> But ask an ordinary person under the age of 40 what exactly IBM does (or did), and the responses will be vague at best. “Something to do with computers, right?” was the best the Gen Zers I queried could come up with. If a Millennial knows anything about IBM, it’s Watson, the company’s prototype AI system that prevailed on Jeopardy in 2011.
I find this attitude to be fairly trite and disingenuous. Maybe we should ask millennials and zoomers what exactly it is that Goldman Sachs does or Dow or Cisco or any other large company that doesn't sell majority direct to consumer and see if we get a more intelligible answer. Just because a company isn't selling to you specifically doesn't mean it's a failure. I'm happy to criticize IBM, but let's do it for legitimate reasons (trend chasing, perhaps?) and not "my 16 year old doesn't know what they do so they must not be relevant"
IBM used to sell computers directly to consumers. They don't do that anymore so it's normal that IBM isn't on anyone's mind for a long time now. My mom knew IBM pretty well decades ago when she was a typist. Nowadays she wouldn't have a clue if IBM still exists or what it does.
If you go back before the IBM PC, the average consumer might well know they made typewriters and probably have some notion about them selling big computers to banks and the like. They'd almost certainly be vague on anything beyond that.
Fifty years ago, when I had nothing to do with the tech industry, I knew that IBM made computers. I didn't know what those computers looked like or who used them, but I knew they made them.
For a brief, maybe fifteen year period out of their 100 year history. And even those weren't big sellers. Point being, I don't know that it was ever reasonable to ask the "man on the street" what IBM does, and expect anything but a vague answer.
Hell, my mother used to program their 370s and System/38s (precursor to the AS400). I haven't asked, but if asked the same question, I wouldn't be shocked if her answer were, "wait, they're still in business?"
And Lenovo is a separate company even if IBM does some of the under-the-covers engineering. The average consumer (or even the not so average one) has no idea what firmware is or drivers are and Lenovo isn't even much of a consumer brand anyway.
Article's paywalled, so apologies if this is out of context, but it seems like a legit point in this case. From the 1950's through the 90's IBM was familiar to consumers. You'd probably have used multiple IBM products at some point even if you didn't own one; you certainly knew about them. If nothing else, IBM typewriters and PCs were ubiquitous. That version of IBM is gone, and it seems reasonable to argue that this is a negative. (Whether or not you agree with it.)
Gen Z is 1997-2012, aged from 11 to 26. It’s likely that the Gen Z they’re most experienced with are strongly biased to the 26 y/o end and that’s old enough to know a few things.
IBM is still fairly active at job fairs. Most Gen Z CS/CE/EE majors will know of IBM because they applied there for a job or internship. They'd pay shit but if you had a beating pulse and attended the right college they'd hire you. A great backup option in the 2010s
I'm not sure it's so much criticism as observing that they've gone from being the Ford of computers to being... IDK, some parts manufacturer for cars that nobody's aware of unless they're in the industry.
I think the point is that IBM is ostensibly a "tech" company and most people in tech (young and old) have never dealt with them nor do they know any of their products. We vaguely remember seeing IBM-branded desktops decades 30+ years ago, but that's about it.
Ask people about any large company in their own industry and they would know at least one of their products or services, and that includes Goldman Sachs, Dow, or Cisco.
>most people in tech (young and old) have never dealt with them nor do they know any of their products
It depends on how "working in tech" is defined.
If you work in IT at a Fortune 500 bank, insurance company, telco, manufacturing company, etc. then you almost certainly Know who IBM, SAP, Oracle, etc. are. If you work for FAANGMULA and adjacent SV companies you probably don't especially if you are under 35 or so.
Thats because FAANGMULA is mostly composed of media companies pretending to be tech companies. The business model is 100% a media and entertainment buisness model for most of the companies on that list.
I don't think it is even controversial to argue this so long as we can agree that a company cannot call itself a tech company simply because they hired a lot of programmers and are paying them decent salaries.
A tech company is a company that makes most of their money selling computer hardware and software products (and to a lesser extent, services and support for software and hardware products although it could be argued that is a different classification but with substantial overlap).
Notably, it has to be computers, not entertainment delivered via computers, or ads delivered through computers, and not industrials or pharmaceuticals or any number of other "technical but not 'tech' as in computers" industries. Tech is and has always meant IT, as in companies that are in the information and computers businesses. Where programmers happen to work, make the highest salary, or be the most highly concentrated has never mattered.
> fact a very tiny percentage of the budgets for these new "tech companies" are put into research and development of new products
Have you read how much cash Meta has burned on VR? Apple on its R&D? Nvidia? Amazon and Microsoft and the rest on cloud (that requires R&D too, they can’t just go out and buy it).
> The business model is 100% a media and entertainment buisness model for most of the companies on that list.
Nonsense if you read any of the financial statements, except for Netflix.
I think this is overly critical and I'm not sure I can see the justification. My understanding from that quote is that IBM is a name that everyone "knows", but fewer and fewer persons actually know what IBM even does anymore or why IBM is a household name.
Your additional examples aren't really counter examples most probably for most people; you've just listed additional companies that are likely common enough names that no one else outside the tech/finance sphere really knows why the name is a known name. I don't see this as disingenuous, I see as an accurate reflection of the modern interpretation of many of these older companies. Apple for example is "relatively" old(er), but you can ask anyone what you might get from Apple right now and probably they can name at least one thing like "oh yeah they make good phones" or "I like their laptops."
My entire professional career has been in IT/Programming, and the best I can tell you about what IBM offers is "eh, you can pay a ton for a contract for some server hardware/software. Hardware support is fine, but the rest is a dice roll on what you're actually getting for your money." I don't associate IBM at this point with a specific service or product I'd seek so much as just "this is a tech company that you pay a ton of money to and hope it works out for your project".
Though I will give them credit for their LTO tape hardware -- that is solid and straight forward enough for my tastes.
My personal experience, half the time I talk to IBM sales team or even their engineering team, I end up with far more questions than answers, and I get the distinct impression I'm offending the IBM rep for even questioning what they're saying, no matter how ridiculous their statements are. I know what the words they're saying mean and I understand what the tech is, but when I have practical questions about their design choices or implementation guidance and the IBM employees act as if they resent me for questioning them, I too wonder why IBM is really trying to accomplish in our meetings -- do they want to sell something that will help with my problem scope or do they just want lock-in? This question isn't unique to IBM naturally, but if that's what ends up occupying my mind after a meeting with IBM representatives, I'm quite certain it's an indicator that it's not something I want my team to get wrapped up in.
Edit: Changed "else outside the tech sphere" to "else outside the tech/finance sphere"
IBM has a fondness for complexity that makes the current situation with cloud offerings look like children's toys.
Their Global Services division could be summarized as a War on Kernighan's Law. Find clever people, and have them strain themselves to stand up a system so complex that you not only need to keep paying GS to show up and maintain it, but in fact you probably need to hire two more people just to keep the wheels on.
That has made them many enemies on the technical side of things. People like me go out of our ways to sabotage any inroads they try to make because we know what will happen if we don't. Presentations of systems so complex you get a headache trying to wrap your mind around it.
If we talk about it, it's not for long and with as few ears to overhear as possible. It's like guerilla warfare. Targeted attacks against a foe who could crush you like a bug if they knew where to find you.
Oracle sniffing around is merely an irritation compared to the spectre of IBM GS getting their hooks into your CTO.
Any technical excellence at IBM is probably an island and definitely doesn't represent the rest of the company.
In my time there, only one thing mattered: head count (or more precisely, body count). It didn't matter if those heads could think. It was all about closing outsourcing contracts and making a profit. With the occasional sprinkle of Watson propaganda sprinkled on top to make it look like you were at the pinnacle of computing.
I'm surprised IBM still exists. I can't remember a single company that I worked for where IBM would have helped anything.
IBM isn’t just accidentally leaving things complex, they sell tools that fix problems almost nobody has. What’s that XML RPC gateway they were peddling years ago? Jesus Christ just use nginx and learn to manage certs.
'Fond' memories for monstrosities like Websphere or MQ servers. Take trivial JMS or less-trivial-but-grokkable J2EE spec, add 10x more ultra-proprietary stuff that is very complex to grok compared to original spec, solves little on top in real world, makes you utterly vendor-locked in for every app until complete rewrite. You need additional Eclipse-based apps to work with it at all, and IIRC they were costly as hell too. Rinse and repeat.
Then there was Weblogic, that worked as well and mostly by standards. Devs I met everywhere loved it.
> Take trivial JMS or less-trivial-but-grokkable J2EE spec,
MQSeries predates Java itself and started out on MVS; it was already the way it is when the JMS spec was developed. There's no real excuse for WebSphere, though.
Maybe it's because I have very good spatial intelligence, but I always found PKI to be a lot simpler than most people made it out to be. People treating me like some sort of priest of the church of crypto when generating and signing keys is really not that hard.
PKI is like a kitchen knife. The hard part is not getting one, or picking it up, it's using it without cutting yourself. But people treat the 'knife' like all aspects are magical.
I've found it ok to understand maybe 70% of PKI, but that I always need to review that last 30% (OSCP stapling, cross signing certs, whatever the heck the formats are, different extensions, more that I'm forgetting).
