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IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#181

Post by pdevr »

t43562 wrote: post #80

IBM felt to me like the last holdout of the shiny shoed salesmen when I briefly worked for them. Before the internet and big tech companies with leaders who were theoretically technical there were the companies dominated by salesmen because selling was the critical part. I imagine that getting a board to spend a lot of money on some project is hard and you need the support of the kind of people that can influence boa…

I am more of a Debian/Ubuntu guy, but it is indeed unfair to call RedHat's distribution super complicated. RHEL is not that difficult to maintain. CentOS was the default OS used by many hosting companies in the past, before technology changes occurred. It was fairly easy to maintain.

Agree with you that many of the salesman are typically technology-agnostic [I use the term "agnostic" in the sense it is used to define religious belief :) ]. They have capable technical guys supporting the salesmen, though.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#182

Post by anukin »

beachy wrote: post #171
jillesvangurp wrote: post #11

IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. They are a very large and a former tech company that mostly coasts along on doing expensive consulting projects around me-too clones of things that other people have invented just so they can still pretend to be a tech company. So you can do things with AI, cloud, and databases with them. But they aren't really leaders in any of that for a long time. And havin…

> IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. I started my career at IBM in the 1980s. My dad worked there before me. It's impossible to convey how much hubris existed in the company then, at the peak of the "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" days. IBM was a god. The company had never laid off a single employee. The talk was that the R&D divisions had multiple generations of innovative tech up their…

Damn it feels so much like Apple now

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#183

Post by azinman2 »

pdevr wrote: post #179
tempest_ wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even properly know what IBM is now that they spun a bunch of things off. I guess they tossed all the services/consulting into Kyndryl and everything else got to stay blue.

IBM has acquired Red Hat, UStream, Alchemy, Cloudant, SoftLayer, Vivisimo, Blekko, and a lot of other companies. They have, in fact, almost everything needed to build anything the FAANG companies are building. The missing pieces (in my subjective opinion) are: (1) happy AND talented employees and (2) a rapid execution culture.

You mean they acquired a bunch of infrastructure stuff, but no consumer products (unless you count failed blekko). That's not a fair match for anything that FAANG companies are building.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#184

Post by pdevr »

azinman2 wrote: post #183
pdevr wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM has acquired Red Hat, UStream, Alchemy, Cloudant, SoftLayer, Vivisimo, Blekko, and a lot of other companies. They have, in fact, almost everything needed to build anything the FAANG companies are building. The missing pieces (in my subjective opinion) are: (1) happy AND talented employees and (2) a rapid execution culture.

You mean they acquired a bunch of infrastructure stuff, but no consumer products (unless you count failed blekko). That's not a fair match for anything that FAANG companies are building.

They do have consumer products too, but by and large, yes. And a lot of consulting-oriented stuff too.

I was making the point that they have a solid platform available to build almost anything the FAANG companies have. Of course, they will have to build them. For that, they need to hire great engineers and they need to retain and keep them happy.

(Quick note: Traction is a whole different ballgame, but there are companies who gained initial traction through the customers of their business clients. In IBM's case, that is almost every major government agency and Fortune 500 businesses.)

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#185

Post by yarg »

RoyGBivCap wrote: post #174
hraedon wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, are they wrong? Elon promised coast-to-coast summoning in 2016 with a time horizon of two years! there were supposed to be a million telsa robotaxis by the end of 2020! Like, putting aside everything else, it had to have been very obvious internally that neither of those goals were plausible in that timeframe without miracles happening.

It's completely off topic and very culty to bring up Musk in a thread about IBM.

Not really, both (ostensibly) involve hinging company direction on speculation about the fundamentally unpredictable progress of machine learning.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#187

Post by abakker »

fallingknife wrote: post #160
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized? Then I guess we can throw out Xerox Parc's NLS because they never commercialized "windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor." They were commercialized by others later on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos We can also…

Would love to know what the last major breakthrough in social science / psych R&D was. Archeology / history, on the other hand, definitely have some pretty awesome finds.

Maybe UBI? I mean, hard to say it's been tested enough, but that feels like an answer to this question.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#188

Post by asdfman123 »

fallingknife wrote: post #155
makeitdouble wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which camp do you put TSMC ?

Nobody has heard of. Ask people outside of tech and I bet <10% have heard of this company.

Lots of people have heard of them, but most of the people who have actually worked there speak Chinese.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#189

Post by asdfman123 »

anukin wrote: post #182
beachy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. I started my career at IBM in the 1980s. My dad worked there before me. It's impossible to convey how much hubris existed in the company then, at the peak of the "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" days. IBM was a god. The company had never laid off a single employee. The talk was that the R&D divisions had multiple generations of innovative tech up their…

Damn it feels so much like Apple now

And Google

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#190

Post by jb1991 »

anukin wrote: post #182
beachy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. I started my career at IBM in the 1980s. My dad worked there before me. It's impossible to convey how much hubris existed in the company then, at the peak of the "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" days. IBM was a god. The company had never laid off a single employee. The talk was that the R&D divisions had multiple generations of innovative tech up their…

Damn it feels so much like Apple now

Apple Silicon is one of the most revolutionary new technologies in awhile. Apple has a long way to go before it is at IBM’s status.
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