They had apparently been doing some "cleanup" and somehow our site number got on to a list. All our servers, attached volumes, subnets, load-balancers were deleted.
My boss and I spent the next 30 hours applying terraform and rebuilding anything not automated.
Would not recommend IBM Cloud. We are moving off in next 6 months.
Few weeks later, massive layoffs, that triggered the warn act. So now I know how IBM works, see first hand meeting, after meeting being totally worthless. I would say stay far away from anything the touch. Just be glad you could move off their platform and not stuck using their platform with their CICD ... else you would be in living hell.
* 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 the process again.
It's not easy to know when is the right time to jump your old trusted provider. At the beginning of the acquisition not much happens. Things degrade slowly because employees take the burden of doing the job for two people. But nobody can be subjected to the stress for too many years.
Big corporations create nothing, only abuse the good faith of employees and the cost of moving providers of small companies. I have seen that happening in tech. When small innovative companies grew they got enough economic power to not have to innovate anymore. Purchase small good companies and drain them is the new business model.
And it's a shame, there was a time that liked IBM, and others.
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.
This seems like just another argument for limiting startup acquires. Perhaps if a big exit wasn't the goal, the company would focus on more long term viability.
Anyway, I don't think they big companies care as much about whether they destroy value, as long as they destroy a potential competitor.
Startup acquisitions, in the absence of astoundingly deep due-diligence should probably be placed in portfolios where a 5:1 failure rate can be tolerated. I’m not sure how such an acquisition would be compensated.
Weird experience.
Turns out sitting on my ass and listening to something useless pays the same.
Then he mentioned the 'merger of equals' and I thought 'this isn't good news'
Narrator: It wasn't.
Started looking for a new job that same minute...
It isn’t always a power move, even if HN wants it to be; and yes, I realize that’s an unpopular opinion here.
Two years ago I had to help a customer debug some weird nginx behaviour, resulting in their traffic spiking at ten times the expected rate. The IBM/Softlayer VPN required that I used Internet Explorer, but it still failed to work. We spend three month with IBM and IBM Cloud consultants to make it NOT work.
IBM destroy everything it buys. They have POWER, their mainframes and associated software left. How that keeps them afloat is a mystery.
As an example, most network or server changes you made through the API resulted in an automated email saying your sales representative would be in touch about your order, followed a minute later by an automated email saying the change was done at $0 charge.
When we opened the initial ticket, the IBM engineer kept saying "you should ask X why they deleted your stuff". Eventually after attaching the LinkedIn page for the IBM SRE in the audit logs, they realized something was screwed up on their side.
> 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 astonishes me that any corporation would trust the organisation to actually carry through with their obligations. You have to really, really, royally screw up for a government body to consider you anathema.
The old adage of "No one was ever fired for hiring IBM" is no longer true or reasonable.
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.
The whole rest of the universe needs software too. Most companies are grossly incompetent to develop it themselves. Most are things that SWEs of the type which visit HN would never, ever want to work on. IBM does that adequately well. That's "services."
If I need a tool built which will manage workflow at a management consulting firm, a custom tool for managing cases at a law firm, or some custom supply chain kludge -- the 99% of other "boring" software -- and I happen to know nothing about technology, who do I turn to?
IBM isn't a bad choice. It's a major step up from Indian firms in terms of both price and quality. It has significant in-house technology to leverage. It's a safe choice. It will usually do better than in-house IT.
I recently evaluated the business of a company which builds ships. They developed software in-house with an IT staff who weren't qualified to tie their own shoelaces. They had huge military contracts. They didn't subcontract to IBM, but it wouldn't have been a bad choice.
Having been there, I can say that IBM is no different than the other Indian tech firms like Infosys, Wipro, HCL and other. Infact, there is a rotating door of employees among IBM and other Indian firms.
1. Since the last 5 years, IBM has more employees in India than in the US or any other country [1]
2. Secondly IBM pays more that the Indian companies in India to poach employees but shortchange their US counterparts. [2]
Infact, the only difference between IBM and other firms is that the initial sales procoess is handled by American counterparts. Once the sales piece is done and the actual project starts, it is replaced by the offshore team.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-now-has-more-workers-in-in...
[2] https://www.postbulletin.com/opinion/ibm-to-give-raises-to-i...