Surprisingly no, not for this project. It was an acquisition, and the developers had come with - so had their data center. I was hired to try to help move it out of their on-prem location. They'd hired me specifically saying it was going to AWS; then they went "whoops! all IBM Cloud" a couple weeks in, and they never actually got me a fully working environment to build against in the few months I was there. (The one nice thing I'd say is that teams from all over IBM were incredibly helpful; some externally-facing consultants actually volunteered a couple hours to try to help undo whatever Softlayer had open-palm slammed onto my virtual machines. They too were confused.)
> Find clever people, and have them strain themselves to stand up a system so complex that you not only need to keep paying GS to show up and maintain it, but in fact you probably need to hire two more people just to keep the wheels on.
AS/400 can still be found in the checkout line at Costco. I don't think it is the main POS system but is used for things like looking up customer information. IIRC Oracle is taking a lot of that retailer backend business now.
The worst quality software I ever worked on as a software developer was an unholy mess of baldy indented, copy & pasted PL/SQL, spaghetti code JSPs, and dubious code generally ... written by IBM contractors (around Y2K timeframe). Luckily the CTO was smart enough to hire our own team to build and maintain it (and eventually rewrite it) rather than have IBM maintain it for $$$$.
I once saw the original architecture document and it was actually very nice -- though perhaps unorthodox. The implementation was like an encyclopedia of Worst Practices.
I also worked a summer for IBM Global Services doing some sysadmin and security work back in 1997... I'd characterize the whole thing as... mediocrity.
Another time, I worked a contract in another part of IBM and saw other parts and got to attend presentations and lectures there and see the patents on the walls, and be exposed to some of the really smart people and history there, and that product side of the organization (people who worked on DB2, etc.) seemed much better.
I’m old enough to have encountered Netscape contractors. The kid they sent to us, at $250/hr (that’s $470 inflation adjusted) no less, had the manual open in his lap. I’m pretty sure they were taught never to get caught doing that.
If memory serves I helped our IT guy replace the whole mess with Apache, so we’d never have to talk to them again. I used to compete with Netscape so there was no small amusement in costing them contractor hours.
> I’m pretty sure they were taught never to get caught doing that.
I've long ago learned that people misremember all the time. I trust the person who quickly looks up the correct answer in the manual over the person who thinks they din't need the manual and uses what they think is right. Sure often the second person gets things right, but when they get it wrong they waste a lot of time trying to figure out which thing is wrong.
Yeah. It's one thing if they obviously don't have the slightest clue. But if someone sort of knows how to do something or even thinks they know how, I'm not going to begrudge them checking a manual.
> The kid they sent to us, at $250/hr (that’s $470 inflation adjusted) no less, had the manual open in his lap. I’m pretty sure they were taught never to get caught doing that.
In my very first consulting gig, my employer intentionally buried all of the best documentation on an internal forum. I can't even count all the hours I burned up on troubleshooting, only to learn days later that the thing I was encountering was a known issue that was completely undocumented and the only way to know that was to be present in the office... which was 3000 miles away.
I tried to get management to open up the forums to public consumption, but they were dead set against it, said that their "intellectual property was too valuable."
You point out Oracle as akin (but less entirely awful). I'd throw Palantir on the pile. Sell management on bullshit, then, once they've got their hooks in, it turns out they'll need to be way up your ass (and billing the whole time) to make any of it happen, and the entire process will be miserable. Another candidate for "begin insurgent activities as soon as the name is overheard" responses.
Versus Palantir, I think was the intent of the question. IDK, from what I've seen they can't really do much more out-of-the-box than lots of other less-bullshitty data platforms, they're just far more aggressive about selling "consulting" services to get you all the features they told you they could do (and they can—with a bunch of custom development, just like any other platform)
I wouldn’t suggest a competitor in that line of business, because it’s not a line of business which should exist: fundamentally, it represents a firm wanting to bring in another firm to engage in its core line of business for it, because it no longer knows how to.
Well, if the firm doesn’t know how to engage in its core business, just fire the employees, close the offices, take the names off the buildings and return the capital to the owners!
My last CEO was ex-IBM. He was pissed when we (his technical team), nixed his attempt to do a storage related deal with IBM. We went through endless meetings with dozens of people on the calls. They wanted to bring in some giant complex product and we just wanted boxes with disks. They couldn't understand that we didn't need all the striping tools they had, because our storage was just using full multiple copies across servers/disks. It was a total square peg / round hole situation and their sales team tactics were to try to discredit people individually with what amounted to as being complete lies. It really put a bad taste in my mouth to ever deal with those type of people again.
I was at a company where that exec won. In this case it was the Infosphere suite to replace a fully mature Informatica/Teradata environment and fix all the "issues". Obviously the issues were all design and management, not technical.
3 years a tens of millions later the whole project is shut down with no value delivered except a single data store and a couple API endpoints. That exec went back to his IBM sales job.
Last I heard they were still paying for and maintaining all of it because that endpoint was used in a key product offering.
Most ex-IBMers want to "go home" in some form. It's some bizarre rationale about returning to the mothership when they were actually jettisoned. Don't get me wrong, working at IBM in the 90s was fascinating but a lot of them only had careers there.
I've known and know a not insignificant number of IBMers who were there on the order of 30 years. I've tended to stay in most jobs a fairly long time (decade plus or minus) but nothing like that.
A former manager at another fairly old-line company, it will presumably be the only company he will have ever worked for--albeit through a couple acquisitions and some stuff during dot-bomb.
A lot of this mentality has to do with wanting a throat to choke if something goes south. The bigger the throat, the more the C-Suite rests easy, despite the costs. The old "Nobody ever got fired buying IBM has morphed into nobody ever got fired buying Microsoft/Oracle/AWS/whatever the flavor of the day."
I've worked in places that refused to allow us (IT) to write programs to automate processes that would have saved enough money yearly to buy a house. They were "severely concerned" because "if you leave or get hit by a bus, who will maintain it?"
I work at a place now where I can automate away with permission and prototype to show use case. I've been at this job a year and have already automated a goodly portion of the grunt work. Some of my colleagues look askance at me, and one has said, "you're automating us out of jobs, eventually, you do know this, right?" These guys/girls fear AI. I don't. I don't use it because God gave me a brain and I'm expected to exercise it. AI also feels like cheating to me. Sure, I may have to read the docs more, hit up someone on Stack Exchange, debug my code a little more, but you know what? I enjoy the challenge. I'm basically getting paid to have fun, despite the daily grind.
> A lot of this mentality has to do with wanting a throat to choke if something goes south.
You're absolutely right about this on many levels. I also heard that quite a few times from my CEO, even though we often went with single smaller providers for things because he also wanted to cut corners.
In this case though, I'd say it was more about nepotism. The CEO wanted the deal with his old pals in exchange for access to the IBM sales pipeline so that we could sell their customers on storage deals on our hardware deployment. The only way to get access to the deals was to buy IBM hardware that was extremely over priced and far more "capable" than what we actually needed.
The fact that their sales teams outright lied about things they didn't even fully understand, was sickening for me. Thankfully other people on my team stepped up and helped prevent anything from moving forward.
>Some of my colleagues look askance at me, and one has said, "you're automating us out of jobs, eventually, you do know this, right?" These guys/girls fear AI. I don't. I don't use it because God gave me a brain and I'm expected to exercise it. AI also feels like cheating to me.
I'm... Not seeing the logical connection here. If you could automate more of the work faster using AI than not using AI, why wouldn't you?
I got into IT because I want to be challenged. Asking some generative AI bot about how to write a better hotpatch function or how to automate a terribly-detailed set of steps that require two people would defeat my own learning. I'd rather take 3 days to sort that out than solve it in minutes with AI. I get better by slogging it out and the mistakes I make help me avoid future mistakes.
I don't want the answers, per se, I want guidance. AI would solve the issue for me. I don't want some bot thinking for me. I'll retire when I cannot suss out how to write code that solves problems or makes life easier.
And yes, I'm one of those holdouts who has never had the desire to even test out generative AI. I'm not worried about it supplanting me. I worried that I will lose my own edge and curiosity.
> Asking some generative AI bot about how to write a better hotpatch function or how to automate a terribly-detailed set of steps that require two people would defeat my own learning. I'd rather take 3 days to sort that out than solve it in minutes with AI. I get better by slogging it out and the mistakes I make help me avoid future mistakes.
That is a good answer. Certain kinds of tools can become a crutch that limit you and stifle your own development. Maybe that's tolerable when it's not a core skill (e.g. never learning your way around your city because you only know how to react to GPS prompts), but when you're talking about a core job skill, it's a recipe for disaster (e.g. letting your skills atrophy or not developing them in the first place).
While I think there has been a lot of hype in generative AI and expecting it to replace programming as we know it is premature at least, programming has always become "less challenging" over time due to improvements in technology. The famous "Story of Mel" was about a programmer in the late 1950s refusing to use those newfangled optimized assemblers rather than writing machine code directly. Then there were compiled languages like Fortran and Cobol that were far easier than machine code/assembly. Then higher level languages, etc.
Same with (after HLLs, and in rough historical order, over a few decades), 4GLs, CASE tools, OOP / OOAD / UML / round-trip engineering, NoSQL, Functional Programming, what, not, ML, AI, ... ;)
What is that French quote about: the more things change, the more they stay the same?
