[HN Gopher] 100 Years Ago, IBM Was Born
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100 Years Ago, IBM Was Born
Author : pseudolus
Score : 311 points
Date : 2024-02-14 01:20 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_(slogan)
| jacurtis wrote:
| I never knew about this slogan.
|
| But I'm curious if this was the real origin behind Apple's
| infamous "Think Different" campaign. IBM was the big competitor
| at the time and Steve Jobs didn't have a high opinion of them.
| Was he familiar with this slogan and decided to play on it
| while also backhanded criticize it with the "Think Different"
| slogan for his own company?
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| The Wikipedia article[1] cites a few sources which support
| "Think Different" as a reference to IBM's "Think". But IBM
| was one of Apple's biggest business partners at the time, as
| part of the AIM alliance[2].
|
| 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different
|
| 2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance
| ioblomov wrote:
| While AIM could be seen as a failure--PowerPC never
| threatened x86's dominance--its legacy, RISC, later became
| ubiquitous with the shift to mobile via ARM.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| Doesn't ARM predate PowerPC by quite some margin?
| ioblomov wrote:
| You are correct: 1985 vs 1991. My bad. I just heard about
| AIM at the time, whereas ARM was relatively unknown
| (well, at least to me ;) until the rise of mobile.
|
| Edit: It's a bit confusing because ARM the architecture
| is older than ARM the company. But yes, both precede
| AIM/PowerPC.
|
| My main point was that mobile made RISC ubiquitous.
| badcppdev wrote:
| Sorry for the tangent but the phrase, "Think with IBM or Thwim
| with someone else" has lived in my head for a very long time.
| Nursie wrote:
| Interesting, IBM itself celebrated its centenary when I was there
| in 2011 or early 2012.
|
| We got a cupcake, some badges and some sort of stock grant - the
| company would do something like put aside $1k worth of stock at
| 2011 prices for each employee, and anyone who was there 10 years
| later would actually receive the shares.
|
| I'm not aware of a single person who received that grant because
| the development lab I worked in back then got shut down a few
| years after I had moved on. And looking at the stock price
| movements in that time, $1600 bucks is not a lot for ten years
| loyalty!
| ghaff wrote:
| I guess it depends on which event you consider the start of
| IBM. I know a fair number of people who have been there for 20
| to 30 years.
| ncneieixk5 wrote:
| lol i remember this, we all got like 6 total RSUs and were
| supposed to be ecstatic about it. and yes they fired all of us
| before ever paying out
| seth123456 wrote:
| When I was there during that time we got a book about the
| history and how IBM saw itself.
| Nursie wrote:
| Oh yeah, there was a book too :)
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Did it mention IBM's role in the holocaust?
| abtinf wrote:
| IBM commissioned two films by Errol Morris for their actual
| centennial.*
|
| 100x100: https://youtube.com/watch?v=atjPROSOSDs
|
| They Were There: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MmVCePfMXAU
|
| I think They Were There is incredible in that it features the
| actual rank-and-file employees who did the work... insofar as
| Mandelbrot may be considered a rank-and-file employee.
|
| *not sure if 100x100 was by Errol Morris, or if that was just my
| assumption.
| w-ll wrote:
| Are you thinking of "Powers of Ten". Charles and Ray Eames but
| I believe commissioned by IBM.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| _Powers of Ten_ was itself a copy of the original dutch work,
| _Cosmic View_ (1957).
| dundarious wrote:
| Thanks for the information about Cosmic View. To be honest,
| I wouldn't call a film adaptation of a 20 year old book, a
| "copy", but I get your point.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Sorry, next time I'll say "based upon" or "derivative of"
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Fully respect the history, but often these days as the corp has
| waned/is nothing more than a bygone great, I can't help but think
| of _Songs of the I.B.M_.
| (https://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/06/songs-of-the-ibm.html)
|
| i.e Ever onward! ever onward! that's the
| spirit that has brought us fame. we're big but bigger we
| will be, we can't fail for all can see, that to serve
| humanity has been our aim. our products now are known
| in every zone. our reputation sparkles like a gem.
