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At least it wasn't Oracle

chrisshort.net

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Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#131

Post by rwallace »

ssalazar wrote: post #104
ChuckMcM wrote: post #49

Having been in Chris' shoes (being acquired by IBM) I found the reactions of different people in the company most interesting. Several people had the same sort of "Everything is different now that IBM owns us." reaction, but if you unpack that, the reality is a bit different. For a company like Redhat I can't imagine it will be largely changed in the first couple of years at least, so for that period of time you will…

> At its heart though, IBM is just another company trying to do things to make the world a better place When has this ever been the prerogative of a multinational for-profit corporation?

Well within living memory, actually. IBM research labs made many contributions to human knowledge without necessarily expecting short-term profit. I still remember when their scientists used a scanning tunneling microscope to write the letters IBM in xenon atoms, five atoms tall.

We have to adapt to today's world, but we should remember a better world, one in which it was not customary to treat life as a zero-sum game, did exist, not so long ago. Social problems only become unsolvable if everyone forgets they were once solved.

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#132

Post by canhascodez »

awad wrote: post #114
kpil wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what is IBM truly good at that can be applied at Redhat? A lethal legal department? Super efficient HR processes? Office supplies management? I doubt something in engineering and sales? Or perhaps sales is the closest answer.

Procuring large contracts from enterprise and government. It's pretty handy in business.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", is what they used to say. IBM has 100 years of brand-name recognition going for them. They have to be doing something right.

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#133

Post by geitir »

kevstev wrote: post #100
vxNsr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the recent walmat redesign and the constant new website features, I was under the impression that Jet had totally taken over the website(walmart.com). It's interesting to see that the opposite was the case.

Walmart has been making lots of e-commerce acquisitions, Jet was just the biggest. A lot of it is about growing outside of the traditional walmart customer- High end brands won't sell on walmart.com, and even if they did, high end shoppers don't go to walmart.com, but they have no problem going to Jet, or Moosejaw, etc. Jet was also framed as an acqui-hire of their management team, in particular Marc Lore. How true t…

I feel with Amazon you can intrinsically tell by the formatting and lack of consistency in design between pages the hodgepodge of code running

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#134

Post by yourapostasy »

donmcronald wrote: post #106
calcifer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea why you are being downvoted. IBMs actions during WW2 are well known. [1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II

The virtualization sub-licensing racket is less well known. Big companies with virtualization offerings will sell you attractive licenses based on measuring usage with a tool like ILMT. IMO it’s intentionally complicated with the goal of having people fall out of compliance. If you end up out of compliance you can be in a position where they claim you owe based on full capacity licensing (a theoretical max) and the b…

Have you run into a situation where ILMT was deployed, kept up to date, clients installed on all servers (typically injected into standard image like part of an Ansible playbook or Windows slipstream or similar), required VM hypervisor port open to ILMT, and a PWC license compliance audit (now part of IBM Global Services) still came up with a different number than ILMT and forced that upon the customer? Because if so, I'd surely like to DM with you to exchange notes, as that would be the very first time I've heard of that happening.

I'd much rather deal with IBM using ILMT than Microsoft or Oracle licensing. Every single one of my customers who have used ILMT and came through a PWC license compliance audit reported to me that the ILMT numbers were accepted as the official count, after an inspection of the customer's asset database compared with an ILMT server list showed that the ILMT clients were deployed pretty much everywhere. Flexera negotiates a special dispensation from IBM to get their numbers accepted on par with ILMT, but Flexera doesn't keep up on a timely basis (within a month or two) with ILMT's tracking of new license models issued by IBM.

It is true that if you are not using ILMT and an IBM license compliance audit team comes knocking, then your life is going to suck. Then again, IBM tells everyone in the paperwork to deploy ILMT, and they've made it as easy as possible for nearly anyone (up to about 5,000 servers) to install and run ILMT, and of course it is no-charge software. Usually only takes at most a week for most sites to install, stand up clients, get the firewall rules right (or set up procedure for updates over air-gaps), integrate into LDAP and SSO, get into backups and verify, compare results with actual licenses (what IBM calls "entitled"), etc., where the actual ILMT install itself usually only takes an hour or less using their all-in-one mode.

As far as my Microsoft and Oracle folks have told me, there is no official license management system that is written into the license contract verbiage like ILMT is into IBM's that they will accept as the official count, that short-circuits any license compliance conversations dead-right-there. If you or anyone reading this knows of any, then please point me to the tooling, as that will save me a hell of a lot of time dealing with Microsoft and Oracle.

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#135

Post by onedr0p »

AlexanderNull wrote: post #130

Having worked at both an IBM and an Oracle acquisition, once you hit year 2 they'll wish it had been the other way around. A kind of nice thing about Oracle is they don't really want you to become an "Oracle shop" after acquisition. They bought you because you were doing something right, and they want you to keep doing that... just fill out these 10 obscure webforms at each step of the way.

Tell that to Sun.

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#136

Post by gaius »

rwallace wrote: post #131
ssalazar wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At its heart though, IBM is just another company trying to do things to make the world a better place When has this ever been the prerogative of a multinational for-profit corporation?

Well within living memory, actually. IBM research labs made many contributions to human knowledge without necessarily expecting short-term profit. I still remember when their scientists used a scanning tunneling microscope to write the letters IBM in xenon atoms, five atoms tall. We have to adapt to today's world, but we should remember a better world, one in which it was not customary to treat life as a zero-sum gam…

I still remember when their scientists used a scanning tunneling microscope to write the letters IBM in xenon atoms, five atoms tall.

That is what is known as “a marketing stunt”. Same as having Watson play Jeopardy.