I initially kind of assumed that most people would know about it, because it is a somewhat famous one, or at least, I've read it in many places. But your question made me realise that may not be the case. So, here it is, from the top of the above Wikipedia article about him, just below the header:
[ Santayana is popularly known for aphorisms, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" ]
.
Yeah, I wondered whether that might be the one. But it's slightly different from the plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose quote, so I thought maybe you had a different one in mind. (Santayana was known for his aphorisms.)
Yes, they are two different quotes. I didn't mean to use them as equivalent. It was more like, I used both, because both were applicable in the context I used them in.
>The famous "Story of Mel" was about a programmer in the late 1950s refusing to use those newfangled optimized assemblers rather than writing machine code directly.
IIRC, K&R said something similar in the first edition of their C book (referring to others' imagined reactions about the C strcmp function:
"What, you mean I have to call a function to compare two strings?"
They went on to add that they had tried to make C function call overhead quite low, to handle this issue.
As an alternative, you can seek learning and opportunity to learn through other means even when assisted by AI.
For me, AI assistance has simply sped up the code I already know how to write (like structured test setups etc.) so I can focus more on the problems related to the business, which AI has no clue how to solve.
The way I use genAI, is exactly as you describe - it's my ultimate rubber duck, one that's actually smart and can talk back.
I use ChatGPT as a study partner in learning new direct-skills, as a soft-skills partner in navigating business dynamics, and a strategy partner in product work. It's very good at helping me learn to think better.
GPT 4 is basically useless for outputting the type of code (or writing) I need on a regular basis. It just doesn't have the right context to even be a viable tool beyond boilerplate/bootstrapping.
> I've worked in places that refused to allow us (IT) to write programs to automate processes that would have saved enough money yearly to buy a house. They were "severely concerned" because "if you leave or get hit by a bus, who will maintain it?"
I mean... they kinda have a point don't they?
I was the sole maintainer on an app used by a Fortune 500 company, and if I were to get hit by a bus, it would've been very difficult (possibly impossible) to support it.
There was very little documentation, because nobody but me was maintaining it.
But you wrote the docs and documented it’s place in the enterprise knowledge graph, because you’re a professional, right?
As an eng manager at an enterprise (not SV style tech) I differentiate between coders and developers.
Developers help our business by actively taking part in shaping software, automated workflows and integrations that makes us improve as a whole.
At lot of time is spent documenting and figuring out how that piece of software someone wrote 7 years ago, before us, works and what integrates.
This is why I firmly believe you need to tie documentation to running code in some way - at the very least a basic service graph that contains all services, dependencies and some metadata.
Tie this database to automatic firewall and proxy configuration and you’re on a good track.
We’ve on the other hand taken the strategic decision that tech and IT will help us win (is it the 90’s all over again?!) and we staff as such. A team is at least two, and no individual can own a service.
best CTO I ever had was someone who was honest about churn: people leave, for multitude of reasons, that's why they stressed documentation and testing, so others can pick up where you will inevitably leave off, eventually for good. It was baked into the culture that hand off was going to happen eventually
Not only one throat to choke, but most C-Suite had direct or indirect experience with what the old IBM (not sure about the current IBM) could do in those infrequent situations with high-impact, high-visibility, nasty technical problems. IBM had a well-defined process in place to handle these when they occurred. If the local team couldn't fix it, they could declare a "critsit" (critical situation) that launched a process that allowed them to pull in amazing resources and bypass red tape.
In one that I had direct experience in, they flew in one of the software's developers to do onsite troubleshooting. Also, being the hegemon of the tech world, IBM often would take the end-to-end role and not just stop at their boundary of a tech problem. I was involved in one in the late 1990's where we were running Netscape's iPlanet web server on an IBM JVM (on IBM's AIX) and it had a nasty memory leak in production where volumes were higher. We called Netscape and got what felt like a guy with a pager on the beach (it was outside business hours when we called); not helpful at all. We called IBM and things started to rock & roll. Eventually we had someone from their UK lab tracing the JVM until he found a JNI (Java Native Interface) call from external C-code (which would have been iPlanet's code) that had the wrong value for the flag that indicated who (JVM or C-code) should release the memory. He could have stopped there saying "not IBM's fault" but he just kept going reverse compiling the C-code to find the bad call. We were able to get back to Netscape saying in module yadayada.c, somewhere around line 47, there's a JNI call with flag=0, change it to flag=1. The patch from Netscape fixed the problem.
These infrequent critsits are something the C-suite remember for a very long time. They know that no way in hell their own staff could resolve these situations, especially in the days before the web, Stackoverflow, shared-knowledge, etc. If not for IBM squashing the bug, their bacon would be fried giving unsatisfactory explanations to their CEO.
Years ago I worked for IBM, and have dealt with them in various contexts since.
The thing I've found that best captures the essence of IBM is how they love bringing *everyone* to every meeting, and then insist on full introductions. Every time.
I've been on a few different projects where we would routinely chew up 20 minutes of a 30 minute call hearing every last one of them announce their name and role. Thanks folks, I already know who you are. Can we talk about the project now?
My last interaction with them, I remember they kept claiming the sky was falling (aka schedule slip) if we didn’t rework the library to do exactly the API they worked out before any line of code was written and with no input from the four other teams that needed to consume it.
This culminated in 2 of our leads sitting in a room with a giant table, in a meeting of what had to be ten people at least, for three hours one afternoon while we dictated pseudocode and sequence diagrams for their next three months’ of work (if you can describe a month of work in an hour, it’s really not as complex as people are making it out to be)
So we paid six or seven of them to listen while we did half of their job for them, with our two most expensive employees.
This made me laugh hard. When I worked at Oracle they’d do this in internal meetings if it was outside your immediate team! A dozen people saying “I am a System Analyst II for Managed Services” like goddamn who fucking cares
I had a boss who was making giving me a lead position into a bigger deal than it needed to be. Like he wanted me and one of my peers to be secret leads before he announced it formally. The entire situation was odd.
I told him I didn't care what he called me, what mattered is whether people would listen to me when I asked them to do stuff, like use a better solution to a problem. If you want to be a lead, you have to do a lot of that yourself. But I was young (1st lead position) and his lack of backing that up were making it all more complicated than it needed to be.
Made all the weirder by the fact that he was good at selling people on ideas, to a fault (it took me 3 tries to quit that job, he was such a smooth talker)
Another story for that same project: this was a program where being two weeks behind schedule resulted in theatrics. Think English Parliament in period pieces, but toned down and with more ties.
That same other lead and I had figured out that IBM was perpetually 5 weeks behind, and always fishing for problems on other teams they could use to invoke day-for-day schedule slippage.
And the reason we knew it was five weeks is this: they would not take patches or hot fixes from us. Because doing so would indicate that we hadn’t fulfilled out contract to deliver on X date. So I’d give them version 1.0.4 (had to be exactly 1.0.4, if the CI/CD pipeline glitched and I gave them 1.0.5 they would demand an explanation, fuckers). And then I’d go off working on catching up with automating functional testing that we were still figuring out, trying to get it to run faster on one particular underpowered destination system, or get feedback from other teams about how some feature in the release was fundamentally broken, and I’d fix those problems and issue 1.0.5-7.
I’d tell them they needed the patch and they would say no. Then eight weeks after we gave it to them they’d complain it was broken, they are blocked, and the schedule will slip “day for day” until we fix the bugs - often bugs they should have seen week one if they were actually using the deliverables we gave them.
In one case it took me about 14 clock hours to fix their problem, but in all other cases I had already fixed that bug almost exactly six weeks before they found it. I just informed them that 1.0.7 already fixes that, upgrade. They were hoping for a week and every time they got less than a day, and only then if the meeting schedule aligned so the could stall for half a day. That was honestly one of the more satisfying aspects of that job.
Ten times they came at us with that schtick, and it worked once. Barely.
Near as I can tell they were spending a month at the beginning of each milestone cleaning up tech debt from stapling together the feature set for the previous milestone, and not getting around to our stuff until much later than they wanted the company to know.
We were almost always the first to say that we needed an extra week. Tons of harrumphing. We were, however, never (maybe 1 exception) the last team to ask for another week.
The thing is when we said we needed 1 week, it meant we needed 3-6 business days. When they said 1 week, it meant they were too scared to ask for three.
The inanity of the whole thing is that the project we were on was behind by a year that people would admit to (it was more like 30 months), so who the fuck cared if our division delivered our part three months late? It was going to collect a lot of cobwebs before it got properly exercised.
Bunch a drama with absolutely no purpose whatsoever.
> This really hits home. It was absurd. 12 people on a zoom call, 1-2, at most, speak beyond the introductions.
For a while there, I had a weekly meeting at a former employer that had 63 people on it. The goal of the project was to change the IP address on an Oracle server.
Nobody wanted to take responsibility for the change, because if it broke, they might be unemployed.
So it just dragged on, week after week after week.
I once had a contracting job where nobody wanted to update-and-reboot a server because they were afraid of getting fired. As a contractor who already had another job anyway, I had no such fears. The server had been running for several years with no patches or updates. You'd think someone would've been fired for that?
Anyway, the "job" involved more meetings than actual, real work. I'd guess 4 hours of meetings and status updates for every 1 hour of work. I don't know how some places even function.
