functionality with a small team - but that's not making a Word-class product, it's making a simple word processor.

Re: IBM says 'several thousand' layoffs on the way

#104

Post by aragot »

jacquesm wrote: post #83
aragot wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide your own estimates on how many people are required to make great software. Not talking about Word in particular. I've worked in large companies, now I make a living off my own company, so I must know something about software teams, complexity and feature creep. I didn't provide these estimates in the void.

> I didn't provide these estimates in the void. Actually, that's exactly what you did. You made a specific claim about a specific piece of software and you failed to back that up with so much as a shred of evidence.

Let's take public figures I can talk about: According to Wikipedia [1], Atlassian has 1148 employees and 20 products. It's 57 employees by product. BUT Atlassian also grew by 44% in 2014, [1] and recruits intensively, so we can estimate that they had 797 employees in 2013. If correct, it means the products they have now have been built by 40ppl on average, including support people, accountants and marketing. Sorry I know some products are bigger than others and I can't talk about those specifics.

And Atlassian does make world-class products which certainly compete with IBM. Please downvote if you prefer IBM ClearQuest to Atlassian JIRA.

I apologize for making an unbounded claim. It was unprecise because I didn't want to be specific about previous workplaces I've worked at. I have felt a shred of hatred from the HN community in the present situation, with the downvotes and negative comments.

Internet Explorer 3 had 100 people and IE5 a thousand [4], which is superior to the figure I was once told, which was 25 people for the development team. I had never been surprised by that low number because complexity grows exponentially and brings problems. I admit downvoters were right that Word didn't take 25 people to build, because of course everyone knows Microsoft has 128k employees [6].

GitHub is 255 employees[3] - Half of which for Enterprise [unbounded claim] and they weren't so many when they got famous. Git itself has had 100 developers over its history [5]; If they were employees, they wouldn't have been simultaneous employees.

So let's change my proposal: Who thinks world-class products are built by rather medium teams ([1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian

[2] https://www.atlassian.com/company/press/press-releases/atlas...

[3] https://github.com/about/team

[4] http://www.citeworld.com/article/2147006/consumerization/int...

[5] https://github.com/git/git/graphs/contributors

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft

Re: IBM says 'several thousand' layoffs on the way

#105

Post by aragot »

AlisdairO wrote: post #103
aragot wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you planned on making a competitor of Word, would you copy all its features and throw 5,000 people at it? Of course not. No, I don't think Word is 25 people. But a relationship of mine made an Excel in js with 3 people and sold enough copies. Before you say I'm wrong again, no this Excel-in-js isn't isofunctional. It's just what the customer needs. Point being: You can make great software with few people, and IBM…

> Before you say I'm wrong again, no this Excel-in-js isn't isofunctional. It's just what the customer needs. isofunctionality is implied by saying you could make 'a Word'. I wouldn't dream of disputing that you could make a word processor that offers some limited subset of Word's functionality with a small team - but that's not making a Word-class product, it's making a simple word processor.

I agree we can't reproduce Microsoft Word with isofunctionality with 25 people (obviously). I agree my past comment made it sound like that.

I currently feel negatively from the readers, so I'm testing that again: I've written a comment below with figures and sources to back my claims - See comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8956544

Re: IBM says 'several thousand' layoffs on the way

#106

Post by tptacek »

jacquesm wrote: post #44
bring1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

their stockprice would make a big jump if they could manage to lay off 110k people. I think it would be a good thing, to streamline their operation.

You do realize you're talking about 110k people losing their income? Including dependents (averaging 2.4 / wage earner) that means this would affect ~ 250K people plus those laid off so 350K people. Funny definition of a 'good thing', there is more to life than stocks.

Hundreds of thousands of other people, like teachers and firefighters, depend on returns from companies like IBM to fund their retirements. If IBM can't profitably retain employees, holding onto them anyways comes at the expense of all the shareholders, not just the ones with cigars and monocles.

Re: IBM says 'several thousand' layoffs on the way

#107

Post by aswanson »

draugadrotten wrote: post #90
aswanson wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting...Ben Horowitz said he suffered the same types of attacks from hedge funds; they'd spread a false rumor and because he was under some type of regulatory restriction, he couldn't correct the record unless he simultaneously updated all his institutional investors at the same time. He had to let the rumors ride out...and he only had a 90-100 million market cap. Somebody has to reign in these useless z…

> he couldn't correct the record unless he simultaneously updated all his institutional investors at the same time. Hmm, conference calls, twitter, e-mail, web pages. And so on. Is it really that difficult to issue an update which satisfies this legal requirement.

Ben is not a dumb guy. I may be dulling out some of the details, but Im sure it was not that simple. Especially since it was about 7 years before the advent of twitter and involved SEC regulatory compliance.
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