| we've fought our way through and new fields we're sure to
| conquer, too, for the ever onward IBM!
| zer0zzz wrote:
| https://youtu.be/VyQEbLx6AEY?si=W9OZHrE-hxXy4P4r
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Don't respect their history. They made their poor workers show
| up in their suits and sock suspenders and sing patriotic,
| hagiographic odes to their executives, while those same
| executives carefully worked out ways to sneak around
| regulations to become top vendors of both the US and Germany
| during WW2. If Google had a mandatory assembly to sing "praise
| be to Sundar Pichai, the most thoughtful and wise of us all,"
| we'd rightfully drag them through the mud for it, just as we're
| right to drag IBM retroactively.
|
| A lot of the good IBM did came in the early 2000s when they
| were still powerful but flailing wildly, almost accidentally
| going all in on open source, and creating truly amazing ads
| around it. Look at how good this ad was:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJgo3BBgWDA
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Also liked the ads with Captain Sisko. Open Source was the
| only option for the legacy players marginalized by microsoft
| at the time. See sgi, sun, apple, netscape, and ibm.
| angiosperm wrote:
| Getting the German national Iron Cross personally from Hitler
| was a high point, I guess. IBM got back all the equipment the
| Nazis used, and all the Nazis paid for its use, after the war.
| rightbyte wrote:
| So selling to both sides and getting the spoils? Talk about
| creating shareholder value.
| gspetr wrote:
| Beat me to posting about the Songbook, but this one's a much
| funnier article about it: https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2014/08/tripp...
|
| Prev HN discussion about it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25227824
|
| Some select lines that I found particularly amusing:
| We don't pretend we're gay. We always feel that way,
| Because we're filling the world with sunshine. With
| I.B.M. machines, We've got the finest means,
| For brightly painting the clouds with sunshine.
| --from "Painting the Clouds with Sunshine"
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| OMG, that songbook is very cult-like Thomas
| Watson is our inspiration, Head and soul of our
| splendid I.B.M. We are pledged to him in every nation,
| Our President and most beloved man. His wisdom has
| guided each division In service to all humanity
| We have grown and broadened with his vision, None can
| match him or our great company. T. J. Watson, we all
| honor you, You're so big and so square and so true,
| We will follow and serve with you forever, All the
| world must know what I. B. M. can do. --from "To
| Thos. J. Watson, President, I.B.M. Our Inspiration"
|
| I guess a show like Severance doesn't need to look to fiction
| for inspiration; plenty of examples in history
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| Such a contradiction - world-class research, patents filed, etc.
| At the same time unable to stay up to date and relevant. After
| many years in the valley I joined them, thinking I'd learn how
| they ran truly global projects. Spoiler, it's just chaos - throw
| people at it and when that fails throw more people at it. A giant
| red flag was when they decided they couldn't compete in the
| commoditized x86 server market and sold off that division to
| Lenovo, for who it instantly became their highest margin
| business. IBM's cost structure and bloat just meant they couldn't
| compete in all but the most profitable product lines. Then came
| all the financial engineering like recasting their software as
| Cloud revenue.
| jacurtis wrote:
| What ive learned in my career is that all companies are
| operating on a knife's edge. I have accepted offers at some
| very prestigious companies where I assume that "surely this
| company will be organized and have good systems in place".
| Then, after I start I realize every company is operating on
| chaos, barely putting one foot in front of the other.
|
| They put on a good front for the public investor meetings, but
| behind the scenes I have decided that every company is just
| running one day at a time.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| " Then, after I start I realize every company is operating on
| chaos, barely putting one foot in front of the other."
|
| So true. I have been involved in some projects where we had
| to figure out how certain processes. Every time it turned out
| that things are run on a mix of SAP, printed Excel sheets and
| some E-mails. Somehow it all (mostly) works out but nobody
| really knows how the company works.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| And this is why AI will not take our jobs, Why would AI let
| itself do this work when it's got such a bright future.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I think AI will be way more able to understand convoluted
| process than humans.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I believe this describe most of the industry.
|
| Conferences about high performance teams and practices are
| wet dreams.