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.
Gerstner layed of somewhere around 20% of work force, sold off tons of ibm art, real estate etc because IBM was lost ... And losing money. That says something. Spurious comparisons don't.
Labeling IBM bad because it out sources to India is a vieled insult to indians and it's culture I guess. If that's the position -- not mine --- have the galiteantry and courage to just say so.
I'm reminded of the Futurama line: do you idiots where you're from? Nobody nowhere can say no to that. American culture, OD, and common sense when it's not losing money, playing golf, splashing around shareholder cash on art or tieing up innovation in BS (all of which IBM did pre Gerstner and was called out for) expects problems fixed, brings out the best in all comers, and expects comers to be value add. Thosr that cant play that game are out.
Regrettably this has one dark corner. Management isnt so good at overseeing itself. So in really bad situations they are good at shifting blame. Well nobody said it'd be easy. Let's start by not gossiping however.
I'm not sure what your point is here, but based on Forbes 2000 for 2020 via Wikipedia [1], by market cap Tata Consultancy Services and Reliance are both larger than IBM. Both have grown faster than IBM since 2020. In terms of companies overall a number of other Indian companies are larger than IBM.
If you look at infotech alone, Tata Consultancy Services is the one bigger than IBM, and Infosys (>50% of IBM market cap), HCL Technologies and Wipro are all larger than 1/10th of IBM.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_I...
Tata is nearly half a century older than IBM. IBM is older than the TCS subsidiary, sure - TCS is "only" 54 years old. But I have no idea why that matters to your argument as it's still not clear to me why you were making the comparison.
That said, IBM does today have more employees in India than in the US, and IBMs current CEO is Indian-American, born in India and educated in part at an IIT so I can see why some would describe it that way. To me at least there's no value judgement - positive or negative - attached to that. It seems like you took offence at the comparison of IBM to an Indian company, and I can see why you'd think so in context, but I don't see why that justifies downplaying the success of companies like TCS.
> Like I said show me an Indian company that was a tech giant for analysis on the way down.
I still have no idea what you intend this to mean. TCS is a tech giant. It's the largest IT service company in the world.
As for Tata being no IBM, you're right, Tata Group is older and several times the size of IBM. The Tata Consultancy Services subsidiary alone is larger than IBM, and Tata as a whole employs about twice as many people as IBM, most in TCS. IBMs original business was thematically closer to what they still do today, I guess, but only marginally.
>I still have no idea what you intend this to mean. TCS is a tech giant. It's the largest IT service company in the world.
What is so tough here understand here? I've done IT for 30 years. I don't think I've used a gadget, O/S, compiler, cloud resource, dev-ops, or distributed algo from Tata once. IBM? All day long. I consulted at AT&T ... man the number of things they made I used was insane.
Moreover, given time all large companies cycle between running on all 8 cylinders to periods where marketing, paper pushers, corporate culture BS, losing contact with customers and customer satisfaction, poor quality erode the top/bottom line, lead to a loss of market power, pricing power, and so on.
Tata, assuming it ever had the towering heights IBM hit on all fronts, may be big now. But wait around long enough and Tata like most large human organizations will fall from grace too. And I bet, at it's core, outsourcing will not be found to be root-cause; related perhaps but certainly blaming the outsiders isn't wisdom. So as I said, then re-said, and say again show me one of those Indian companies *who are on a down cycle now*. The way I have contextualized it here makes for a relevant comparison.
While I'm at it: I'll say again unlike posters earlier up, I refuse to crap on IBM because it out-sources to Indian companies. Like anywhere some Indian companies suck. Some don't. Some may be on a high cycle like Tata. Those in the US doing the outsourcing maybe already sucked before outsourcing began. It's those kinds of spurious insults which are not appropriate and not my position.
I would put the IT services business of Accenture, Cap Gemini, and IBM in the same bucket as the rest of the Indian firms.
Oh, my sweet child. You might be surprised to learn that IBM and those SWE boiler rooms like WiPro are basically the same.
[0] https://newsroom.ibm.com/2021-11-03-IBM-Completes-the-Separa...
Will it be? Don't they outsource a lot of their subcomponents to Indian firms?
- A US intermediator can know the climate in India and navigate the cultural differences because they do this day in day out.
