A billion reasons never to buy IBM services • Hacker News Board

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#161

Post by verylittlemeat » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 5:28 AM UTC

throwaway7312 wrote: post #140

lainga wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole article smacks of a people-are-their-nations attitude I'd expect from a copy of National Geographic circa 1890.

As an expatriate who has traveled through dozens of countries and lived long-term in a handful, let me assure you: different national personal characteristics are very real. Put an Englishman, a Norwegian, and an Italian in a room together and it is more than their accents that tells you who's whom. Or a Chinese, a Japanese, and a Korean for that matter. Pick up your suitcase and get outside North America for a bit.…

I've spent time in countries all over the world and my experience was not like yours at all. There were so many more important factors in guessing a foreigners personality than what their nationality/ethnicity was. What is their education level? What is their occupation? What is their economic background? If you want to stereotype then those were much better questions to ask than "chinese, japanese or korean."

Now if you want to argue that certain countries produce way more of one socio-economic class than another and that you're more likely to be exposed to people raised in that culture then maybe I can agree. But to just say, for example, all Nigerians are loud mouthed tricksters? No I don't agree with that kind of stereotyping.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#162

Post by kumarvvr » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 5:43 AM UTC

xab9 wrote: post #113

Wife worked for them as sales something, sometimes I saw the tools she had been using, couple of presentations - real nightmare fuel. I remember once talking about how they (big blue) see Atlassian as a competitor and how they have to try harder to convince companies to use IBM products... the very moment someone replaced Jira with some IBM shit or Gmail Business or even Outlook with Lotus Notes I would quit.

Not trying to defend IBM here, but as a one time Lotus Notes dev, I can assure you that LN is not just an email program, but a whole platform that enables you to build workflow apps very very quickly. Not unlike sharepoint, but the catch being that it worked best from the LN client rather than the browser.

When I worked for IBM Global Business Service div as a dev, most of our payroll, billing, travel approvals and what not were done on LN. IIRC email was just another app on the platform.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#163

Post by kumarvvr » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 5:50 AM UTC

matte_black wrote: post #23

Is there any proof that the technical work for IBM is sent out to Indian boiler rooms with very high turnover? Or is this just based on some belief that any software in India must automatically be shitty?

I wouldn't agree with the high turnover part. Its as much as in other similar sized companies.

Its just that most of my colleagues hate the software made by IBM, its slow, a pain to use and has a tendency to make things very very complicated. You cannot build great stuff with mediocre tools.

The IT industry has moved on to leaner and simpler tools and platforms. IBM, atleast the GBS group, is basically a sales company.

Note : I worked in IBM GBS for a year before I left for more interesting and rewarding jobs. This was in 2008 though.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#164

Post by newfoundglory » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 6:09 AM UTC

throwaway7312 wrote: post #140

lainga wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole article smacks of a people-are-their-nations attitude I'd expect from a copy of National Geographic circa 1890.

As an expatriate who has traveled through dozens of countries and lived long-term in a handful, let me assure you: different national personal characteristics are very real. Put an Englishman, a Norwegian, and an Italian in a room together and it is more than their accents that tells you who's whom. Or a Chinese, a Japanese, and a Korean for that matter. Pick up your suitcase and get outside North America for a bit.…

And you can tell Americans by their assumption that everyone else on the internet is also American.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#165

Post by newfoundglory » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 6:11 AM UTC

Mizza wrote: post #126

danso wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Europeans are more exposed than Americans to folks of different nationalities, wouldn't they be less inclined to broadly generalize them? No one would accuse the author of meaning to judge "every single individual Slovakian person". It's ironic that you state your dislike of "weaselly or bland language", and then go on to describe the author as having a "perception of the traits of their culture as a whole" . Most…

> If Europeans are more exposed than Americans to folks of different nationalities, wouldn't they be less inclined to broadly generalize them? Why would it? It's just more data to pattern-match on, and that can mean confirming bias and prejudice as well. It might also shock you to find out that people who work in retail or food service also develop prejudices as well. It's not a good thing but it happens. I'm not say…

> This is particularly so when Europeans talk about other European countries, as in this particular case.