|
| If I'm wrong then I want to meet these teams.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I work at a very high performance company that I co-
| founded. But we are less than 150 people and ~50% have been
| with us for 10 to 20 years as loyal employees we have
| brought through a few firms.
|
| I think small, lucrative, focused companies can enjoy work-
| life balance and strong employee and customer loyalty. You
| need a niche that is big enough to support a 90th
| percentile team, but small and esoteric enough to avoid
| attention of giant firms. It is a delicate balance. I think
| the German Mittelstand model is similar, except translate
| this to software.
| rtz121 wrote:
| I work in a "Mittelstand" company and we are definitely
| operating mostly on chaos.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Well to be honest most companies of any size are
| operating on chaos. But the person I was replying to
| "wanted to meet [the high performing] teams" so I gave an
| example of mine, where I feel things are fairly well-
| oiled. But this is a unique situation, that is actually
| the result of 20 years of building. We even raised VC but
| they have accepted whatever it is they have invested in,
| which won't be 1000x ROI.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Thanks, there's so many questions coming to mind:
|
| - how did you find your team mates
|
| - how do you plan the work (fully self organized ? xp ?
| agile ? another method ?)
|
| - how do you resolve human issues (intra or inter teams
| frictions, loss of motivation)
|
| - do you assess per employee performance or not ? (have
| you ever run into a situation where someone was faking,
| or faking too much, but nobody checked ? or is you group
| tight enough so that any such case will be detected and
| fixed rapidly)
|
| - do you have allocated time for team performance
| improvements ? remove friction, adjust processes
|
| - do you allow creative attempts (if someone thinks he
| could chase a new idea for a day or two)
|
| also, i didn't ask, how do you define high performance ?
| i have my own definition in a way: ability to understand
| most parts of your system in a few minutes with high
| confidence, ability to try new ideas, ability to split
| work between people for parallelism so that integrating
| is nearly guaranteed and lastly people who can generate
| new ideas multiple times per day
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I thought I was insane reading all of these chaos
| comments. I've worked at several companies that are VERY
| well organized. I think that above or below a certain
| scale chaos is the rule, but somewhere around 100 people
| can be a smooth running machine.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| It seems that the bigger a company is, the higher
| percentage of dead wood.
| agumonkey wrote:
| yeah it's something one can read regularly, and
| especially in military or govt settings where the
| bureaucracy is so heavy it takes a month to add a file.
| Nursie wrote:
| The only one I've seen otherwise was one of the big banks.
|
| They were pretty well organised. They had relatively low
| productivity expectations for developers because they had
| nailed eveything down in terms of network security and legal
| compliance, but they accounted for that and expected it.
|
| It may come from them having no shortage of funds, I suppose,
| and as a result no shortage of staff, skills and time to
| throw at things.
| kitd wrote:
| I worked at an oil major which was fairly well organized,
| but I think much of that was down to the nature of the
| business which is both highly integrated and highly
| regulated.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| That's kind of re-assuring, it means nobody has some secret
| huge advantage over their competitors. (Well it's not re-
| assuring for me riding in a Boeing plane.)
|
| I guess it's some combo of the Efficient Market Hypothesis
| and "Every complex system is always running in a broken
| state" (https://how.complexsystems.fail/#5)
| jxramos wrote:
| Great excerpt
|
| > ...are usually predicated on naive notions of system
| performance
| benreesman wrote:
| Most companies I've worked for in 20 years doing this were a
| mess in one way or another, but also generally delivered an
| acceptable if inconsistent outcome.
|
| I've had a few brief spells at companies in their "golden
| days", where it just sings. Every once in a while there's
| plenty of budget because the product market fit is hand-in-
| glove, and the first people set an aggressive but achievable
| bar for quality, and a mentoring culture emerged, and
| leadership still knew their trade.
|
| That's a quarter of my career at best, but it's the stuff you
| remember.
| hondo77 wrote:
| Yeah, I was at a company when we were on top of the world.
