[HN Gopher] The Rise and Fall of the 'IBM Way'
___________________________________________________________________
The Rise and Fall of the 'IBM Way'
Author : samizdis
Score : 69 points
Date : 2023-12-14 09:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| hdk wrote:
| https://archive.ph/QeSny
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20231213142931/https://www.theat...
| 63 wrote:
| > 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"
| gtirloni wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| mikestew wrote:
| _IBM used to sell computers directly to consumers._
|
| 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?"
| bluedino wrote:
| My grandmother has been retired for _years_ , she worked as
| an accountant.
|
| Any time there's a conversation about computers, she'll
| pipe in with remarks about how "Compaq makes the best
| computers".
| cbarrick wrote:
| > For a brief, maybe fifteen year period out of their 100
| year history.
|
| 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.
| mikestew wrote:
| More like _24_ years, but point taken. I thought the PC
| end was sold off in the late 90s.
| KyleSanderson wrote:
| What? They absolutely still do, it's through Lenovo and IBM
| still writes the majority of firmware and drivers for it.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| 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.)
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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
| wharvle wrote:
| 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.
| codexb wrote:
| 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.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >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.
| csydas wrote:
| 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"
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Making thing simpler is hard.
|
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| '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.
| meepmorp wrote:
| > 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.
| twisteriffic wrote:
| From painful personal experience there are about 3 people
| in all of IBM who understand PKI well enough to configure a
| server.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| eropple wrote:
| I was at IBM for about five months, a few years ago.
|
| 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.
| gregw134 wrote:
| LLMs are sure going to make the Watson advertising look
| outdated.
| internet101010 wrote:
| > 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| > 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| Opening a book to check something is very different from
| rearranging yourself so you can keep it open in your lap
| while you type.
|
| Nothing they were doing was worth $250 an hour.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > 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."
| wharvle wrote:
| 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.
| ido wrote:
| Who would be a _good_ name to suggest? I can't imagine SAP
| would do a good job at it either.
| btian wrote:
| AWS I suppose
| wharvle wrote:
| 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)
| latchkey wrote:
| 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.
| Deprecate9151 wrote:
| 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.
| blastro wrote:
| This is like one of those "horror stories in 2 sentences"
| type things.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| secretforest wrote:
| 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.
| latchkey wrote:
| > _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.
|
| I agree with you, automation is key.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| >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?
| secretforest wrote:
| 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.
| tivert wrote:
| > 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).
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| fuzztester wrote:
| 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?
|
| Or that George Santayana quote.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana
| fuzztester wrote:
| >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.
| no_wizard wrote:
| 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.
| losteric wrote:
| 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.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > 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.
| no_wizard wrote:
| 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
| jghn wrote:
| 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?
| hinkley wrote:
| On the clock of course.
|
| 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.
| pram wrote:
| 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
| hinkley wrote:
| 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)
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| senderista wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schedule_chicken
| Aloha wrote:
| I am amazed there is an wiki article for this.
| latchkey wrote:
| This really hits home. It was absurd. 12 people on a zoom
| call, 1-2, at most, speak beyond the introductions.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > 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.
| glitchcrab wrote:
| I honestly don't know how you can work in an environment
| like that, it sounds like my idea of hell.
| cowpig wrote:
| 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.
| projektfu wrote:
| 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.
| bcantrill wrote:
| 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]
|
| [0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2023/11/26/what-punch-cards-
| tea...
| GiorgioG wrote:
| 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.
| bruce511 wrote:
| 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.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > 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.
| tobinfricke wrote:
| > The failure of IBM is long, slow and tragic.
|
| "Failure of IBM"?
| gopher_space wrote:
| As a beacon of engineering
| wizerdrobe wrote:
| The firm name is quite literally "International Business
| Machine." The idea that they're just a services firm is...
| something else.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| And maybe that's just as well. The value of IBM hardware was
| not in the screws or the paint.
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| The IBM selectric typewriter would disagree. Everything was
| well designed, including the screws and paint and the
| aesthetic.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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"
|
| 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.
| no_wizard wrote:
| how did Mark Hurd implode? I've never heard this before
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
| Aloha wrote:
| There is a very good argument that the real inheritor of the HP
| DNA is Keysight.
| graycat wrote:
| 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.
| jonathaneunice wrote:
| 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.
| dakial1 wrote:
| 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.
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