Given that you appear to be incorrect about this case being such an example, are you still sure that it’s all well meaning comradery?

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#166

Post by John_KZ » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 6:17 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #76

Historically Slovakia gets lumped with Eastern Europe in popular perception - Slovakia is nothing like Romania, the Ukraine, Albania or even Poland in turning out petty criminals or promiscuous online fraudsters. Not to forget Western Europe, France has a far more unhealthy work culture and fraud at work and as a way of living is far more acceptable than in Slovakia. Germany and Austria tend to value probity far more…

Well if someone keeps praising Germany and Austria exclusively, you know what to expect.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#167

Post by RobLach » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 6:47 AM UTC

AzzieElbab wrote: post #62

IBM is a horrible vendor, but the author is obviously clueless about the levels of incompetence, irresponsibility and indecisiveness of the stakeholders on client side for this kind of projects. All governmens should simply always pick the cheapest vendor because 90% of their projects fail regardless of who the implementers are

They did pick the cheapest. IBM was the only bidder.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#168

Post by SSLy » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 6:51 AM UTC

blueside wrote: post #83

kraig911 wrote: post #49

As someone who used to work in/on/underneath websphere. I can tell you I am loathe to even consider anything IBM. I was almost recruited by them and then I recalled how miserable I was on one particular project. The money was good but I said no. I recommend everyone I mean to stay away from IBM and Oracle as best I can. I just don't think the line between open source and enterprise is crystal clear anymore.

As a general rule, if a work task lands on your desk that involves working with a IBM/Oracle/SAP product, preemptively apologize to those regularly around you for your miserable attitude in the near future.

I don't know, I get this exact attitude when working against Windows Server, Oracle and WebSphere isn't so bad in comparison.

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#169

Post by PeterStuer » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 7:30 AM UTC

I you think this is an 'IBM' only problem, you're in for a surprise. I've worked on very large projects with other very large service companies, and the experience is very much alike.

From day one the client company gets swamped by an army of vendor analysts, the prime reason for this is to establish that it is the clients fault the project will fail as they couldn't respond to requests for information fast enough. Any information you manage to supply will be scrutinized for 'discovery' of 'change requests' to pad the meters and CYA.

Meanwhile, a 'technical specialist' room chock full of developers is installed to (a) put on extra time pressure and (b) start the billing engine in top gear. When you went into that room there were literally people sitting at desks watching the vendor's equivalent of CS 101 video courses.

Also, a team of lawyers is already preparing the documents for the 'settlement' in case of the (very likely) project failure.

All status information to the project's steering committee gets 'green shifted' until the supplier is ready to shift to litigation mode and then overnight the project's near unrecoverable disaster gets revealed alongside a proposed 'rescue' plan that is priced so ridiculously it makes the 'settlement' look cheap.

In the private sector these train-wrecks are often settled with non-publish clauses as making the press would make both parties look bad. In our case the supplier dropped a small percentage on the billing. The client was left with a room (literally) full of boxes of A4 'analysis' documents and 25M€ out of pocket. (this was in the financial industry, so it was basically pocket change)

All involved, both supplier side and customer side seem to have not suffered career wise from this disaster, moving swiftly to new clients and new projects.

P.S. Am I the only one that finds the author's sweeping generalizations of nationalities a bit in bad taste?

Re: A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

#170

Post by fphhotchips » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 7:31 AM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #144

user5994461 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why Oracle is in the list. The databases are very expensive but they work well.

When The Daily WTF was still maintained it reserved an entire section of the site for Oracle Database. It may rarely have catastrophic failures (although it's the second one I've seen most catastrophic failures, just after MySQL), but it is composed of one unreasonable choice after the other.

What makes you say The Daily WTF isn't maintained?