I have a feeling that IBM, including all those pre-80 behemoths, are more like civil servants -- they always remind me of Sir Humphrey with tons of formality, planning and such. Maybe it's because they hired from academies heavily and actually did work on a lot of government projects?
Since this is the real "engineering" spirit that HNs love, I'm not going to argue. But I definitely prefer SpaceX' run and break things spirit.
This article is terribly written. It flows between strong claims like this one:
> The company’s technological accomplishments are still recognizable as the forerunners of the digital era, yet its culture of social responsibility—a focus on employees rather than shareholders, restraint in executive compensation, and investment in anti-poverty programs—proved a dead end.
And loose narrative, without ever tying the two together at all.
How was this culture of social responsibility a "dead end" exactly? Oh, it's just a vibe. Let's talk about Watson family drama.
I think it means they were losing money before they put Watson Jr. out to pasture and brought in the hatchet man Gerstner, who took millions per year and left after 13 years with a $189 million severance package. IBM seemed more successful by the early 2000s.
I am not sure how the anti-poverty programs tie in but most likely they were just scrapped as no longer in fashion.
To anyone interested in the history of IBM (and I think the TJ Watson Jr. era has many lessons to teach!), be sure to also read IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. I read this recently -- and wished I had read it much earlier.[0]
My father in law worked for IBM in the 60s-90s in chip fab / manufacturing in NY. They used to make everything down to the screws that held the machines together, had their own paint shop, etc. By the time he left all of that was gone.
This is not uncommon in "new" industries. You see the same effect in cars and planes - in the early years the companies had to "do everything". Once scale is reached then companies appear that do "just on task", which then "take over" that task for the parent.
This plays out at the small scale as well. When I started out writing commercial software it was very common to either sell a PC with it, or at least sell the concept of computerisation. For lots of companies this was their first computer. We were their defects IT department.
10 years goes past, and customers now already have computers. 10 more years and they have IT either on staff, or on contract.
We got to go back to writing software.
In the same way, yes, IBM needed to do everything. There was no off-the-shelf anything. So try make hardware, wrote software, sold services.
And this is the point. IBM always existed to sell services. Everything else was to get them there. Other people made hardware. Others made software. They are left to focus on their services.
This is likely revisionist history because I'm sure along the way lots of IBMers saw themselves as a hardware or software company. But I'm not sure that was ever the "core" idea. Those were just necessary to sell services, and were off-loaded along the way.
> This is not uncommon in "new" industries. You see the same effect in cars and planes - in the early years the companies had to "do everything". Once scale is reached then companies appear that do "just on task", which then "take over" that task for the parent.
This is called vertical integration. It's not about "new" though it does crop up there. Amazon is an example of this: Chips for servers, warehouses, ships, vans for last mile... YKK zippers is another, they make their own equipment, refine raw materials all in an effort to have the best final product (and it shows).
> And this is the point. IBM always existed to sell services. Everything else was to get them there.
So the bit where IBM sold typewriters and time clocks in 1911 was all a big plot to sell software services someday?
> 10 years goes past, and customers now already have computers. 10 more years and they have IT either on staff, or on contract.
The failure of IBM is long, slow and tragic. It is a failure to evolve with the market, it is the gutting and miss management of core assets.
So all that screw making and painting was not there to support computing, but rather was legacy manufacturing that computing took advantage of.
They had a long legacy of mechanical engineering from the days of card punches and readers and teleprinters. Even into the 70s and 80s they were a major — perhaps by then the major — typewriter manufacturer. Typewriters were “business machines”.
IBM’s original name was The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. They started out making cash registers and related products.
Maybe a better way to see this is that during WWII they reconfigured their factories to make machine guns. Factories don’t look like that any more.
I nearly went to IBM. Fortunately I didn't. Their program for plant visits was the best of any of the companies I interviewed with: at the end of the day, they asked me to estimate all my expenses, and then they handed me an envelope of cash.
Another legacy company book HN'ers would really like for a Christmas gift is "Bill & Dave"
A lot of his success was increasingly viewed as financial engineering that included things like really cutting back on research. He was eventually forced out over some expense picadillos that were presumably cover for the fact that the board just didn't want him there any more. (Or there may have been been other issues that AFAIK never came fully to light.)
I wasn't paying much attention to HP by then as I had moved companies and roles. As I recall, everyone strongly suspected this kind of thing because the public reason for his departure at the time didn't really pass the sniff test. There was also a lot of boardroom and executive drama at HP before, during, and after Hurd's time there.
The only reason I remembered was because I was a big fan of Palm WebOS and when HP bought it, there was a brief moment where I thought, "Wow HP is really going to have a go at this and try to become like the old HP." Then Hurd left and the new guy (former SAP exec I think?) axed the whole thing. What an absolute waste all that was. I felt like if RIM or Nokia had acquired Palm it would have had a reasonable shot.
Yep, Leo Apotheker. Who also presided over the Autonomy mess.
I was an industry analyst until 2010 and HP servers and storage were pretty big clients. (I also know one of the journalists well who got their phone records accessed.) I was still in the industry after but not following HP day-to-day. I either missed Kara's later reporting or had just forgotten given that people were assuming something along those lines.
After reading about many failing companies IBM, HP, GE etc, I am becoming unsure if Financial engineering led to failures later on or they were already failing and just resorted to financial engineering to cover up.
Regarding Mark Hurd, there was that funny story that his replacement Leo Apotheker burned 11 billion dollars on Autonomy purchase and HP had to write off ~9 billions in a year or two. Mark was at Oracle and refused to buy Autonomy at 6 billion dollars few months earlier.
Yes, he was forced out in a bitter dispute, almost a riot, about serving these in the HP cafeteria. At least that's what I heard. They took their food very seriously there.
I've said this before, but it's a shame that the HP brand didn't end up with Agilent/Keysight. What was once a well respected name has been destroyed over the last 25 years, and is now synonymous with terrible printers and computers.
Yes. I even did some market cap comparisons between Agilent / Keysight (and there are other spinoffs and semi-spinoffs) and HPE. HPE loses.
The real villain, which you won't get from the press but the book tells you, is Richard Hackborn. He was offered the job before Fiorina, and turned it down.
Hackborn was the genius behind their laser printer business. He hated HQ and stayed in Boise, which is probably why he didn't want the top job. But he was Fiorina's champion all the way through the Compaq merger debacle.
Interesting, I'll have to get a copy of that book. It goes to show how difficult succession planning and keeping a culture is, once the founders retire or leave.
I'm reminded of the "HP Origins" video from 2006. There's a clip of Bill Hewlett towards the end, talking about the HP Way:
> "We hope that the people that'll follow us will have the same ideas...I don't think that a lot of these fundamental positions are going to change very much; they're too ingrained in the organisation." [0]
Funny, my knowledge of HP (three separate visits) came from the John Young / Lew Platt eras. I thought they were already getting stodgy and mediocre, although the folks were just great to work with. No big egos at all. It was a nice company.
Walter Hewlett and David Packard, Jr. really should have been groomed to take over. No skin in the game like having your name on the company.
I spent some time with IBM: Worked on the inside in an AI (artificial intelligence) project at their research lab and also outside -- sometimes a happy customer and sometimes fighting with IBM and being happy with other computer vendors.
Here is how IBM worked when their approach worked well: They would have polished sales representatives (reps) who would get the confidence of a relatively high decision maker, commonly a CEO, also with contacts with the BOD, in an organization that had some serious data processing problems. The IBM rep would talk with the CEO (decision maker) about the problems and claim that IBM could implement a good solution. Commonly that was music to the ears of the CEO -- just give the leadership, design work, technical work and products of the solution to IBM.
Generally we would regard IBM's charges as high, but in the target companies (1) IBM didn't have serious competition and (2) the company and their problem was so big that the IBM charges were worth it.
With the business at a target customer, IBM worked hard, made sure the hard/software was highly reliable, and delivered good results.
E.g., one customer was a medical insurance company. They had staffs in three time zones keying in medical claims applications. For this they had a mainframe computer, with their usual operating system, their network equipment ending with their 3270 terminals, COBOL-based (right, maybe PL/I, etc.) applications software, DB2 relational data base, etc.
The system worked very well: A significant outage meant that to keep up with the work staff would have to be called back after hours and paid overtime.
Soooo, it was important that the whole system had almost no downtime. Part of the approach was to have a test system and for any hard/software update, run it on the test system for some days before using the update for the real work.
Both IBM and the customer were very serious. Uh, having to pay some overtime could cost the System Manager his bonus.
Now, there are lots of options for data entry. PCs and even laptops can play a major role. The mainframes IBM was selling as computers were tiny and slow compared with nearly any desktop or laptop PC now. Having one PC out of hundreds+ quit does not have to be serious problem.
Now lots of people and companies can set up serious, reliable, powerful computing installations, and IBM is no longer the only option.
And the IBM target customer is no longer such a big part of computing.
Another, contrarian perspective: I worked with IBM Fellows, CTOs, Distinguished Engineers, VPs, and divisional GMs for two decades, and they were sharp. Less than 1N on the CATRA scale sharp. Absolutely on par with folks I worked with Apple, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and IBM's competitors of the time.