| For a few years we could do no wrong but even when we hit
| our peak, behind the scenes it was chaos (and we assumed
| "the other guys" actually knew what they were doing while
| we were just winging it). How we were able to achieve so
| much during so much craziness is still amazing to me. It
| didn't last very long, of course, but at least I got to
| experience something like that--most people don't.
| rcbdev wrote:
| What made IBM worse to me than the rest of the industry was
| the crazy crunch/burnout culture both in my project and
| utilization-wise. Also the absolute insanity of putting fresh
| out of college juniors on major aspects of multi-million euro
| projects.
|
| They also seem to have zero organizational understanding of
| modern requirements engineering even though they talk a big
| buzzword game with "Design Thinking".
|
| Suffice it to say, I didn't stay long.
| Nursie wrote:
| > crazy crunch/burnout culture both in my project and
| utilization-wise
|
| Kinda the opposite of some of my experiences in big blue -
| in some of the software sides of things, productivity
| expectations were _so_ low as to be really kinda funny.
|
| You could (and people did) coast along producing not very
| much for years at a time. Which is probably why entire
| business areas just got shitcanned every so often. One
| office in particular operated more like an old-fashioned
| university campus. There was a yearly release cadence, with
| 3-5 months of that dedicated purely to merging together the
| work that the teams had produced over the past 7-9.
| rcbdev wrote:
| IBM Technology people seemed like that, yeah. I'm talking
| about IBM Consulting, where most (if not all) hiring
| seems to be happening recently.
| jxramos wrote:
| I second this. When you think about it it's a fallacy of the
| ideal to assume some non-trivial assemblage of humans would
| be able to be in perfect harmony with each other. That
| fiction of perfect execution of godlike companies is really a
| youthful impression when all your exposure is slick marketing
| campaigns, Hollywood movie representations and other
| artifacts that a company generates that enter the public
| square. When you see how the sausage is made it's a shock to
| all who get to see behind the veneer. Once you get over it
| you're a lot more forgiving for anything that doesn't meet
| one's unsubstantiated expectations because as they say life
| is hard.
| jgilias wrote:
| I've come to the same conclusion. But not just about
| companies, but everything. Talk to someone in the military,
| or government agencies, or working on large infrastructure
| projects. It's the same story everywhere - chaos. And it's
| generally not because of malice, being dumb, or lack of
| trying.
|
| I think as a civilization we're much more like ants than a
| troop of smart chimps. In that our civilization is a kind of
| a proverbial emergent anthill. And most likely the relative
| individual understanding of our respective anthills doesn't
| differ too much between ants and us.
|
| And it's kind of freeing. You just move your proverbial bit
| of earth that you're just compelled to put somewhere else,
| and don't stress the rest. Emergence will take care of it.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > But not just about companies, but everything
|
| For me, it's a good argument against conspiracy theories.
| There's no way there could be secretive organisations
| running for years and controlling the world without
| screwing up in stupid and obvious ways.
| jgilias wrote:
| Yeah. I think anyone who has had experience with
| school/kindergarten parents chats trying to organize
| _anything_ would find the idea of shadowy organizations
| running the world laughable.
| lootsauce wrote:
| To the contrary does it not imply any well organized
| group should have an easier time of accomplishing their
| aims while the rest are mired in the chaos?
| esrauch wrote:
| The claim is that there are literally no observable
| organizations running without chaos, so are we to believe
| the only one to achieve it is nefarious instead of just
| regular profiteering?
|
| I like the meta conspiracy theory that the only
| organizations running without chaos are covert ones
| though.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| It's more that within that chaos there are short bursts
| of organization that can pull off narrow conspiracies.
|
| There are also natural long term aligned players who
| conspire in ways that they can use their energy for their
| benefit. "Market makers"
|
| There are also random alignments that appear to be
| conspiracies ex post facto.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > To the contrary does it not imply any well organized
| group should have an easier time of accomplishing their
| aims while the rest are mired in the chaos?
|
| This take makes sense to me. It's not the org as a whole
| that is accomplishing secret aims, but a sub-org within a
| chaotic org, or spread across multiple chaotic orgs, that
| is able to do so since no one is paying close attention
| to anything.
