IBM is a Silicon Valley company? I thought they were headquartered in some combination of Armonk, NY and whatever country has the cheapest workers that week.
They have a top research facility in San Jose (Almaden), among many others in the US and around the world. I'm not familiar with where the bulk of their workforce is located, or if it is highly distributed.
Silicon Valley has become a general reference to the Tech industry the same way Wall Street is for the Finance industry. That's just the way it is in the public consciousness now, no point in fighting it too much.
It seems that wherever I go, everyone has something terrible to say about them, but they still keep getting huge contracts that they fail to deliver on.
Is there someone here who can reasonably explain why they like IBM?
Because I can't understand it.
And I congratulate Queensland, Australia for banning future contracts with them for the next fifty years. (QLD can't contract to them for 50 years).
I'm certainly not an IBM customer, but I recognize that they have a very strong sales force. Relationships with management level IT folks and lots of golf games/schmoozing is probably one of their main competitive advantages.
No longer true. When IBM borked the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control software upgrade (1993), they very publicly lost the contract and many heads rolled. Mitre (their very stable FFRDC) lost a third of their FAA support staff in the blood-letting that ensued.
IMHO, the only remaining golden boys of business are consultants like Bain and BCG, who tell the C-suiters what to think.
Of course, the great secret is that these opt-shops will be the first companies to be fully automated, but invisibly. Then for decades thereafter, human CEOs will blithely continue to follow the lead of their precious Bain-bots, not realizing they've become a bot too (which they always were, of course).
> It seems that wherever I go, everyone has something terrible to say about them, but they still keep getting huge contracts that they fail to deliver on.
Like many businesses that thrive on enterprise, and particularly government, contracts, IBM's key competitive strength is in knowledge of an expertise in navigating and manipulating the relevant contracting processes.
I'm not sure its really a case of "like"... or for that matter "hate"..
IBM has a heaping pile of problems, many of which are completely understandable, and in many cases self inflicted due to "poor management". Yet, for many companies/government organizations (particularly large ones with decades of IT systems, frequently tied together with bailing wire from the last merger/spinoff/etc) they remain a choice, simply because buying another zSeries/iSeries/etc is the least expensive/risky proposition. These are companies that have been using IT solutions for decades, and have pretty mature processes, that frequently are damaged by modernization. Its not that these problems couldn't be solved by a modern web stack, or whatever is sexy this decade. It is that there is a working solution, and the companies have a history of trying to replace it, or living through the pain the last time they did. So, they buy a new iSeries every couple years for $250k, when the machine is doing the work of a $5k server from dell, or a couple thousand dollar a year cloud instance. In many cases they buy the new machine/contract/consulting even though there is an in-house project "replacing" it with a java/php/node.js/whatever stack, and the resulting product still isn't done. So, they pay IBM to tweak the current solution a little so it works on an phone browser (or whatever) instead of throwing the whole stack away and struggling with the 1/2 baked replacement. Sometimes they try to pay IBM to replace a solution, and the same thing happens, only its some other consulting company that comes in an quietly buys another iseries/hp nonstop/etc and continues on with business as usual. So, if you have been in IT for any length of time you realize that its not just IBM. The industry is littered with failures, many quietly hidden behind NDAs. In fact there are statistics floating around about modernization projects at large organizations, and they aren't pretty.
All that said, IBM has some really bright people working for it. They produce things like the POWER8 or FS900 which are fantastic pieces of technology. Although having fantastic pieces of technology isn't necessarily by itself a recipe for success. If it were, we would all be using VMS on Alphas. That said, you can frequently see the WTF, in IBMs products. The proprietary DIMMs that were originally used in the "scale out" POWER8's, or the mess that is the firmware on the linux only power machines. Two problems that would have been much better if IBM had just stuck with industry standards and made them work from the beginning (standard DIMMs and UEFI) rather than thinking they were special snowflakes and creating further barriers to the use of their technology. They like all the other really big tech companies, drink far to much of their own cool aid. Particularly when they are slowly declining.
