281–290 of 711 posts
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It's about power, just like mandating going back to the office.
There are lots of reasons other than power to want people on-site. This is a strawman.
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IBM is basically an Indian firm these days
Is it? Really? No. In fact it's not. Name one Indian company that ever reached 1/10th of what ibm had so that it's a candidate for seeing it on the way down. A serious insult because it'd be much more true would be to look at it's OD, culture and demise since Gerstner. Gerstner wasn't happy with a lot of IBM slop, paper pushers, and corporate BS either. That'd keep it on track rather than spurious comparisons. Gerstn…
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Good luck suing ibm..
For breach of contract and negligence, IBM were successfully sued, and then banned from all future projects, by the Queensland government in 2013. [0] Which sets you up with a nice precedent and set of documents to see their angle of attack. > IBM will not be allowed to enter any new contracts with the State Government until it improves its governance and contracting practices. With that ban _still live today_, it as…
I mean, yes, but also think about how long a government can afford to have their lawyers pursue a case like that. If you don't have those kind of resources, it's a lot riskier.
I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…
> I do not understand how IBM stays in business. They make money on those who have more than they know what to do with. Case in point: I spent six months in a project, which at its peak had about forty people working on it. Eventually it was scrapped and replaced with a solution from IBM, which in turn ended up... not being used at all. Overall it was a hilarious waste of everyone's time, but somehow that was okay.
I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…
They will deal with all the crappy and lazy and incompetent clients. They bid on all the government work, the bank work, the insurance work, etc. The kinds of places where HN devs would say your career goes to die, along with your soul. They will do the stuff the internal teams at those companies pass on.
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It's happening because hospital corporations love them. Corps can pay less, and since they have a tenth of the education, they order tons of profitable tests, consults, and scans because they don't know otherwise.
This is a mischaracterization of P.A.s (well, not the being-paid-less bit). Do you know any personally?
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The biggest airline booking system, Amadeus, can actually run on Kubernetes and some airlines are migrating to it. Fun fact: a few years back Amadeus employees were in the top 15 of k8s contributors by company.
Is airline booking software very complex? I don’t see why that software would necessitate the updating of k8s.
If this is surprising to you, you have no idea.
It's a 24/7 business as a start. Multiple flights, multiple fares, multiple ways of booking a flight, airline agreements, etc
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Isn't this the typical corporate acquisition process? * Bring in Deloitte, McKenzie, or other consulting group. * Gut the acquired company to reduce costs. * Fold newly acquired divisions into existing mediocre division. * Service gets run into the ground without the original people who made it great. * Eventually the service degrades and customers leave, business line stops generating profits * Company goes through…
Gives me the unpleasant thought of how much value is destroyed and lost in these mindless corporate acquisitions. Incentives are broadly misaligned with what we should want as a society, instead investors want a payday as well as founders, and the acquiring corporation wants a fresh coat of paint and has access to the finance that can make it happen and only hurts 10 years later. In the end promising human efforts ar…
Nice payday for the founding team and the ticking time bomb is paid for out of bigcorp’s wallet. They go on to great new things and the eventual demise of their garbage pile will be blamed on bigcorp.
Not to say that large companies don’t destroy value - they absolutely do, frequently - but that the main error they make is not being able to appraise which startups are smoke and mirrors and which are legit. The rest of us are not so great at it either.
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I was part of that acquisition. To be fair, Weather Channel was already running Weather Underground into the ground when they acquired it first. IBM just came in and helped them finished the job. A huge part of it was the incompetence with which IBM pushed us to use Watson modules in our products, which I could see 6 years ago were worse than open source AI options and had no application to Weather Underground's serv…
>> They were basically toy projects being advertised as ground-breaking AI. They were media events that lead to powerful media events, which in turn lead to investors pumping money into the stock price. Shareholder value is the only real profit. Watson being on Jeopardy no doubt garnered investment dollars from thousands of wealthy retirees. Those toy projects earned their keep many times over.
That can't be the reason. Over the last 5 years, IBM underperformed the S&P 500 by 16%/year.
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IBM is basically an Indian firm these days
Is it? Really? No. In fact it's not. Name one Indian company that ever reached 1/10th of what ibm had so that it's a candidate for seeing it on the way down. A serious insult because it'd be much more true would be to look at it's OD, culture and demise since Gerstner. Gerstner wasn't happy with a lot of IBM slop, paper pushers, and corporate BS either. That'd keep it on track rather than spurious comparisons. Gerstn…
I would put the IT services business of Accenture, Cap Gemini, and IBM in the same bucket as the rest of the Indian firms.