| polynomial wrote:
| Right, the conspiracy is to destroy things, not build
| them.
| CabSauce wrote:
| I think this is the cause of my depression. It's
| horrendously sad to think about what we could be
| accomplishing if we were just a little efficient.
| jgilias wrote:
| Sorry to hear this! I hope you can manage to get out of
| it, depression can be a real bitch! Do seek help, it's
| nothing to be ashamed of.
| dtech wrote:
| Efficient how? Ants are extremely efficient and
| successful, second only to humans in biomass. Turns out
| making good global decisions is hard to impossible, so
| you see decentralized decision making pop up everywhere.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Efficiency, trust and cooperation, what an amazing place
| it could be.
|
| Finding a hobby that provides a little of that helped me.
| What I also noticed, having spent far too much time in
| front of a screen and programming, that I began to think
| of the world as a giant program that is really really
| buggy. Trying to fix those bugs got me down ... just
| gotta live with those bugs.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| > began to think of the world as a giant program that is
| really really buggy
|
| I think this is an excellent way to phrase the experience
| of "programmer brain" and I will be blatantly ripping it
| off in the future. It's definitely an occupational
| hazard, and something we should be wary of, but it's only
| a small symptom of the larger technologized worldview
| that permeates Western thought (and via export, a lot of
| global thought). There are definite upsides to technology
| and programming, but: "we shape our tools, our tools
| shape us". I think we technologists think a lot about the
| former, and rarely about the latter (that's for those
| squishy humanities types!) -- at our own peril.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Thank you for ripping it off - I call it sharing :)
|
| > at our own peril.
|
| I always like to quote the frog in water. As the water is
| heated to boiling point, apparently the frog doesn't
| spring out. That is, in fact, an urban legend - the frog
| does spring out. However we are the frogs that don't
| spring out.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Perfect isn't efficient. The loss from wastage and chaos
| is less than the resources it would take to eliminate it.
| jorvi wrote:
| Well, everything exists along a gradient.
|
| The example often given is Japan vs the West.
|
| Especially people in the West laud how great Japan its
| collectivist society is, how streets are clean,
| relatively little gets stolen, personal responsibility is
| still a thing, etc; But they completely skip over the
| other side of the coin: collectivist societies crush much
| of the independence out of a person.
|
| So, in this one sense, you can trade independence for
| social "efficiency". I imagine it is much the same for
| humanity. We could become more harmonized, at the cost of
| becoming more drone-like.
|
| An interesting book that deals with this exact dilemma
| (among other things) is "A Deepness In the Sky" by Vernor
| Vinge. Worth a read!
| tsunamifury wrote:
| You should consider that you might be the one wrong here.
| What you think is efficient is just an individual
| perspective.
|
| I've come to accept this after years of fighting "the
| system".
|
| The system doesn't care about you or what you want. It is
| a ruthlessly collective thing and it makes short term
| mistakes you will pay for but long term builds
| foundations you benefit from.
|
| Also over and over efficiency in many cases proves to be
| maladaptive as it kills flexibility.
| hiddencost wrote:
| We blame large, intractable systems for our problems when
| it's too dangerous to look at the small, local causes.
| hoseja wrote:
| Emergence is an agent that isn't me. Why am I even
| conscious if all my agency is subsumed by the egregore.
| This isn't freeing in the slightest, maybe only for the
| most conditioned megacity dwellers.
| jgilias wrote:
| This couldn't be farther from the truth though. As in, I
| don't think any place I've even been to would count as a
| megacity. Let alone where I live.
|
| The way I see it is that emergence is not an agent. More
| like some basic law of nature. Think about planned
| gardens and suburbs versus natural forests and medieval
| city centers.
|
| You can mow your lawn every week, expend obscene amounts
| of water during the summer, pour everything with
| herbicides in a misguided effort to have the perfect
| lawn, but the moment you stop doing it, nature takes over
| and introduces a fractal amount of complexity in just a
| few seasons.
|
| In my opinion an old forest where nature has been let
| alone for some time is much more beautiful and
| interesting than any planned garden, and a medieval city
| centre much more beautiful and interesting than any
| planned neighborhood.