IBM employed roughly 378,000 people in 2015[1] and the actual number laid-off is closer to 14,000[2]. This represents 3.7% of the workforce. While layoffs are never great, most of these were from legacy systems as they have been attempting to hire 25,000 since that was announced[3].
IBM is a very large company and employs a great number of people. They have been transitioning from a hardware company to a services company and thus, many workers who specialized only in the older tech will be let go. I cannot speak for everyone, but (AFAIK) they were given opportunity to move elsewhere in the company.
To put the layoffs in context, Cisco is expected to lay off 14,000 workers (nearly 20% of its workforce), Walmart is laying off 17,500, and Seagate is laying off 8,100 by 2017 - 15.5% of its 2015 workforce[4].
Of course its IBM bullshit. They get to tie hiring they needed anyway to some incentive that they will be negotiate.
They have an effective methodology for holding governments hostage and this is no different. You cannot blame IBM... they are making the noises that pandering politicians want to hear and driving value for their shareholders.
I tried to use Bluemix to prototype some stock market AI thing... I spent a few weekend nights playing with it. Frankly, I didn't find Bluemix or Watson any more capable than myself.
Of course, I then received several emails from sales reps.
IBM is pivoting towards cloud so they let go a lot of people associated with legacy projects. Bluemix happens to be great. We have had an excellent experience with them.
Pretty heavy Blumix and AWS user here. Honest question: what do you feel is great about Blumix and what is the main differentiator? Except for the fact that they have bare metal in their offering, I haven't been impressed with them.
I can't tell if you're talking about SoftLayer or Bluemix or are they the same thing now? I feel like a confused old man suddenly because I thought Bluemix was a thing and now it's SoftLayer I thought, but maybe it's still that other thing?
I don't get this either. Blue and White collar workers haven't gone anywhere. They've been sitting here for years terrified that their jobs would go away. Let us not forget that IBM just eliminated 20,000+ jobs just this year.
Judging from the context, I suspect it mean hiring former blue collar people to fill what would traditionally be professional roles (IT).
Basically, they laid off a bunch of expensive, educated and experienced people and are now looking to backfill the areas they cut too deeply in with cheap labor that they can boot camp to a minimum level of proficiency and then charge the same prices for.
>with cheap labor that they can boot camp to a minimum level of proficiency
That does indeed seem to be the case. There's a Huff Post article where IBM execs talk about their pilot program that's tied to this "new collar" business:
According to an interview with an IBM official, “The objective is to prepare students for entry-level technology jobs paying around $40,000 a year"[1]
She ties the term "new collar" to vocational training versus college degrees. I suppose the cynical view is that they are trying to shift jobs that are currently held by expensive, degreed, employees...to fresh, cheap, vocational school grads.
Where pr meets identity politics old issues can be forgotten. The hopeful branding of a generation of workers as "new collar" will reframe the class gap debates in a wonderfully confusing way for all who don't want to identify as either of the previous, equally non specific "collar" types.
I'm surprised that they didn't just go with "No collar", but I suppose it doesn't rhyme with either "blue" or "white".
> "Entirely new role in area such as cybersecurity, data science, artificial intelligence and cognitive business"
Leaving the "Entirely new" bullshit, considering that "what matters most is relevant skills, sometimes obtained through vocational training", to me it seems that they simply want to hire software engineers while paying them 2x less than their market rate.
New collar is a bullshit term meant to avoid saying white collar, because they will have the same job with a pay cut.
"CEO Ginni Rometty announced that the new jobs will come over the span of four years"
That's roughly 6000 per year. I'm curious what the definition of "new jobs" is. Since they have 300,000+ employees, I would think they already hire 6000+ a year just to cover natural turnover.
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Exactly. And where is Trumps plan to meet with organizations that represent the interests of the American tech worker?
