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IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

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Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#141

Post by newsclues »

tssva wrote: post #138
diob wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also the CIA

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#142

Post by samiv »

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…

That's a very cynical take. Unfortunately likely correct.

It's a fact that a publicly traded company is beholden to Wall Street and any time such a company would use their earnings for R&D the P/E and margins go down (i.e. spending more money to earn the same) and this is considered a negative signal at Wall Street and the company gets punished in the market.

So the only way a company can spend their earnings is to pay dividends or buy assets such as other companies, which then must be squeezed for margins.

More here:

https://www.cringely.com/2015/06/03/autodesks-john-walker-ex...

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#143

Post by tgma »

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'…

IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things. Some enterprise boring profit squeezing, some shady scam "IBM blockchain on Z OS prevents viruses," some research/patent efforts elsewhere.

That said the GP is spot on for this sort of acquisition we know what will happen and has nothing to do with 2nm research division.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#144

Post by pengaru »

cr125rider wrote: post #53
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…

I hope Hashicorp survives. A few higher ups I’ve talked to there made it seem like IBM wants to learn from them, not force their old ways onto Hashicorp. We’ll see. That one is still pretty new.

My friends at RedHat were embracing similar forms of copium. By now they've all either moved on or are actively hand sitting while exploring options.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#145

Post by ahoka »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #99
alexjplant wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, and every consumer should just do this in a while (true) loop as producers write to it. Very efficient and simple with no possibility of lock contention or hot spots. Genius, really.

I've implemented a distributed worker system on top of this paradigm. I used ZMQ to connect nodes and the worker nodes would connect to an indexer/coordinator node that effectively did a `SELECT FROM ORDER BY ASC`. It's easier than you may think and the bits here ended up with probably - Coordinator node ingests from a SQL table - There is a discriminator key for each row in the table for ordering by stacking into an…

Yeah, but that's like doing actual engineering. Instead you should just point to Kafka and say that it's going to make your horrible architecture scale magically. That's how the pros do it.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#147

Post by prmoustache »

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?

I work for a company that has so much bureaucracy and silos that teams maintain wiki pages with links and routing on how to create tickets for specific tasks and wether there is a specific mandatory information needed in order to not have your ticket just closed as incomplete without an explanation.

Sometimes a team unilaterally decide to change the process, info is sent to a random number of mailbox/managers who may fail to pass the info. Some entire teams just put themselves in away status 24/7 and do not respond to direct messages.

So yes I can believe his story. Sometimes in these kind of companies you just don't know who and how to ask for something and you just hope someone knows someone who might know.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#148

Post by Zigurd »

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?

On consulting engagements, 0% of the time are Jira and git provisioned correctly for an outside consultant. I used to be appalled at being paid for two or three days of waiting for the IT guy to fix this. Now I use the time to find cleaning supplies and deep clean my cubicle and chair. People do look at me funny, but I feel better not just sitting there reading.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#149

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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…

There were a series of Dilbert comics that spoke to this.

Dilbert’s company buys an “artsy” startup (represented by a chap with a goatee and a ponytail).

Dilbert comments something like “We get your energy and skill, and we provide … an endless supply of 3-ring binders.”

To which the chap replies “I hear that if your name goes into a binder, you lose your soul.”

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