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IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

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131–140 of 374 posts

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#131

Post by jen20 »

oersted wrote: post #108
embedding-shape wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely by now everyone, including non-developers and non-software people, know exactly what IBM is, and you don't sell to IBM/join IBM without knowing exactly what's about to happen. No one joins IBM today and thinks there will be a huge focus on customer satisfaction or focus on great product design, it's all about squeezing maximum profit out of products until you need to discontinue them because you chased away al…

Not wrong but the image that people are painting in the comments is getting close to a caricature now. The stuff IBM is doing on Quantum Computing is serious cutting-edge science and engineering for instance. The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech. They are doing a bunch of progress on post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. They'…

> not focused on building excellent products

> a lot of the things they are doing on R&D are no joke

Sounds a _lot_ like Microsoft too...

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#132

Post by ecshafer »

askafriend wrote: post #82
theta_d wrote: post #37

I worked for IBM Cloud about 6+ years ago. While there, we had to connect to a Softlayer VPN to get into our Jira instance. My VPN account and Jira account never got provisioned so I couldn't connect nor see the Jira board. My team-mates couldn't even assign a ticket to me b/c of this. They would just put my initial's in the ticket summary and send me a slack of the details. It was right before I left that we got our…

Why didn't you ask to get the accounts provisioned?

What's the largest company you've worked for? A lot of big, older companies, are just so messed up that its just not worth it. How do you do this? Well you have to find the specific form, or specific person who does the thing, who is that? no one knows. So that provisioning of a vpn and getting in jira might literally be like a month of work.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#133

Post by diob »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #30

IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have…

Yeah, they acquired the company I worked at and left us alone for a year or two. Each year would get worse though, and each year we swapped nearly all bureaucratic things around. Always a different way to do performance reviews goals, etc.

A lot of the successful projects at the original company are now dead.

It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to job hunt within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a month or so you are out. It's super weird.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#134

Post by ekianjo »

jen20 wrote: post #131
oersted wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not wrong but the image that people are painting in the comments is getting close to a caricature now. The stuff IBM is doing on Quantum Computing is serious cutting-edge science and engineering for instance. The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech. They are doing a bunch of progress on post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. They'…

> not focused on building excellent products > a lot of the things they are doing on R&D are no joke Sounds a _lot_ like Microsoft too...

Sounds a lot like every very large company, in broader terms

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#135

Post by chubot »

Romario77 wrote: post #69
gnatman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty bleak, and describes my experience to a T (although involving other companies). Has there ever been an example where a company has been acquired and culture/morale/conditions have actually improved rather than dissolved?

I wouldn't describe it as improved necessarily, but successfully integrated. This happened many times - youtube by google for example. Facebook acquisitions are pretty successful too (not looking if it was good for humanity, just from business perspective). Some companies like Amazon buy companies and let them run almost independently - IMDB for example, Zappos, Twitch, Whole Foods, Zoox, Audible.

Android was also an acquistion by Google, run relatively separately, and it grew into something huge

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#136

Post by thinkingtoilet »

ecshafer wrote: post #132
askafriend wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't you ask to get the accounts provisioned?

What's the largest company you've worked for? A lot of big, older companies, are just so messed up that its just not worth it. How do you do this? Well you have to find the specific form, or specific person who does the thing, who is that? no one knows. So that provisioning of a vpn and getting in jira might literally be like a month of work.

I've worked for S&P Global, so pretty large. If you don't have an account that you need, then you need to be tenacious, which of course is super annoying. If you don't have an account on a system you should, it's 100% on you after a while.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#137

Post by justin66 »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #30

IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have…

> They’ll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above and beyond for that important early customer.

Yeesh. Which level of hell is that?

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#138

Post by tssva »

diob wrote: post #133
JSR_FDED wrote: post #30

IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have…

Yeah, they acquired the company I worked at and left us alone for a year or two. Each year would get worse though, and each year we swapped nearly all bureaucratic things around. Always a different way to do performance reviews goals, etc. A lot of the successful projects at the original company are now dead. It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically h…

"It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to job hunt within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a month or so you are out. It's super weird."

This is standard operating procedure at most consulting/professional services firms.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#140

Post by ahoka »

Romario77 wrote: post #111
spyspy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still convinced the vast majority of kafka implementations could be replaced with `SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`

pull vs push. Plus if you start storing the last timestamp so you only select the delta and if you start sharding your db and dealing with complexities of having different time on different tables/replication issues it quickly becomes evident that Kafka is better in this regard. But yeah, for a lot of implementations you don't need streaming. But for pull based apps you design your architecture differently, some thin…

Funny you mention that, because Kafka consumers actually pull messages.
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