IBM's approach was indeed heavy-weight, and they loved complexifying things—but so did a lot of their customers in finance, aerospace, automotive, consumer goods, yadda yadda. IT operated by an entirely different business model and set of preferences in 1960–1990 than it did in 2000. It was the bespoke, pre-open standards, we'll handle all the edge cases in this lovingly homegrown solution era. The products were expensive, but in many cases solved technical operational problems that nothing else did. "Best of breed" was a common rallying cry; interchangeable parts and the virtues of utter standardization only came into prominence slowly.
The world's very different now, and there was enormous tension inside IBM, and between IBM and its customers and competitors, evolving to where we are today. (The same was true of almost all the legacy competitors.) However real that tension, what worked in the Before Times was the cause, not that IBM only employed doofuses or brought Mongol Hordes and crappy technology to bear.
I worked at IBM Research in 2003 for a year. There were a ton of extremely bright people there. It was pretty cool to go around a corner and see an office that belonged to Benoit Mandelbrot. Another office had the name tag of one of the "Design Patterns" guys.
But it felt like IBM Research was totally disconnected from the actual business of IBM. The switch away from pensions also seemed to make IBM way less attractive for new hires.
I spent a couple of Summers in Yorktown Heights and even had lunch with Beniot a couple of times.
To have the second largest super computer down the hall, an electron tunneling microscope, and beauty of the Hudson Valley seems like a bygone era. The innovation, patents, and persona were not enough to move the needle vs Silicon Valley.
> The switch away from pensions also seemed to make IBM way less attractive for new hires.
Total comp is what matters. A meager DB pension is worth less than RSUs from a competing tech company earning tons more profit.
I vastly prefer 401k and mega backdoor Roth capabilities than any DB pension. But IBM’s problem was not just getting rid of DB pensions, it was not paying competitive total comp in the first place. And also not having offices where their target employees would want to work.
A lot of the researchers who worked at Yorktown and Hawthorne now work at google’s office in the city. They were mostly living in the city anyways, or wanted to live in the city, and the whole big tech campus in leafy WestChester county didn’t really appeal to them anyways.
It's the knife sharpness one, they were referring to people being "sharp", which is another way of saying smart, typically the kind of person who thinks very quickly and nothing gets past them
(hope this doesn't come off as condescending, I'm including these extra details for any non native English speakers because it's kind of a slang word)
Worked at IBM for some time recently and I agree with many people here about the amazing technical talent there. Really bright people with deep understanding about their fields. I also worked with some very good project managers there, that can move very complex projects ahead like a maestro.
IBM problem today is:
1) The bureaucracy and general organizational sluggishness created by years and years of policy over policy to avoid 1%, 2% risks that in the end impact 100% of the company.
2) the leadership, which mostly come from the commercial part of the firm and are "number cookers", who now how to play the forementioned bureaucracy and controls, moving around air to look like their are beating their targets.
This makes the company extremely slow, unwilling to take risks, letting Google and Microsoft pass them repeatedly. Personal Computers, the Internet, Cloud Computing and now AI. IBM was at the right place on all of those opportunities, but its internal problems made it unable to take the right action to fetch them.
I worked for a startup that sold to IBM. My impression is that IBM has been in the business of responding to market needs by attempting to build the best possible technical solution that also drives customers to stay in the IBM sphere.
However, what IBM forgot is that the market is big, and the market drives towards commoditization wherever it can. Any technical advancement that makes technology faster/cheaper is where the market will go -- even if it means compromising in other areas like up-time. IBM is, naturally, allergic to becoming a commodity and tries to drive to higher margin business. e.g. Mainframes, consultant heavy engagements, AI, etc.
But the revolution that happened since the PC revolution, that commodity hardware and open source software (free in beer and freedom) could power companies both the size of IBM and in the same competitive space seems to be a lesson IBM has perpetually never quite gotten into their DNA. There's no "fixing" IBM. It will linger on momentum for a while until somebody else eventually just buys it for whatever IP they can squeeze out of it, dismembers the corpse, and spins out single purpose core businesses all in one excrement pile. It might take another decade or so, but it's coming.
There's no fixing it because there isn't anything fundamentally broken , rather an aversion and active resistance to a process that is objectively bad in many respects, and largely the result of the massive waves of outsourcing that were promoted and allowed to happen by choice. This wasn't a law of nature or of logic , there are a lot of ways in which it is less than desirable.
I don't think there is a 2nd law of thermodynamics for social and economic processes, and I think that it is provably the case that specific decisions were made by specific people that allowed all of the things you described to happen, and that there are easily conceivable alternative paths we might have taken.
In some sense, IBM is idealistic in the true sense of the word. That ideology is certainly not HackerNews' ideology, but it is more complicated than the simple "capitalist company doing capitalist things" explanation.
Great comment. IBM is as IBM wants to be. I don't think there's a mystery to it and they've ended up on an evolutionary path that can't be reversed.
To wit, I just watched a long form video [1] on the passion that goes into IBM mainframes including some interesting clips of various physical robustness tests of the assembled systems. It reminded me of watching clips from various space programs where a largely full-up untested rocket had to put humans into orbit without blowing up.
Another revolution that's occurred, but IBM chose not to really follow (asterisk) is the idea that you assume some percentage of your hardware will fail (instead of trying to make it never die) -- then you engineer around that. I'm not sure what will win in the end, but right now the entire industry is telling us to have failover into different availability zones in Amazon, or even across clouds -- one of which IBM offers.
1 - https://youtu.be/ouAG4vXFORc
(asterisk) - IBM does sort of have an understanding of this of course, they have a cloud after all.
Recall the token ring not falling and error management way, compared with the Ethernet assume possibly failure. It is such a headache to manage token ring and sna network. At least sna is reliable. Token ring is actually no. Suprisng. But at least sna assume there might be issues in the other end. Not token ring. And that is the problem of assuming all problem is managed.
Many say that IBM is a quarter-to-quarter company, but that wouldn't be true, as it still has some longe-term high-bet investments as the Quantum Computer.
So not all is lost.
I grew up near where IBM was started in a small town that had an IBM secret military project (top 10 bomb target for USSR!). While no one could tell me what they or their parents did at IBM, I heard some fun stories. One was about a guy who disliked people visiting his office, so he barricaded his door and would climb in and out through the transom window.
I don’t really have anything to contribute, but feel compelled to express how depressing it is to see IBM today.
My first computer was an IBM PS/2 Model 25. It came with a budget version of the Model M keyboard, but without the number pad. It’s still the gold standard for how a keyboard should feel. If it wasn’t an IBM computer then it was a cheap clone.
Later in life, I was inspired to go to law school because of the SCO vs IBM case, and the excellent lawyering by IBM’s counsel.
Now, it’s like watching a zombie movie. I don’t even know what they do anymore.
I agree with you about this but have an even darker take in that I see the exact same lack of vision in every single large tech company out there today. I mean, IBM does actually sell hardware and software ...that's a lot more than you can say about some of the other big names out there.
I have a theory that the death of the traditional computer company and it's buisness model, in the sense a company like an Oxide or IBM or Sun would understand the term "computer company", as well as the transition to the cloud for all new infrastructure, fundamentally changed the landscape in tech in a very negative way culturally speaking.
The hyperspecialization of the industry and consolidation of hardware into a single dominant platform for most serious buisness computing needs, obviated the need for traditional engineering cultures. It's hardly any wonder that this same transition also was a transition towards Agile development methods (or rather a cheap imitation of them, if it was ever even intended to be some paradigm shift at all).
The industry and the vibes I got were radically different and better even during ostensibly difficult times like right after dotcom.
> I mean, IBM does actually sell hardware and software ...that's a lot more than you can say about some of the other big names out there.
The other big names do, they just rent it instead of selling it. All the data centers/custom processors in cloud services are hardware and software, not to mention Apple’s hardware for consumers, and Microsoft’s surface tablets and Xbox, and Alphabet’s phones, Meta’s headsets, Nvidia’s GPUs, etc.
Unhumble brag: A PI at IBM Almaden tried to hire me as a paid dark matter research assistant ~1994. Plot twist: I wasn't old enough to drive much less take a gig because parental units and school were involved between the ages of 15.5 and 18.
Awesome brag: The road leading to the IBM Almaden front gate was fun to bike down.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadI find this attitude to be fairly trite and disingenuous. Maybe we should ask millennials and zoomers what exactly it is that Goldman Sachs does or Dow or Cisco or any other large company that doesn't sell majority direct to consumer and see if we get a more intelligible answer. Just because a company isn't selling to you specifically doesn't mean it's a failure. I'm happy to criticize IBM, but let's do it for legitimate reasons (trend chasing, perhaps?) and not "my 16 year old doesn't know what they do so they must not be relevant"
For a brief, maybe fifteen year period out of their 100 year history. And even those weren't big sellers. Point being, I don't know that it was ever reasonable to ask the "man on the street" what IBM does, and expect anything but a vague answer.
Hell, my mother used to program their 370s and System/38s (precursor to the AS400). I haven't asked, but if asked the same question, I wouldn't be shocked if her answer were, "wait, they're still in business?"
Any time there's a conversation about computers, she'll pipe in with remarks about how "Compaq makes the best computers".
More like 34 years.
The IBM PC debuted in 1981, and they sold their PC business to Lenovo in 2005.
> And even those weren't big sellers.