- A US tech company can properly vet whom they're subcontracting to because they have engineers in-house
- A US tech company will have a contract in US jurisdiction. If there is e.g. a data leak, there is liability through US courts. A step down from that, a US company can have US-based oversight and escalation mechanisms
- Social networks and relationships matter too. If you're working with Bob from the golf course, and his company messes up, you'll see Bob again next month at the golf course and chew him out.
... and so on.
I'm not suggesting you or I (personally) should subcontract through IBM, but for a US-based non-tech firm, it can make a lot of sense.
To flip this around, whom would you rather hire to do your accounting (presuming you're not an accountant and know nothing about accounting):
- A US company which outsources to India
- A random company in India
I would go for the former, since I know there would be liability if they messed up, and they'd make sure the US tax code was properly complied with. There's nothing wrong with the latter, but I'd have no way to vet them, and if they messed up, no recourse.
Then Covid hit, nobody wanted to fly, and $BIGCO took an earnings haircut and decided to cut back. My friend had to let dozens of people go. It ended up costing him his company because he'd neglected bringing other work into the pipeline.
Coworker dad went from being a millionaire to living in a truck this way too.
Let the big fish swim together.
They probably could just run much of the business just on the licencing fees they get. If you think they are not doing anything you're likely not their target customer.
No one talks about Oracle. But they're still around. We did a major tech project to migrate off of Oracle after an acquisition of a large org that was running it.
It was a year-long effort to migrate. But it was worth it since Oracle renewal costs were going to be nearly 50% of our IT budget.
b) Large global talent pool of Oracle experts.
c) First-class professional support.
Not everyone is looking to innovate on their database. Many just want something that is reliable and easily supported.
Ah, this was a sarcastic comment! It was, right?
Fun fact: a few years back Amadeus employees were in the top 15 of k8s contributors by company.
Modernization for these systems was probably long overdue.
https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sabre/
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/the-most-important-c...
There was a project they did not want to do. To avoid saying "no" and risking the relationship they quoted what they thought was an outrageous price, expecting to loose. The customer said yes. They had underestimated how much IBM had been gouging them for so long.
"How do you get to tokyo from paris", the cheapest, the shortest time, the least layovers, add a stop in X, etc. Not that easy.
Then you have to remember all the stuff under the hood like how are you caching all that information, how do you actually register the sales of all those tickets. Are they in your flight alliance? Are they goign through your regional airline systems too?
I would never want to touch that stuff. Way too hard. Way too many legacy systems powering it too, probably.
See also: https://franz.com/success/customer_apps/data_mining/itastory...
Which is now owened by google and probably powering google flights lol
Not to mention the uptime requirements and other SLAs in place (which probably are all different for each contract they sign)… yup. It’s probably a monster.
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
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.
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 services. They were basically toy projects being advertised as ground-breaking AI. I'm not surprised at all to see Watson finally collapsing under the weight of its vacuous claims.
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.
But as someone who doesn't know the tech, but worked in the media side as a vendor at the tail end making marketing materials for IBM during their "Internet of Things" craze, I couldn't help but feel, as a laymen, so excited at what IoT (and other crazy developments like Watson) could be, because apparently IBM at the time was hitting up a buncha different vendors and just blanketing a certain sector of the marketing industry with jobs. Any colleagues I talked to were on some IBM marketing job or another.
Fast forward to about 7 years later, and I still have no clue what IoT is or does, but I sure saw a buncha marketing material flood mainstream media for a minute, with IBM saying it'd be revolutionary!
Just makes me think about web3/ crypto/ NFT's, how it's coming down hard with media campaigns, claims, yada yada. Definitely seems about hype & optics, just like IBM in their IoT media carpet bombing era.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/market-cap
It is even worse than it looks considering the opportunity cost of not sticking the money in basically risk free and cost free SP500 ETFs. Even Warren Buffett took a huge bath on IBM.
That can't be the reason. Over the last 5 years, IBM underperformed the S&P 500 by 16%/year.
A shame…
But when I left to go back to school "global services" a business to business consulting division was the big up and coming division. It seems that division is where IBM decided to go. Honestly they'll just sell to some big businesses so likely you'll never hear about what they're doing.