|
| And then, emergence explaining our civilization doesn't
| necessarily imply that you don't have agency as an
| individual. It just says that the total of whatever we
| collectively do, irrespective of if we're compelled to do
| it, or have free will, results in more than just the sum
| of individual parts.
| hoseja wrote:
| Tell it to the choanoflagellates.
|
| The emergent agent isn't a harmonious oak old growth.
| It's a ravenous, homogenizing beast, primally unable to
| die; accelerating forever in the red queen race; killing
| everything that isn't itself, fundamentally unaware and
| uncaring of the individuals it's made of.
| jgilias wrote:
| But you don't know that. As in, it's impossible for you
| (or me) to know that.
|
| I do care about my cells. Like, not individually, but I
| do care that they are in as good an environment for them
| as I can muster. I don't think they have any concept of
| me. Or if they do, I don't think they can reason about
| how murderous am I.
| layer8 wrote:
| Within a group of _n_ people, everything else being
| equal, why would you expect to be able to steer its
| behavior by more than 1 / _n_ th?
| hoseja wrote:
| But that's the problem with emergence, you don't even get
| the 1/n. You get zero, or very near it.
| jgilias wrote:
| I think you misunderstand what emergence is. It's really
| not an argument about if you have agency or not in your
| individual actions.
| layer8 wrote:
| Well, you had the agency to read HN today, to comment
| here, and to choose the contents of your comment. So I'm
| not sure what you're getting at, beyond the well-trodden
| free-will debate.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| "emergent anthill"
|
| Wonder if this concept could also be Moloch.
|
| Moloch is sometimes used to represent how humans just
| consume.
|
| And, what do ants do, expand and consume.
|
| More and More I think the ant-human analogy is best.
|
| We are organizing, we form structures, but it isn't a plan,
| it's just twitching on our feedbacks. We have some loose
| internal functions to respond to inputs. That when stacked
| up by millions form some pattern.
|
| Ant's don't have an 'anthill plan' and humans don't have a
| 'city/town plan'.
|
| Like ants, we just kind of group together and follow the
| chemical paths laid down by others (coffee, beer).
| schrectacular wrote:
| Sounds Daoist to me.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's kind of a side effect of capitalism. You get the
| culture of doing more with less and drive it until the
| point you are doing less than adequate with less money than
| you'd need to do it properly.
|
| The end result is software that puts postal workers in jail
| and doors that fall off planes.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Like democracy, it sucks, but it's all we have. Depending
| how you define capitalism (currency, trade, investing in
| capital?) and software (something executed on a digital
| or analog computing machine) there was no software
| 10,000+ years ago before capitalism
| rbanffy wrote:
| In the end it's about process and dumbing it down enough
| that it can be followed by the cheapest resource
| available (while also pressing down the cost of such
| resources through managed poverty). This race to the
| bottom is never good.
|
| As for democracy, it's great, much better than any
| alternative. It's inconvenient (to the powers of the
| day), however, that it tries (at least the functional
| ones) to prevent the widening of the chasm between the
| haves and the have nots. One thing any functional
| democracy must aggressively prevent is the acquisition of
| power from any means other than popular vote.
| Octabrain wrote:
| My conclusion is that this "chaotic scenario" happens when
| humans work in big groups. It's extremely hard/pretty much
| impossible to coordinate big group of humans and made them
| to work efficiently. In fact, this is one of the reasons by
| which nowadays, I personally prefer to work on a small
| start up environment instead of a big corporation.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It is possible, they just need to spend more than half of
| the work day in coordination meetings and doing
| paperwork.
|
| And not many organization are willing to pay thousands of
| people to do paperwork to help other departments do their
| paperwork more effectively and so on.
|
| Or somehow they found a group of extremely trustworthy
| and reliable employees who will never fudge the truth
| even at the cost of their jobs/reputation/etc...
| orzig wrote:
| Surely it's a matter of degree through? I was at a company
| with a recently acquired-in product line and the amount of
| chaos on release day each month was notably higher. I would
| have described the original product's development process as
| _awkward_ but way less bad than the new one.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > Then, after I start I realize every company is operating on
| chaos, barely putting one foot in front of the other.