Still, let's not downplay the impact that the IBM PC had on the industry.
Ask people about any large company in their own industry and they would know at least one of their products or services, and that includes Goldman Sachs, Dow, or Cisco.
It depends on how "working in tech" is defined.
If you work in IT at a Fortune 500 bank, insurance company, telco, manufacturing company, etc. then you almost certainly Know who IBM, SAP, Oracle, etc. are. If you work for FAANGMULA and adjacent SV companies you probably don't especially if you are under 35 or so.
I don't think it is even controversial to argue this so long as we can agree that a company cannot call itself a tech company simply because they hired a lot of programmers and are paying them decent salaries.
A tech company is a company that makes most of their money selling computer hardware and software products (and to a lesser extent, services and support for software and hardware products although it could be argued that is a different classification but with substantial overlap).
Notably, it has to be computers, not entertainment delivered via computers, or ads delivered through computers, and not industrials or pharmaceuticals or any number of other "technical but not 'tech' as in computers" industries. Tech is and has always meant IT, as in companies that are in the information and computers businesses. Where programmers happen to work, make the highest salary, or be the most highly concentrated has never mattered.
Have you read how much cash Meta has burned on VR? Apple on its R&D? Nvidia? Amazon and Microsoft and the rest on cloud (that requires R&D too, they can’t just go out and buy it).
> The business model is 100% a media and entertainment buisness model for most of the companies on that list.
Nonsense if you read any of the financial statements, except for Netflix.
Your additional examples aren't really counter examples most probably for most people; you've just listed additional companies that are likely common enough names that no one else outside the tech/finance sphere really knows why the name is a known name. I don't see this as disingenuous, I see as an accurate reflection of the modern interpretation of many of these older companies. Apple for example is "relatively" old(er), but you can ask anyone what you might get from Apple right now and probably they can name at least one thing like "oh yeah they make good phones" or "I like their laptops."
My entire professional career has been in IT/Programming, and the best I can tell you about what IBM offers is "eh, you can pay a ton for a contract for some server hardware/software. Hardware support is fine, but the rest is a dice roll on what you're actually getting for your money." I don't associate IBM at this point with a specific service or product I'd seek so much as just "this is a tech company that you pay a ton of money to and hope it works out for your project".
Though I will give them credit for their LTO tape hardware -- that is solid and straight forward enough for my tastes.
My personal experience, half the time I talk to IBM sales team or even their engineering team, I end up with far more questions than answers, and I get the distinct impression I'm offending the IBM rep for even questioning what they're saying, no matter how ridiculous their statements are. I know what the words they're saying mean and I understand what the tech is, but when I have practical questions about their design choices or implementation guidance and the IBM employees act as if they resent me for questioning them, I too wonder why IBM is really trying to accomplish in our meetings -- do they want to sell something that will help with my problem scope or do they just want lock-in? This question isn't unique to IBM naturally, but if that's what ends up occupying my mind after a meeting with IBM representatives, I'm quite certain it's an indicator that it's not something I want my team to get wrapped up in.
Edit: Changed "else outside the tech sphere" to "else outside the tech/finance sphere"
And how could anyone in Canada forget the Phoenix pay system. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
Their Global Services division could be summarized as a War on Kernighan's Law. Find clever people, and have them strain themselves to stand up a system so complex that you not only need to keep paying GS to show up and maintain it, but in fact you probably need to hire two more people just to keep the wheels on.
That has made them many enemies on the technical side of things. People like me go out of our ways to sabotage any inroads they try to make because we know what will happen if we don't. Presentations of systems so complex you get a headache trying to wrap your mind around it.
If we talk about it, it's not for long and with as few ears to overhear as possible. It's like guerilla warfare. Targeted attacks against a foe who could crush you like a bug if they knew where to find you.
Oracle sniffing around is merely an irritation compared to the spectre of IBM GS getting their hooks into your CTO.
Any technical excellence at IBM is probably an island and definitely doesn't represent the rest of the company.
In my time there, only one thing mattered: head count (or more precisely, body count). It didn't matter if those heads could think. It was all about closing outsourcing contracts and making a profit. With the occasional sprinkle of Watson propaganda sprinkled on top to make it look like you were at the pinnacle of computing.
I'm surprised IBM still exists. I can't remember a single company that I worked for where IBM would have helped anything.
Then there was Weblogic, that worked as well and mostly by standards. Devs I met everywhere loved it.
MQSeries predates Java itself and started out on MVS; it was already the way it is when the JMS spec was developed. There's no real excuse for WebSphere, though.
PKI is like a kitchen knife. The hard part is not getting one, or picking it up, it's using it without cutting yourself. But people treat the 'knife' like all aspects are magical.
I've put my favorite learning resources and tools into https://www.bbkane.com/blog/learn-ssl/
It took from ~2 weeks after my start date until ~1 week before my last day to get a vSphere cluster provisioned for my development work.
PKI? Sounds hard, by comparison.
AS/400 can still be found in the checkout line at Costco. I don't think it is the main POS system but is used for things like looking up customer information. IIRC Oracle is taking a lot of that retailer backend business now.
I once saw the original architecture document and it was actually very nice -- though perhaps unorthodox. The implementation was like an encyclopedia of Worst Practices.
I also worked a summer for IBM Global Services doing some sysadmin and security work back in 1997... I'd characterize the whole thing as... mediocrity.
Another time, I worked a contract in another part of IBM and saw other parts and got to attend presentations and lectures there and see the patents on the walls, and be exposed to some of the really smart people and history there, and that product side of the organization (people who worked on DB2, etc.) seemed much better.
If memory serves I helped our IT guy replace the whole mess with Apache, so we’d never have to talk to them again. I used to compete with Netscape so there was no small amusement in costing them contractor hours.
I've long ago learned that people misremember all the time. I trust the person who quickly looks up the correct answer in the manual over the person who thinks they din't need the manual and uses what they think is right. Sure often the second person gets things right, but when they get it wrong they waste a lot of time trying to figure out which thing is wrong.
Nothing they were doing was worth $250 an hour.
In my very first consulting gig, my employer intentionally buried all of the best documentation on an internal forum. I can't even count all the hours I burned up on troubleshooting, only to learn days later that the thing I was encountering was a known issue that was completely undocumented and the only way to know that was to be present in the office... which was 3000 miles away.
I tried to get management to open up the forums to public consumption, but they were dead set against it, said that their "intellectual property was too valuable."
Well, if the firm doesn’t know how to engage in its core business, just fire the employees, close the offices, take the names off the buildings and return the capital to the owners!
Not all of the lost seeing stones have been accounted for. We don’t know who else may be listening.
If they want to be Sauron.
That's Palantir Technologies' customer base.
3 years a tens of millions later the whole project is shut down with no value delivered except a single data store and a couple API endpoints. That exec went back to his IBM sales job.
Last I heard they were still paying for and maintaining all of it because that endpoint was used in a key product offering.
A former manager at another fairly old-line company, it will presumably be the only company he will have ever worked for--albeit through a couple acquisitions and some stuff during dot-bomb.
I've worked in places that refused to allow us (IT) to write programs to automate processes that would have saved enough money yearly to buy a house. They were "severely concerned" because "if you leave or get hit by a bus, who will maintain it?"
I work at a place now where I can automate away with permission and prototype to show use case. I've been at this job a year and have already automated a goodly portion of the grunt work. Some of my colleagues look askance at me, and one has said, "you're automating us out of jobs, eventually, you do know this, right?" These guys/girls fear AI. I don't. I don't use it because God gave me a brain and I'm expected to exercise it. AI also feels like cheating to me. Sure, I may have to read the docs more, hit up someone on Stack Exchange, debug my code a little more, but you know what? I enjoy the challenge. I'm basically getting paid to have fun, despite the daily grind.
You're absolutely right about this on many levels. I also heard that quite a few times from my CEO, even though we often went with single smaller providers for things because he also wanted to cut corners.
In this case though, I'd say it was more about nepotism. The CEO wanted the deal with his old pals in exchange for access to the IBM sales pipeline so that we could sell their customers on storage deals on our hardware deployment. The only way to get access to the deals was to buy IBM hardware that was extremely over priced and far more "capable" than what we actually needed.
The fact that their sales teams outright lied about things they didn't even fully understand, was sickening for me. Thankfully other people on my team stepped up and helped prevent anything from moving forward.
I agree with you, automation is key.
I'm... Not seeing the logical connection here. If you could automate more of the work faster using AI than not using AI, why wouldn't you?
I don't want the answers, per se, I want guidance. AI would solve the issue for me. I don't want some bot thinking for me. I'll retire when I cannot suss out how to write code that solves problems or makes life easier.
And yes, I'm one of those holdouts who has never had the desire to even test out generative AI. I'm not worried about it supplanting me. I worried that I will lose my own edge and curiosity.
That is a good answer. Certain kinds of tools can become a crutch that limit you and stifle your own development. Maybe that's tolerable when it's not a core skill (e.g. never learning your way around your city because you only know how to react to GPS prompts), but when you're talking about a core job skill, it's a recipe for disaster (e.g. letting your skills atrophy or not developing them in the first place).
What is that French quote about: the more things change, the more they stay the same?
Or that George Santayana quote.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana
Which one?
