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IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

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Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#181

Post by dangoodmanUT »

dangoldin wrote: post #130
b33f wrote: post #15

Maybe a good time to consider alternatives https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka

I led the engineering team of a large adtech company (TripleLift - order of hundreds of billions of events/day) and we evolved from self hosting Kafka, to paying a vendor (Instacluster), to migrating to RedPanda. RedPanda was a huge win for us. Confluent never made sense to us since we were always so cost conscious but the complexity/risk of managing a critical part of our infra was always something I worried about.…

This. Using RP was like a breath of fresh air compared to the dread of Kafka (both local dev, and running a prod cluster)

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#182

Post by nosefurhairdo »

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'm with a company that was acquired by IBM ~2.5 years ago. The internal systems are definitely rough, but for the most part it's business as usual.

I've heard chatter from our engineering leadership that IBM is trying to push some silly initiatives, but we've been able to prioritize the right work so far.

I also get more equity (one time award + employee stock purchase plan) than I did previously, and with how IBM stock has been performing lately this has been a net positive for me.

FWIW I have heard that IBM used to force their management style on acquisitions in years past, so perhaps this is a fairly recent shift towards a less hands-on approach.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#183

Post by [deleted] »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #121
wetwater wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In defense of Byzantines. Their rules and amazing diplomatic prowess is what let them be an empire for so long. The negative connotations to Byzantine comes from the negative perception the west had of them. Byzantines were very practical in regards to who they allied with.

I'm sure the children who watched their parents get murdered before they themselves were taken into slavery during the fall of Constantinople appreciated those rules and the alliances they supported.

[deleted]

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#184

Post by theta_d »

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 did, multiple times. I was a contractor. I was the only one on my team of contractors whose account was screwed up. There seemed to be no priority to do anything there. One of many many reasons I left when I could.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#185

Post by theta_d »

Reubachi wrote: post #95
askafriend wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I imagine that's done via JIRA tcket/IT before onboarding. So if they somehow can get past initial device deployment/user account logon, and get other resources IE; slack....well that speaks to how difficult/pointless it would be to get proper VPN/Jira access.

I believe it was an ancient ServiceNow incantation that all the current employees couldn't seem to hunt down.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#186

Post by _zoltan_ »

bdelmas wrote: post #164
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'…

Doing research? Sure... Maybe. But it doesn't mean they are going to get anywhere to mass production... What was their last huge innovation? On top of that I won't give that much credit for what they do or say they do. Remember how much they lied about many of their "innovations" like IBM Watson?

Scanning Tunneling Microscope, high-temperature superconductivity - 2 Nobel prize right there.

Then laser eye surgery, magnetic storage, relational databases, UPC barcodes, DES, FFT, RISC, ...

yeah, almost nothing. /s

disclaimer: I work for IBM Research and I love every second of it.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#187

Post by viccis »

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…

Yep, this is a classic acquisition story. You go from a hungry company out there to fight to succeed and join a big corp where most projects are just endless series of meetings people have about what they want to do without any real timeline or immediate plan to start.

The worst is when your sales team (and all of its super valuable institutional knowledge of your specific market) are cut, and all your management is laid off so that the new corp's managers (who have embedded themselves into the corporate bureaucracy like a trichinosis worm) can treat all your teams as free headcount.

Soon, your company, which was acquired for growth, can't do anything and turns into an albatross around the new corp's neck. So the layoffs begin.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#188

Post by bonzini »

nosefurhairdo wrote: post #182
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'm with a company that was acquired by IBM ~2.5 years ago. The internal systems are definitely rough, but for the most part it's business as usual. I've heard chatter from our engineering leadership that IBM is trying to push some silly initiatives, but we've been able to prioritize the right work so far. I also get more equity (one time award + employee stock purchase plan) than I did previously, and with how IBM s…

> FWIW I have heard that IBM used to force their management style on acquisitions in years past

Definitely wasn't like that for Red Hat. We had a CFO with an IBM past which was a really nice guy and never ever felt like he was parachutes from IBM.

Now after 6 years legal, HR and finance will move to IBM starting next January; but my perspective from engineering is that after the acquisition it's been and remains business as usual.

I have no idea how it was for Hashicorp.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#189

Post by gnatman »

macintux wrote: post #177
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?

The Apple acquisition of NeXT has (only half-jokingly) been described as NeXT buying Apple with Apple's money. That's obviously an exceptionally rare case.

I think I’ve seen people on here describe Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick in similar terms—- or at least in the sense that DC’s culture infected & somewhat replaced Google culture. I may be misremembering though.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#190

Post by fatal94 »

NewJazz wrote: post #169
fatal94 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're doing is fine for a homelab, or learning. But barring any very specific reason other than just not liking Kafka, its bad. The second that pattern needs to be fanned out to support even 50+ producers/consumers, the overhead and complexity needed to manage already-solved problems becomes a very bad design choice. Kafka already solves this problem and gives me message durability, near infinite scale out, sha…

Some people don't and won't need 50+ producers/consumers for a long while, if ever. Rewriting the code at that point may be less costly than operating Kafka in the interim. Kafka is also has a higher potential for failure than sqlite.

Ofc, and not everybody needs or cares for all the features Kafka has. Then use another known and tested messaging system. Use NATS or ZMQ. Or any cloud native pubsub system

My main point is, I have zero interest in creating novel solutions to a solved problem. It just artificially increases the complexity of my work and the learning curve for contributors.

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