I'll agree they seem to have lost their way. Its a shame really. They did some good things: I remember a lot of the engineers there would travel to schools and promote engineering careers.
Extremely reliable, and extremely good at what they do. They sure are expensive.
A lot more companies should adopt them.
Yet its going the way.
They run at scale at a lot of companies.
AS/400 / iSeries was awesome at least in the beginning.
I think it may be discontinued now.
Those machines were extremely reliable and well made.
Often companies who had bought one had no idea where it was. Someone had set it up for them 7 years ago and after that nobody paid attention.
Some places were better and did proper backups. Which means stuff the right tape of a rotation into the slot.
They would also call home to tell IBM of a proper that is developing and they would send a tech out to switch the parts prior to anyone using it had any problem.
(and that is when the machines were sometimes hard to find. One was buried in a closet, with tons of paper cases, paper archives. stack buttom up to the floor.
IBM is a sale driven organization. I.e. sale first - tech after. so it cannot be judged as an high tech company, I.e. on the tech.
A point of reference is SUN - which was tech first - sale after.
Another point of reference is HP. HP was tech first, but turned into sales first.
Marketing aside. Lets not forget how cool that was. It was a great public demonstation that AI / ML is possible now.
I always answer, "Sure, we could, if you're fine with not other progress getting made towards your business objectives for 6 months."
I set up briefings to Gartner Analysts seeking to get our consultancy on a quad early in the mobile era.
One of them was on the earliest examples of hybrid HTML / native views in iOS. One of our engineers was implementing them in the Apple Store app.
IIRC, Gartner was not ready to split out boutique mobile dev but getting an earworm into an analyst with influence over a quad is still valuable.
I presume there is chatter on potential forming of quads before they make print.
Working these executive-influential information sources, and our firm continuing to land major app dev contracts led to an acquisition by Deloitte Digital.
/lol
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.
https://petri.com/blockchain-bust-microsoft-joins-ibm-with-b...
Genius!
The solution is 100x faster, cheaper, more secure, immutable, less prone to fraud and limited in supply.
It’s a very simple calculation.
I never need to transfer money quickly between accounts — it’s never once been a problem to wait a couple days. And sure there are real economic problems with printing money, but again, the government does a decent enough job at keeping the dollar stable that it doesn’t affect me.
And there’s the fact that the US gov has tons of power to maintain the validity of the fiat dollar through legislation, and as a backup they have the use of force through police and jail (in the case of tax evasion, or avoiding the laws). Then there are international alliances, and there’s the largest military in the world also with a strong interest in maintaining the dollar’s value.
So I’m not worried about the value of the US dollar in the long term — at least I certainly trust it more than a purely technical solution with none of the US Gov benefits.
Faster: I don’t have any problem with speed of USD transactions. In fact, most transactions are faster than crypto via credit cards or cash.
Cheaper: there are $0 transaction fees for cash, and low fees for credit.
Secure: US laws do a decent enough job
Fraud: crypto exchanges get hacked and there is often no recourse — if my credit card is stolen, there are laws that protect me
Limited supply: by definition, that makes the currency deflationary, which is horrible for a growing economy. And it’s obvious in bitcoin. Nobody spends money today if it’ll be worth more tomorrow — that’s why everyone just buys and holds bitcoin as an investment, not uses it as a currency
It might not matter to you that sending cross border transactions have very high fees, because you live in a first world country and are rich, but 99% of the world aren’t as rich as you.
whut
NYC Covid pass was build on blockchain. Such a goddamn pointless waste of time
Thinkpads were a great example of this. Laptops which promised decent quality and support for a high price. When the laptop market was demystified and commodified, IBM correctly got out of it - for a decent price.
If some random start-up, or even Google, had built Watson, it would have correctly been seen as a gimmick. Instead it sold literally billions of software consulting to people who thought they needed AI but actually just needed a search box with dynamic autosuggestion. Would you rather get some junior guy to hack something together using open source tools, or would you rather pay IBM 50 times as much? If you chose the former, you're simply not in the target market.
The hybrid cloud is exactly the same game - as is made quite clear in that ad, it's pitched at middle management who don't want to look like chumps for ignoring the cloud, but don't want to fuck up by moving to it.