All these executives see is the bottom line, and to them it looks like a bunch of overpaid nerds and there is a nice solution to that problem and all they have to do is repeat over and over "we can't find the skills we need". They've done a fantastic job of all getting on the same page, I just wish the american tech worker did the same to at least counterbalance their narrative.
If you search around for other places where she uses the term, it means jobs that require only vocational training. Handy that these "new collar" workers will be less expensive, right?
Do we know that those new collar jobs will be less paid? In the resource you linked, security and data analysts are included. The could be vocational. They could be degree bearing. They could be advanced degree bearing. If they are paid less, it's probably do ease of entry.
I posted a link in another comment in this thread that gives some idea. Their pilot program (6 year high schools) is targeting entry level jobs that pay $40k/year. They are definitely not degreed.
I can't, of course, prove that this is displacing a job with a higher entry level salary, though I highly suspect it is.
If it were a normal white collar opportunity, why call it new collar? That term obviously implies she's trying to shoehorn something in-between blue collar / white collar.
Edit: I assume the $40k jobs are mostly in New York State, since the pilot school is in Brooklyn. I have no idea if $40k is a reasonable salary for say, Poughkeepsie.
I think a lot of tech jobs are vocational. I know they don't require a college degree.
I have one. I'm good at what I do. I've worked with several people who didn't have one, only a HS diploma, and they were good. This is part of the meritocracy that is tech.
As to the entry level. While that is low from a SF perspective, in Florida, that's pretty good, especially in a semi-rural area. If IBM is putting data centers and the like in similar areas, the price for the employee is a good fit.
Edit: don't get me wrong. I'm not a huge fan of IBM. I have a love/hate relationship (15000 red book pages under my belt). I also call their self-checkouts Nazi Clerks given their past.
The job areas sound interesting, but I'm curious how their schools will train people sufficiently for data science and other such intellectually debating work.
Not that these people aren't smart enough...I just question the ability to educate someone sufficiently for this stuff in 6 years as part of extended high school.
I'd love to know more about what this means in practice. The play on words with "blue collar" might resonate with Trump but definitely has connotations with "lower paying" which is concerning when coming from a major tech employer like IBM. After all, under a services model your biggest overhead (and thus target for "optimization") tends to be salaries.
Besides IBM's Ginni Rometty, the list of tech execs due to meet the President-elect today includes Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Facebook COO Sheryl Sanddberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, Oracle CEO Safra Catz and Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins. [1]
List of "invited, but not going": Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (currently out of the country), Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. [2]
Announced a few minutes ago however is that Travis Kalanick and SpaceX's Elon Musk are due to become members of the Presidential advisory council. [3]
Yeah, the structure of the sentence tripped me up. I get that headline-writers sometimes get teased for their dependent clauses, but they do serve a purpose.
Given Trump's propensity to publicly denounce individual organisations, including threats of withdrawing government business, it's hardly surprising that companies are now lining up to court Trump's favour in the same vein as Carrier. The only thing that does surprise is just how quickly companies are adapting to the new game and lining up to present King Trump some kind of offering.
Indeed. My bet is they will announce a "great deal" that will "create 1000's of tech jobs" and all the Trump had to give up was an increase to the H1B cap, another OPT extension and maybe even a tax break.
I don't trust this at all. IBM promised to create jobs in my town (Columbia, MO) in order to receive tax credits, and after they received those tax credits, they cut their workforce. The city has since suspended those tax credits. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but I see this as nothing more than a facade to gain leverage with Trump.
61 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 45.7 ms ] threadP.S. Bluemix is bad and you should feel bad.
EDIT: I normally try to approach my commenting with a rational calm way, but I can't, not with I.B-fucking.-M.
It seems that wherever I go, everyone has something terrible to say about them, but they still keep getting huge contracts that they fail to deliver on.
Is there someone here who can reasonably explain why they like IBM?
Because I can't understand it.
And I congratulate Queensland, Australia for banning future contracts with them for the next fifty years. (QLD can't contract to them for 50 years).
