My FIL worked for IBM for 15 years (1980-1995, IIRC). He says that when he was hired he wondered why on earth a company like IBM would need a Civil Engineer. And wondered the same thing every day up until being laid off.

I think its been a long, long time since IBM was a shining star of American business.

correct me if im wrong but it looks like they just acquire new companies and their software but they either let it die or never continue improving on it. Just check IBM's products page. Its a mess. They literally have thousands of softwares some of which arent even being sold to customers

They can make a lot more consulting dollars on marginal software than for something that was sanely designed and worked well.

Thats my experience with them and qradar. Its literally littered with bugs and instead of fixing them they just made a new version with literally 0 things shared with the old one, naming it qradar+ (nice naming btw, next time it call it qradar 2)

A friend's startup competes with Maximo, and IBM's "in-place version upgrade" has not yet been completed for a client with less than a year-long consultant engagement to fix changes that are both forwards AND backwards incompatible. Might as well be a new system.

We use maximo to track changes, its terrible.

What time frame did you work there?

I enjoy reading about the Mercury missions and the work IBM did in that era. There must have been a lot of smart people there then.

There's also a (recent?) book about IBM's work with the Nazis during WWII that has gotten some press lately. Has anyone read it?

They had similar contributions to apartheid, too.

From 1990.

"IBM and the Holocaust", Edwin Black, 2001.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

When? Recently or back in it's heyday?

My cousin worked there from like 1999-2016 or so as an accountant and I've never seen someone so overworked.