|
| I've seen and been in enough situations where a quite
| moderate changes could had improved QoL of the company people
| and conseq. the company itself.
|
| How many times I was paid for that? Zero.
|
| Add to that 'yes, we see it would be better for us, but
| [bullshit reason]'.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > every company is just running one day at a time
|
| And every day, one decision at a time, it is the quality,
| skills, and integrity of the _people_ that make an
| organisation 's culture, capabililty, and sustainability.
|
| An organisation without a culture that attracts talent and
| maintains integrity in its decisions is nothing but a licence
| to burn money squatting in a building.
| ghaff wrote:
| I know a pretty senior person who went to Apple and they
| boomeranged after about 6 months. At scale, there's a high
| level of chaos just about everywhere.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Even in a segment as rigorously regulated as aerospace,
| Boeing ended up with planes that fly into the ground and lose
| doors while flying.
|
| The horrors we see in any corporate-grade software-intensive
| company where development is a cost would drive H. P.
| Lovecraft to madness.
| shever73 wrote:
| I call this the "shiny window effect".
|
| 30 years ago, when I started my first business from a
| converted garage, I used to think about all of the chaos I
| had to deal with. I'd look at the big companies with their
| shiny, mirror glass windows and think "when we're that size,
| we'll have it all figured out".
|
| Then we started working for these large companies. We were
| supplying IT solutions to try help them deal with their
| chaos. I realised then that the only difference between them
| and us was the shiny windows and the scale of their chaos.
|
| I apply this on a human level too. There's not one of us that
| has it all figured out, despite outward appearances.
| jmclnx wrote:
| >What ive learned in my career is that all companies are
| operating on a knife's edge
|
| I guess you never worked for a Large Drug Company. I have a
| relative working for one (low-level employee) and pretty much
| on the way home, you pick up your bag of money bonus leaving
| every day :)
|
| The benefits are 100x better that anything I have ever had in
| tech. Plus everyone gets stock bonuses and money bonuses when
| a new product is successful. And working from home, sure, why
| not.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Yeah, agree about the sale to Lenovo. That's when they became
| just another "body shop" like Accenture or Deloitte.
| rcbdev wrote:
| This business - which they run under IBM Consulting in EMEA -
| they also bought off of PwC in the early 2000s.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Just another sad example of the MBA caste ruining an
| organization built on engineering excellence.
| miroljub wrote:
| > IBM's cost structure and bloat just meant they couldn't
| compete in all but the most profitable product lines.
|
| That's the key to IBM success and longevity. Despite blatant
| incompetence, they have been pretty good at riding every single
| high margin fad in the industry.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > A giant red flag was when they decided they couldn't compete
| in the commoditized x86 server market
|
| In general I would agree it's not great to compete in a
| commodity segment if you can focus on differentiated products.
| You can make the same amount of cash from high-volume low-
| margin product or a low-volume high-margin product, with the
| latter generating sizeable IP you can also generate money from.
|
| The split between HP and HPE is one example: HP gets the high-
| volume no-added-value segment and HPE tries to rebuild what was
| systematically killed by its descent into generic x86 hardware.
| They have very little headroom there, as HP/UX is on life-
| support and their high end has been stagnant for years.
| avhception wrote:
| The user experience for random x86 servers is utter garbage,
| especially at the low- to mid-tier. Bug-riddled firmware,
| weird licensing schemes for some features, IPMI is complete
| crap. Salespeople stuck in the 90s who can't get their head
| around the fact that I want an HBA for my ZFS, not some
| convoluted "RAID solution". Updating firmware is an
| adventure. Middlemen who all seem to think you'll be running
| Windows, again, stuck in the 90s or 2000s. I'd gladly pay a
| premium for something better here.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > I'd gladly pay a premium for something better here.
|
| Unfortunately, the people who know better rarely are the
| same people who signs the checks.