IMHO, the only remaining golden boys of business are consultants like Bain and BCG, who tell the C-suiters what to think.
Of course, the great secret is that these opt-shops will be the first companies to be fully automated, but invisibly. Then for decades thereafter, human CEOs will blithely continue to follow the lead of their precious Bain-bots, not realizing they've become a bot too (which they always were, of course).
Like many businesses that thrive on enterprise, and particularly government, contracts, IBM's key competitive strength is in knowledge of an expertise in navigating and manipulating the relevant contracting processes.
IBM has a heaping pile of problems, many of which are completely understandable, and in many cases self inflicted due to "poor management". Yet, for many companies/government organizations (particularly large ones with decades of IT systems, frequently tied together with bailing wire from the last merger/spinoff/etc) they remain a choice, simply because buying another zSeries/iSeries/etc is the least expensive/risky proposition. These are companies that have been using IT solutions for decades, and have pretty mature processes, that frequently are damaged by modernization. Its not that these problems couldn't be solved by a modern web stack, or whatever is sexy this decade. It is that there is a working solution, and the companies have a history of trying to replace it, or living through the pain the last time they did. So, they buy a new iSeries every couple years for $250k, when the machine is doing the work of a $5k server from dell, or a couple thousand dollar a year cloud instance. In many cases they buy the new machine/contract/consulting even though there is an in-house project "replacing" it with a java/php/node.js/whatever stack, and the resulting product still isn't done. So, they pay IBM to tweak the current solution a little so it works on an phone browser (or whatever) instead of throwing the whole stack away and struggling with the 1/2 baked replacement. Sometimes they try to pay IBM to replace a solution, and the same thing happens, only its some other consulting company that comes in an quietly buys another iseries/hp nonstop/etc and continues on with business as usual. So, if you have been in IT for any length of time you realize that its not just IBM. The industry is littered with failures, many quietly hidden behind NDAs. In fact there are statistics floating around about modernization projects at large organizations, and they aren't pretty.
All that said, IBM has some really bright people working for it. They produce things like the POWER8 or FS900 which are fantastic pieces of technology. Although having fantastic pieces of technology isn't necessarily by itself a recipe for success. If it were, we would all be using VMS on Alphas. That said, you can frequently see the WTF, in IBMs products. The proprietary DIMMs that were originally used in the "scale out" POWER8's, or the mess that is the firmware on the linux only power machines. Two problems that would have been much better if IBM had just stuck with industry standards and made them work from the beginning (standard DIMMs and UEFI) rather than thinking they were special snowflakes and creating further barriers to the use of their technology. They like all the other really big tech companies, drink far to much of their own cool aid. Particularly when they are slowly declining.
IBM is a very large company and employs a great number of people. They have been transitioning from a hardware company to a services company and thus, many workers who specialized only in the older tech will be let go. I cannot speak for everyone, but (AFAIK) they were given opportunity to move elsewhere in the company.
To put the layoffs in context, Cisco is expected to lay off 14,000 workers (nearly 20% of its workforce), Walmart is laying off 17,500, and Seagate is laying off 8,100 by 2017 - 15.5% of its 2015 workforce[4].
1: http://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM_Annual_Report_2015.p...
2: http://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-layoffs-continue-1463784692
3: http://fortune.com/2016/05/20/ibm-layoff-employees-may/
4: http://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/08/19/12-companies-...
They have an effective methodology for holding governments hostage and this is no different. You cannot blame IBM... they are making the noises that pandering politicians want to hear and driving value for their shareholders.
I tried to use Bluemix to prototype some stock market AI thing... I spent a few weekend nights playing with it. Frankly, I didn't find Bluemix or Watson any more capable than myself.
Of course, I then received several emails from sales reps.
Basically, they laid off a bunch of expensive, educated and experienced people and are now looking to backfill the areas they cut too deeply in with cheap labor that they can boot camp to a minimum level of proficiency and then charge the same prices for.