I initially kind of assumed that most people would know about it, because it is a somewhat famous one, or at least, I've read it in many places. But your question made me realise that may not be the case. So, here it is, from the top of the above Wikipedia article about him, just below the header:
[ Santayana is popularly known for aphorisms, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" ] .
IIRC, K&R said something similar in the first edition of their C book (referring to others' imagined reactions about the C strcmp function:
"What, you mean I have to call a function to compare two strings?"
They went on to add that they had tried to make C function call overhead quite low, to handle this issue.
For me, AI assistance has simply sped up the code I already know how to write (like structured test setups etc.) so I can focus more on the problems related to the business, which AI has no clue how to solve.
I use ChatGPT as a study partner in learning new direct-skills, as a soft-skills partner in navigating business dynamics, and a strategy partner in product work. It's very good at helping me learn to think better.
GPT 4 is basically useless for outputting the type of code (or writing) I need on a regular basis. It just doesn't have the right context to even be a viable tool beyond boilerplate/bootstrapping.
I mean... they kinda have a point don't they?
I was the sole maintainer on an app used by a Fortune 500 company, and if I were to get hit by a bus, it would've been very difficult (possibly impossible) to support it.
There was very little documentation, because nobody but me was maintaining it.
People are reverse engineering binary blobs, I’d say your software can be deciphered. It would be an hassle, but doable.
As an eng manager at an enterprise (not SV style tech) I differentiate between coders and developers.
Developers help our business by actively taking part in shaping software, automated workflows and integrations that makes us improve as a whole.
At lot of time is spent documenting and figuring out how that piece of software someone wrote 7 years ago, before us, works and what integrates.
This is why I firmly believe you need to tie documentation to running code in some way - at the very least a basic service graph that contains all services, dependencies and some metadata.
Tie this database to automatic firewall and proxy configuration and you’re on a good track.
We’ve on the other hand taken the strategic decision that tech and IT will help us win (is it the 90’s all over again?!) and we staff as such. A team is at least two, and no individual can own a service.
In one that I had direct experience in, they flew in one of the software's developers to do onsite troubleshooting. Also, being the hegemon of the tech world, IBM often would take the end-to-end role and not just stop at their boundary of a tech problem. I was involved in one in the late 1990's where we were running Netscape's iPlanet web server on an IBM JVM (on IBM's AIX) and it had a nasty memory leak in production where volumes were higher. We called Netscape and got what felt like a guy with a pager on the beach (it was outside business hours when we called); not helpful at all. We called IBM and things started to rock & roll. Eventually we had someone from their UK lab tracing the JVM until he found a JNI (Java Native Interface) call from external C-code (which would have been iPlanet's code) that had the wrong value for the flag that indicated who (JVM or C-code) should release the memory. He could have stopped there saying "not IBM's fault" but he just kept going reverse compiling the C-code to find the bad call. We were able to get back to Netscape saying in module yadayada.c, somewhere around line 47, there's a JNI call with flag=0, change it to flag=1. The patch from Netscape fixed the problem.
These infrequent critsits are something the C-suite remember for a very long time. They know that no way in hell their own staff could resolve these situations, especially in the days before the web, Stackoverflow, shared-knowledge, etc. If not for IBM squashing the bug, their bacon would be fried giving unsatisfactory explanations to their CEO.
The thing I've found that best captures the essence of IBM is how they love bringing *everyone* to every meeting, and then insist on full introductions. Every time.
I've been on a few different projects where we would routinely chew up 20 minutes of a 30 minute call hearing every last one of them announce their name and role. Thanks folks, I already know who you are. Can we talk about the project now?
My last interaction with them, I remember they kept claiming the sky was falling (aka schedule slip) if we didn’t rework the library to do exactly the API they worked out before any line of code was written and with no input from the four other teams that needed to consume it.
This culminated in 2 of our leads sitting in a room with a giant table, in a meeting of what had to be ten people at least, for three hours one afternoon while we dictated pseudocode and sequence diagrams for their next three months’ of work (if you can describe a month of work in an hour, it’s really not as complex as people are making it out to be)
So we paid six or seven of them to listen while we did half of their job for them, with our two most expensive employees.
I told him I didn't care what he called me, what mattered is whether people would listen to me when I asked them to do stuff, like use a better solution to a problem. If you want to be a lead, you have to do a lot of that yourself. But I was young (1st lead position) and his lack of backing that up were making it all more complicated than it needed to be.
Made all the weirder by the fact that he was good at selling people on ideas, to a fault (it took me 3 tries to quit that job, he was such a smooth talker)
That same other lead and I had figured out that IBM was perpetually 5 weeks behind, and always fishing for problems on other teams they could use to invoke day-for-day schedule slippage.
And the reason we knew it was five weeks is this: they would not take patches or hot fixes from us. Because doing so would indicate that we hadn’t fulfilled out contract to deliver on X date. So I’d give them version 1.0.4 (had to be exactly 1.0.4, if the CI/CD pipeline glitched and I gave them 1.0.5 they would demand an explanation, fuckers). And then I’d go off working on catching up with automating functional testing that we were still figuring out, trying to get it to run faster on one particular underpowered destination system, or get feedback from other teams about how some feature in the release was fundamentally broken, and I’d fix those problems and issue 1.0.5-7.
I’d tell them they needed the patch and they would say no. Then eight weeks after we gave it to them they’d complain it was broken, they are blocked, and the schedule will slip “day for day” until we fix the bugs - often bugs they should have seen week one if they were actually using the deliverables we gave them.
In one case it took me about 14 clock hours to fix their problem, but in all other cases I had already fixed that bug almost exactly six weeks before they found it. I just informed them that 1.0.7 already fixes that, upgrade. They were hoping for a week and every time they got less than a day, and only then if the meeting schedule aligned so the could stall for half a day. That was honestly one of the more satisfying aspects of that job.
Ten times they came at us with that schtick, and it worked once. Barely.
Near as I can tell they were spending a month at the beginning of each milestone cleaning up tech debt from stapling together the feature set for the previous milestone, and not getting around to our stuff until much later than they wanted the company to know.
We were almost always the first to say that we needed an extra week. Tons of harrumphing. We were, however, never (maybe 1 exception) the last team to ask for another week.
The thing is when we said we needed 1 week, it meant we needed 3-6 business days. When they said 1 week, it meant they were too scared to ask for three.
The inanity of the whole thing is that the project we were on was behind by a year that people would admit to (it was more like 30 months), so who the fuck cared if our division delivered our part three months late? It was going to collect a lot of cobwebs before it got properly exercised.
Bunch a drama with absolutely no purpose whatsoever.
For a while there, I had a weekly meeting at a former employer that had 63 people on it. The goal of the project was to change the IP address on an Oracle server.
Nobody wanted to take responsibility for the change, because if it broke, they might be unemployed.
So it just dragged on, week after week after week.
Anyway, the "job" involved more meetings than actual, real work. I'd guess 4 hours of meetings and status updates for every 1 hour of work. I don't know how some places even function.
Since this is the real "engineering" spirit that HNs love, I'm not going to argue. But I definitely prefer SpaceX' run and break things spirit.
> The company’s technological accomplishments are still recognizable as the forerunners of the digital era, yet its culture of social responsibility—a focus on employees rather than shareholders, restraint in executive compensation, and investment in anti-poverty programs—proved a dead end.
And loose narrative, without ever tying the two together at all.
How was this culture of social responsibility a "dead end" exactly? Oh, it's just a vibe. Let's talk about Watson family drama.
I am not sure how the anti-poverty programs tie in but most likely they were just scrapped as no longer in fashion.
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2023/11/26/what-punch-cards-tea...
This plays out at the small scale as well. When I started out writing commercial software it was very common to either sell a PC with it, or at least sell the concept of computerisation. For lots of companies this was their first computer. We were their defects IT department.
10 years goes past, and customers now already have computers. 10 more years and they have IT either on staff, or on contract.
We got to go back to writing software.
In the same way, yes, IBM needed to do everything. There was no off-the-shelf anything. So try make hardware, wrote software, sold services.
And this is the point. IBM always existed to sell services. Everything else was to get them there. Other people made hardware. Others made software. They are left to focus on their services.
This is likely revisionist history because I'm sure along the way lots of IBMers saw themselves as a hardware or software company. But I'm not sure that was ever the "core" idea. Those were just necessary to sell services, and were off-loaded along the way.
This is called vertical integration. It's not about "new" though it does crop up there. Amazon is an example of this: Chips for servers, warehouses, ships, vans for last mile... YKK zippers is another, they make their own equipment, refine raw materials all in an effort to have the best final product (and it shows).
> And this is the point. IBM always existed to sell services. Everything else was to get them there.
So the bit where IBM sold typewriters and time clocks in 1911 was all a big plot to sell software services someday?
> 10 years goes past, and customers now already have computers. 10 more years and they have IT either on staff, or on contract.
The failure of IBM is long, slow and tragic. It is a failure to evolve with the market, it is the gutting and miss management of core assets.
"Failure of IBM"?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/market-cap
They had a long legacy of mechanical engineering from the days of card punches and readers and teleprinters. Even into the 70s and 80s they were a major — perhaps by then the major — typewriter manufacturer. Typewriters were “business machines”.
IBM’s original name was The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. They started out making cash registers and related products.
