IBM Watson Health slashes workforce

I helped build that candy machine demo! It was admittedly kind of silly, but it was fun to do.

Sadly IBM has changed a lot and I ended up in a different role not too long after, and then leaving the company entirely a year or so later.

To answer your question, though, one of the things Watson actually did was pretty powerful speech-to-text and text-to-speech engines. Out of the box they were approaching the best in the business, and with some customisation they could beat any other solution available for purchase. It was also far easier to use in a web browser than any of the competition (I'm biased here - I wrote a lot of that code - but I don't believe I'm wrong.)

I really enjoyed working with that part of Watson.

I disagree too. I think that humor should be allowed on hacker news. I mean as long as the jokes aren't at the expense of the ideology of the majority of hacker news's users. In that case, that humor should be downvoted and removed.

If it’s a serious company, it’s just an expected, standard part of negotiating, no different than salary, bonus, benefits, vacation, etc.

In general, you should ask if you’ll be required to sign any NDA, non-compete, or non-disparagement agreements, either as part of a company handbook or as standalone documents. If so, the severance package should be commensurate with the duration and condition of those.

It is common to negotiate severance equal to your salary for the duration covered by the agreements, or at least a large fraction like 30-50% of the duration, so a competitive severance package would certainly be in the range of 4-6 months of your base salary.

You can also negotiate to have company-paid insurance benefits extend past your termination date as part of severance, to avoid needing COBRA in the US.

The severance agreement should also cover anything like a company issued laptop, etc., if you are promised you can keep it after employment ends.

To get this, they’ll likely require you to sign waivers to any additional monetary claims, and draconian IP, NDA, etc., agreements. And this is why you should force the issue of negotiating severance up front and why you should walk away from companies (like IBM) that won’t negotiate.

Otherwise, they’ll announce the restructuring or layoff and then hold you over a barrel, by claiming you have to honor their company policy non-compete anyway, and pressure you to sign restrictive documents at your HR exit meeting, generally offering some insultingly low severance benefit, like only a few weeks or months of pay and no continuation of benefits.

All of this advice is specifically for junior-level employees as well. Never let anyone treat you like you cannot negotiate severance just because you’re a junior employee. Walk away from those companies.

For experienced employees, the amount of severance should absolutely be at least 6 months of pay and continued company-paid health coverage, and in many cases you can negotiate for it to fully match the duration of the non-compete or NDAs, usually 12 months.

Above all, don’t accept any baloney nonsense about “standard policies” restricting severance to a small number of weeks of pay per each year of tenure, or any of that garbage.

That’s just the standard line they feed to people who don’t negotiate. And if a company refuses to be flexible on it, walk away.

I also used to work for Watson. It remains one of the best jobs I've had. There's a number of useful services available through Watson on the IBM Cloud. I'm a little biased toward Watson Assistant which can be nicely customized and integrated with other solutions to create some terrific customized virtual agents. You can also easily train natural language systems using Knowledge Studio.

I am a nerdy physician desperate to work with somebody on decision tree based expert systems. Are there a bunch of existing projects that I’m just missing?