That does indeed seem to be the case. There's a Huff Post article where IBM execs talk about their pilot program that's tied to this "new collar" business:
According to an interview with an IBM official, “The objective is to prepare students for entry-level technology jobs paying around $40,000 a year"[1]
[1]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/what-does-the-p-in...
Edit: The letter she wrote to Trump outlining what "new collar" means: http://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/201...
I'm surprised that they didn't just go with "No collar", but I suppose it doesn't rhyme with either "blue" or "white".
> "Entirely new role in area such as cybersecurity, data science, artificial intelligence and cognitive business"
Leaving the "Entirely new" bullshit, considering that "what matters most is relevant skills, sometimes obtained through vocational training", to me it seems that they simply want to hire software engineers while paying them 2x less than their market rate.
New collar is a bullshit term meant to avoid saying white collar, because they will have the same job with a pay cut.
[1]: http://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/201...
That's roughly 6000 per year. I'm curious what the definition of "new jobs" is. Since they have 300,000+ employees, I would think they already hire 6000+ a year just to cover natural turnover.
> Rometty, the sole Silicon Valley leader on the advisory
> council, may be trying to show Trump that IBM is working
> to keep jobs inside the country.
Is directly at odds with the implications of the CEO's words in the same article (emphasis added):
> We are hiring because the nature of work is evolving –
> and that is also why so many of these jobs remain hard to fill
That reads a lot like the language used by $everyone to convince legislators that more H1B visas are required.
In addition, I saw nothing in the statement that indicated the hiring would be in the US, or of US citizens.
All these executives see is the bottom line, and to them it looks like a bunch of overpaid nerds and there is a nice solution to that problem and all they have to do is repeat over and over "we can't find the skills we need". They've done a fantastic job of all getting on the same page, I just wish the american tech worker did the same to at least counterbalance their narrative.
Edit: The letter she wrote to Trump outlining what "new collar" means: http://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/201...
I can't, of course, prove that this is displacing a job with a higher entry level salary, though I highly suspect it is.
If it were a normal white collar opportunity, why call it new collar? That term obviously implies she's trying to shoehorn something in-between blue collar / white collar.
Edit: I assume the $40k jobs are mostly in New York State, since the pilot school is in Brooklyn. I have no idea if $40k is a reasonable salary for say, Poughkeepsie.
I have one. I'm good at what I do. I've worked with several people who didn't have one, only a HS diploma, and they were good. This is part of the meritocracy that is tech.
As to the entry level. While that is low from a SF perspective, in Florida, that's pretty good, especially in a semi-rural area. If IBM is putting data centers and the like in similar areas, the price for the employee is a good fit.
Edit: don't get me wrong. I'm not a huge fan of IBM. I have a love/hate relationship (15000 red book pages under my belt). I also call their self-checkouts Nazi Clerks given their past.
Not that these people aren't smart enough...I just question the ability to educate someone sufficiently for this stuff in 6 years as part of extended high school.
I'd love to know more about what this means in practice. The play on words with "blue collar" might resonate with Trump but definitely has connotations with "lower paying" which is concerning when coming from a major tech employer like IBM. After all, under a services model your biggest overhead (and thus target for "optimization") tends to be salaries.
Still blue collar, except with khaki pants.
List of "invited, but not going": Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (currently out of the country), Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. [2]
Announced a few minutes ago however is that Travis Kalanick and SpaceX's Elon Musk are due to become members of the Presidential advisory council. [3]
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-top-tech-executives-larry...
[2] http://www.recode.net/2016/12/10/13908492/trump-tech-summit-...
[3] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-forum-idUSKBN143...
The most recent Economist cover story provides some interesting perspective on this http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21711314-president-ele...
What is IBM doing and selling nowadays? Did they become a consultancy or something?
They have 300k employees. That's a lot for a company I thought was dying.
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/local/ibm-s-columbia-emp...