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#137

Post by emmanueloga_ »

kevstev wrote: post #81
tombert wrote: post #65

I used to work for Jet.com, which was acquired by Walmart, and I stayed there for about two years after the acquisition. It was an OK place to work, and they gave Jet some level of autonomy, but I left when I read that Walmart wants to start "integrating" their stuff ours, which in my case was a lot of Java crap that was clearly at least 10 years old. I doubt that my experience is atypical with this. Big companies li…

Interestingly, I had a unique view on the other side of this. I worked at Walmart Labs at the time of the acquisition as well- remotely, from Jersey City. Long story short, upper management had changed, they were no longer supporting remote, at least not for management level, and I saw the writing on the wall that my future wasn't looking great- I fought against their massive tightly coupled Pangaea system (that Java…

Where does Clojure fit in the technology stack of Walmart?

Cognitect has a few references that seem a bit old [1], but I see WalmartLabs release clj libraries from time to time [2], and I heard a podcast once where someone talked about working with Clojure remotely too [3].

1: https://www.cognitect.com/walmart-case-study.html

2: https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia

3: http://blog.cognitect.com/cognicast/087

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#138

Post by kevstev »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #137
kevstev wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, I had a unique view on the other side of this. I worked at Walmart Labs at the time of the acquisition as well- remotely, from Jersey City. Long story short, upper management had changed, they were no longer supporting remote, at least not for management level, and I saw the writing on the wall that my future wasn't looking great- I fought against their massive tightly coupled Pangaea system (that Java…

Where does Clojure fit in the technology stack of Walmart? Cognitect has a few references that seem a bit old [1], but I see WalmartLabs release clj libraries from time to time [2], and I heard a podcast once where someone talked about working with Clojure remotely too [3]. 1: https://www.cognitect.com/walmart-case-study.html 2: https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia 3: http://blog.cognitect.com/cognicast/087

I knew these guys, IIRC, clojure originally came from an acquihired startup. This grew into a relatively small team working on an e-receipts project that was remote but largely based in Portland.

The most interesting thing about that team was that it appeared that not just a beard, but an epic beard was required to on it. I keep in touch with one of them, but he has left the firm. The others... I should probably send a note to- those were good guys.

I guess more generally though, they are "off strategy" and clojure was not making inroads at Labs, at least at the time I had left. There was a lot of gravity towards only using Java on the backend, part of my friction with upper management was pushing node.js as a backend technology. My feeling on the Clojure guy was that they were a good team so they were left alone since they weren't a core feature and they never generated any noise. That's just my take on it though, why after the big upper management change they really bristled against certain teams and technologies but were content with others was not clear to me.

Before I sent this off, I figured I should look at your links- the featured guy in the podcast was the one person whom I had mentioned that I keep in touch with but had left the firm- as have the other two that were on it. I recognize three of the contributors to lacinia.

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#139

Post by kevstev »

geitir wrote: post #133
kevstev wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart has been making lots of e-commerce acquisitions, Jet was just the biggest. A lot of it is about growing outside of the traditional walmart customer- High end brands won't sell on walmart.com, and even if they did, high end shoppers don't go to walmart.com, but they have no problem going to Jet, or Moosejaw, etc. Jet was also framed as an acqui-hire of their management team, in particular Marc Lore. How true t…

I feel with Amazon you can intrinsically tell by the formatting and lack of consistency in design between pages the hodgepodge of code running

Indeed. And listen every business needs to make tradeoffs, especially when you are just getting started. The job was described to me as running the "front page of Amazon" which of course sounded very exciting. I went to final stages there and it became clear that I was really going to be running a content management system, which is a bit different than I thought the job would be, but fine. But my last on-site at HQ, they really seemed to have a tunnel vision view on the problem, and just how siloed each team was became clear. I forget the specific question they asked that made it clear that changing any color would be a herculean undertaking, but I remember just being annoyed at how they seemed to have this air of superiority that they did things so much better than others, and seemed dissatisfied with my answers- to the extent that at one point I felt the need to make it very clear that to change the Walmart logo consistently, or turn it from blue to yellow or whatever, would be a simple change I could push from my laptop and have live within an hour. They were implying I couldn't handle the complexity and scale of their site, and I was in disbelief at the mess they had made of it.

Honestly the whole recruiting process had turned me off. They had reached out to me, and they baited me with the run the "front page of amazon" hook. I knew things were not headed in a great direction where I was, and it was right before bonus/vesting, so while I was not yet actively looking, I said just have a talk, make some contacts there. The recruiter I spoke to was unlike any I had spoken to, he felt like he worked out of a call center. He made it clear the position was based out of Austin, and I wasn't looking to relocate. It also became clear to me that this guy was just trying to fill this role, he had zero interest in trying to see what else was open where I might fit. Even though I wasn't looking to relocate, I figured I could wow them and either get them to relent on relocation or find a more local role that would fit. 6 months and several rounds later I finally get an on-site. At this point though, I had started actively looking, and by the time I got on the plane, had 3 offers in hand. I wouldn't have gotten on the plane, but I did kind of want to see the process through, I had never been to Seattle before and had a friend there.

I was really disappointed in the whole thing really, particularly their recruiting process.

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#140

Post by Nrsolis »

pinewurst wrote: post #119
Nrsolis wrote: post #116

The one thing I can't understand is why people aren't more excited about the possibility for IBM to completely transform into an open-source-forward organization. IBM does work for EVERY Fortune 100 company. I can't comment on the working conditions but as a person who regularly works with IBM I can tell you that they aren't much worse than any other 400K employee sized company. There are a lot of folks there that lo…

https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a... Maybe their awful corporate conduct outweighs open source handwaving?

Maybe there are two sides to every story?

I'm a person who looks to the future and hopes that e can find a better way forward. The company has new leaders, new employees, and a new focus on cloud.

There are no losers when a 100-year old Fortune 100 company validates your strategy and values.

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