Maybe a better way to see this is that during WWII they reconfigured their factories to make machine guns. Factories don’t look like that any more.
Another legacy company book HN'ers would really like for a Christmas gift is "Bill & Dave"
https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp...
the author is an unabashed fanboy, and the history ends with Mark Hurd before he imploded. Still, it's a great history of a (formerly) great company.
Yep, Leo Apotheker. Who also presided over the Autonomy mess.
I was an industry analyst until 2010 and HP servers and storage were pretty big clients. (I also know one of the journalists well who got their phone records accessed.) I was still in the industry after but not following HP day-to-day. I either missed Kara's later reporting or had just forgotten given that people were assuming something along those lines.
Regarding Mark Hurd, there was that funny story that his replacement Leo Apotheker burned 11 billion dollars on Autonomy purchase and HP had to write off ~9 billions in a year or two. Mark was at Oracle and refused to buy Autonomy at 6 billion dollars few months earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picadillo
Larry Ellison is also famous for his "can I buy you a car?" line for attractive women. ;)
The real villain, which you won't get from the press but the book tells you, is Richard Hackborn. He was offered the job before Fiorina, and turned it down.
https://archive.ph/5ijLo
https://www.nndb.com/people/181/000124806/
Hackborn was the genius behind their laser printer business. He hated HQ and stayed in Boise, which is probably why he didn't want the top job. But he was Fiorina's champion all the way through the Compaq merger debacle.
I'm reminded of the "HP Origins" video from 2006. There's a clip of Bill Hewlett towards the end, talking about the HP Way:
> "We hope that the people that'll follow us will have the same ideas...I don't think that a lot of these fundamental positions are going to change very much; they're too ingrained in the organisation." [0]
Sadly, this didn't come to pass.
[0] https://youtu.be/Iqv6DhtLay4?t=1327
Walter Hewlett and David Packard, Jr. really should have been groomed to take over. No skin in the game like having your name on the company.
Here is how IBM worked when their approach worked well: They would have polished sales representatives (reps) who would get the confidence of a relatively high decision maker, commonly a CEO, also with contacts with the BOD, in an organization that had some serious data processing problems. The IBM rep would talk with the CEO (decision maker) about the problems and claim that IBM could implement a good solution. Commonly that was music to the ears of the CEO -- just give the leadership, design work, technical work and products of the solution to IBM.
Generally we would regard IBM's charges as high, but in the target companies (1) IBM didn't have serious competition and (2) the company and their problem was so big that the IBM charges were worth it.
With the business at a target customer, IBM worked hard, made sure the hard/software was highly reliable, and delivered good results.
E.g., one customer was a medical insurance company. They had staffs in three time zones keying in medical claims applications. For this they had a mainframe computer, with their usual operating system, their network equipment ending with their 3270 terminals, COBOL-based (right, maybe PL/I, etc.) applications software, DB2 relational data base, etc.
The system worked very well: A significant outage meant that to keep up with the work staff would have to be called back after hours and paid overtime.
Soooo, it was important that the whole system had almost no downtime. Part of the approach was to have a test system and for any hard/software update, run it on the test system for some days before using the update for the real work.
Both IBM and the customer were very serious. Uh, having to pay some overtime could cost the System Manager his bonus.
Now, there are lots of options for data entry. PCs and even laptops can play a major role. The mainframes IBM was selling as computers were tiny and slow compared with nearly any desktop or laptop PC now. Having one PC out of hundreds+ quit does not have to be serious problem.
Now lots of people and companies can set up serious, reliable, powerful computing installations, and IBM is no longer the only option.
And the IBM target customer is no longer such a big part of computing.
IBM's approach was indeed heavy-weight, and they loved complexifying things—but so did a lot of their customers in finance, aerospace, automotive, consumer goods, yadda yadda. IT operated by an entirely different business model and set of preferences in 1960–1990 than it did in 2000. It was the bespoke, pre-open standards, we'll handle all the edge cases in this lovingly homegrown solution era. The products were expensive, but in many cases solved technical operational problems that nothing else did. "Best of breed" was a common rallying cry; interchangeable parts and the virtues of utter standardization only came into prominence slowly.
The world's very different now, and there was enormous tension inside IBM, and between IBM and its customers and competitors, evolving to where we are today. (The same was true of almost all the legacy competitors.) However real that tension, what worked in the Before Times was the cause, not that IBM only employed doofuses or brought Mongol Hordes and crappy technology to bear.
But it felt like IBM Research was totally disconnected from the actual business of IBM. The switch away from pensions also seemed to make IBM way less attractive for new hires.
To have the second largest super computer down the hall, an electron tunneling microscope, and beauty of the Hudson Valley seems like a bygone era. The innovation, patents, and persona were not enough to move the needle vs Silicon Valley.
Total comp is what matters. A meager DB pension is worth less than RSUs from a competing tech company earning tons more profit.
I vastly prefer 401k and mega backdoor Roth capabilities than any DB pension. But IBM’s problem was not just getting rid of DB pensions, it was not paying competitive total comp in the first place. And also not having offices where their target employees would want to work.
(hope this doesn't come off as condescending, I'm including these extra details for any non native English speakers because it's kind of a slang word)
IBM problem today is:
1) The bureaucracy and general organizational sluggishness created by years and years of policy over policy to avoid 1%, 2% risks that in the end impact 100% of the company.
2) the leadership, which mostly come from the commercial part of the firm and are "number cookers", who now how to play the forementioned bureaucracy and controls, moving around air to look like their are beating their targets.
This makes the company extremely slow, unwilling to take risks, letting Google and Microsoft pass them repeatedly. Personal Computers, the Internet, Cloud Computing and now AI. IBM was at the right place on all of those opportunities, but its internal problems made it unable to take the right action to fetch them.
They were directly competing with the future of tech, in particular as it applied to personal use.
However, what IBM forgot is that the market is big, and the market drives towards commoditization wherever it can. Any technical advancement that makes technology faster/cheaper is where the market will go -- even if it means compromising in other areas like up-time. IBM is, naturally, allergic to becoming a commodity and tries to drive to higher margin business. e.g. Mainframes, consultant heavy engagements, AI, etc.
But the revolution that happened since the PC revolution, that commodity hardware and open source software (free in beer and freedom) could power companies both the size of IBM and in the same competitive space seems to be a lesson IBM has perpetually never quite gotten into their DNA. There's no "fixing" IBM. It will linger on momentum for a while until somebody else eventually just buys it for whatever IP they can squeeze out of it, dismembers the corpse, and spins out single purpose core businesses all in one excrement pile. It might take another decade or so, but it's coming.
I don't think there is a 2nd law of thermodynamics for social and economic processes, and I think that it is provably the case that specific decisions were made by specific people that allowed all of the things you described to happen, and that there are easily conceivable alternative paths we might have taken.
In some sense, IBM is idealistic in the true sense of the word. That ideology is certainly not HackerNews' ideology, but it is more complicated than the simple "capitalist company doing capitalist things" explanation.
To wit, I just watched a long form video [1] on the passion that goes into IBM mainframes including some interesting clips of various physical robustness tests of the assembled systems. It reminded me of watching clips from various space programs where a largely full-up untested rocket had to put humans into orbit without blowing up.
Another revolution that's occurred, but IBM chose not to really follow (asterisk) is the idea that you assume some percentage of your hardware will fail (instead of trying to make it never die) -- then you engineer around that. I'm not sure what will win in the end, but right now the entire industry is telling us to have failover into different availability zones in Amazon, or even across clouds -- one of which IBM offers.
1 - https://youtu.be/ouAG4vXFORc (asterisk) - IBM does sort of have an understanding of this of course, they have a cloud after all.
1) What
Here's a fun Christmas themed one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFMV6tAg64
https://www.wired.com/2009/10/the-original-ibm-thinkpad-was-...
Before there even were computers, they gave out these small paper pads for jotting things down, with "THINK" on the cover.
My first computer was an IBM PS/2 Model 25. It came with a budget version of the Model M keyboard, but without the number pad. It’s still the gold standard for how a keyboard should feel. If it wasn’t an IBM computer then it was a cheap clone.
Later in life, I was inspired to go to law school because of the SCO vs IBM case, and the excellent lawyering by IBM’s counsel.
Now, it’s like watching a zombie movie. I don’t even know what they do anymore.
I have a theory that the death of the traditional computer company and it's buisness model, in the sense a company like an Oxide or IBM or Sun would understand the term "computer company", as well as the transition to the cloud for all new infrastructure, fundamentally changed the landscape in tech in a very negative way culturally speaking.
The hyperspecialization of the industry and consolidation of hardware into a single dominant platform for most serious buisness computing needs, obviated the need for traditional engineering cultures. It's hardly any wonder that this same transition also was a transition towards Agile development methods (or rather a cheap imitation of them, if it was ever even intended to be some paradigm shift at all).
The industry and the vibes I got were radically different and better even during ostensibly difficult times like right after dotcom.
The other big names do, they just rent it instead of selling it. All the data centers/custom processors in cloud services are hardware and software, not to mention Apple’s hardware for consumers, and Microsoft’s surface tablets and Xbox, and Alphabet’s phones, Meta’s headsets, Nvidia’s GPUs, etc.
Awesome brag: The road leading to the IBM Almaden front gate was fun to bike down.