Reputation is a difficult asset to monetize - effectively you make money from it by degrading and then destroying it. After all, if you carry living up to your good reputation, you're not extracting any advantage from it. IBM can't sell their reputation or their name to the highest bidder. All they can do is keep trawling for business lines where it gives them a comparative advantage.
It's easy to see this as unscrupulous - but their customers genuinely do get a benefit from the confidence they have in IBM.
I understand why you're saying this. I have no idea either. However, open their 10-K and you'll find out how they make money. In fact, while their revenue and profits are declining, they still make more than $70B in revenue a year with a profit of about $4-5B, so their ability to stay in business is higher than many tech companies that are not profitable.
They still do stuff but it's hard research and niche so business wise it won't make them short term success. You mention power but they also have a good hand in Quantum Computing.
which may take over the world, but is presently at the stage "call me when it can reliably factor 35"
I know they bought Red Hat but I didn't hear that they gutted it. Can you expand on that?
Source: I work at Red Hat.
It's a bit of a strange comment considering it blames IBM for Lenovo's management of the Thinkpad line and a commercial that they later realized (but still haven't corrected themselves) was actually an HPE commercial [0].
Before IBM purchase: Travel to clients, build and/or fix their things, suggest improvements.
After IBM purchase: Travel to clients, build and/or fix their things, suggest improvements.
At least from my side of Red Hat I've experienced zero changes in how I go about my work. In fact, my schedule is even more packed now, we can barely keep up with the demand. As far as I can tell IBM has left us alone to do our thing. Maybe it's different for other departments.
https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-2Q-Earnings-Press-R...
I don't think they do either, judging by my experience working there as an upper-level-support technician 15 years ago.
It seemed like the organization was book-ended with decent brains: engineers and front-line managers were decent to fantastic, and the upper-management seemed to be decent at the time. However, both ends seemed to be choking to death on a hundred layers of middle management. 7 years after Office Space was released and I actually had three(3) managers. Three! I had a technical manager with whom I had bi-weekly meetings where we talked about nothing, a non-technical manager with whom I had monthly meetings where we talked about nothing, and the head of my department who was the only one who meaningfully managed me in any way. (And he was absolutely fantastic.)
For example— they made some big announcements about their impending migration from windows to linux for everybody from admin assistants to sales to developers. Exciting! I loved that linux was getting more professional credibility, and my product ran on Solaris, so having a local UNIX environment would reduce some of the cognitive load for networking, scripting, etc. etc. There was no internal mandate to start the migration yet, but I was too eager to wait. I found the official image on the intranet and started writing documentation for my coworkers. It was pretty smooth! The complex GUI apps like the Lotus suite worked great! Well, as great as they did on windows, anyway. The installer was quite polished! I was excited!
I had one more thing to install— the ancient, internal defect and ticket tracking clients used by every technical worker, product designer, all of their managers, etc. Neither the intranet page for the clients nor the Linux image docs had any info. Hours later, I found a months-old internal note EoLing the Linux port, directing people to use the obtuse CLI instead. No problem— we're all technical people here, right? Problem. The API used by the GUI client supported necessary functionality the CLI didn't. That alone rendered the Linux initiative dead-in-the-water for most technical workers who'd benefit most.
I'm sure the manager who canned the Linux client was solving a very real problem, but a) a decision directly affecting company-wide strategy getting lost in the ether, and b) nobody checking to see if these big overtures were even basically feasible, embodies their organizational shortcomings. (I might have gotten some of the details wrong— it was a long time ago— but you get the gist.)
That's almost certainly why they're getting sued for purportedly blatant age discrimination, too. Managers in the middle with too much sway to have that little top-level visibility solving their problems using means that end up screwing lots of people.
That they style themselves as a technology-focused business consulting company rather than just a tech company is pretty rich.
There's your answer.
This commercial still makes me laugh. The way she finishes his sentence with “our digital transformation” is the kicker.
Those were the days…
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 blew their budget on marketing (remember Watson on Jeopardy?)
The final straw for me was watching football with a techhy friend and a commercial for IBMs “hybrid cloud” came on. There’s some executive mulling over whether to “go to the cloud” or whether to go with on premises, and they have a eureka moment where they learn about IBM hybrid cloud and they go into a board meeting and save the day. We both just burst out laughing.
IBM doesn’t make stuff anymore. That’s the core problem.