| jameshart wrote:
| The article leans on the significant change of emphasis renaming
| from CTR (computing, tabulating, recording) to IBM (business
| machines) implies - but doesn't lampshade the more specific
| contrast the name makes with Thomas J Watson's previous employer,
| and the company IBM was trying to outcompete: NCR. Where NCR was
| 'national', IBM was international. Where NCR handled 'cash', IBM
| handled 'business'. And where NCR made only 'registers', IBM made
| all manner of 'machines'.
| fuzztester wrote:
| A bit like IBM and HAL ...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000
|
| The section "Origin of name"
| HeadlessChild wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000#Origin_of_name
| Findecanor wrote:
| Something missing from the wikipedia article:
|
| There used to be a convention among engineering students at
| the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois to name
| their student projects "HAL" _because_ it was one letter off
| from IBM. "HAL Communications" was founded by alumni.
|
| Arthur C Clarke claimed he put the "HAL" plant in Illinois
| only because he had a friend who was a professor there. He
| also claimed he didn't know about the student connection.
| somat wrote:
| My favorite piece of IBM gear: The computing cheese cutter.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8VhNF_0I5c (hand tool rescue)
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| Just happened to jump to the exact point where he explains why
| / how it's a "computing" cheese cutter; if you're curious too
| you can find the explanation at the 42:30 mark:
| https://youtu.be/z8VhNF_0I5c?si=X4TmA1rxIzB9AcPo&t=2552
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| they don't like to mention the role of Dehomag, their German
| subsidiary - but it is also part of their history.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag
| angiosperm wrote:
| IBM got back all the money Dehomag got in rent from the Nazis,
| and all the machines they rented.
|
| TJ Watson was _personally_ awarded the Iron Cross by Hitler for
| his contribution to their efforts at a "final solution". He
| gave it back reluctantly after the US declared war.
| Nursie wrote:
| AFAICT it was the " Order of the German Eagle", and he
| returned the medal in 1940, a year before the US declared
| war.
|
| It's still pretty shameful, but details are important too.
| zabzonk wrote:
| germany declared war on the us
| hugg wrote:
| yeah, germany declared war first, but the US also
| declared war on germany
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Yes, that deeply shameful episode definitely shouldn't be left
| out of any retrospective of IBM's last 100 years. They clearly
| knew what the machines were being used for deeply malign ends,
| even if they didn't know the exact details of what was
| happening.
| bt3 wrote:
| Reading the comments here, largely negative pointing, I couldn't
| help but recently feel like IBM was really impressive with their
| work on Quantum System 2 [1]. I'm not knowledgable enough to know
| if there's really progress in what they presented, but it seemed
| to help justify why this is still a $160B+ company.
|
| [1] https://newsroom.ibm.com/2023-12-04-IBM-Debuts-Next-
| Generati...
| isoprophlex wrote:
| So, what can it actually do? Factor the number 21 into 3 and 7,
| but using quantum computing?
| cubefox wrote:
| The future practical applications of quantum computing remain
| a mystery.
| pram wrote:
| For a positive IBM reminiscence: I was really impressed by their
| AIX support staff. It was one of the very few times in my career
| that I felt like I was speaking to someone from a vendor who
| actually understood the product at a deep level. They helped
| resolve some very obscure bootloader/kernel issues.
|
| Of course that was almost 20 years ago, I'm sure everything has
| gone to shit by now lol
| Palomides wrote:
| they moved AIX development to India last year and laid off the
| US developers
| m463 wrote:
| which was 2 years after the _other_ IBM...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_M...
| vb-8448 wrote:
| My former boss used to spell IBM as International Business Mafia,
| especially when we were going thought the renewal of the
| maintenance contracts.
| urxvtcd wrote:
| It's Better Manually
| vb-8448 wrote:
| I don't get it
| dvh wrote:
| The I in FAANG stands for IBM
| dade_ wrote:
| It's in the A-Hole
| hardware2win wrote:
| It isnt faang anymore - now we have mag7
| piokoch wrote:
| Well. IBM, the "tech" company we all remember from cool servers,
| AIX, OS400 and other innovative technologies, that were used all
| over the world for various purposes - from banks and airlines to
| supporting Germans to send Jews to concentration camps bankrupted
| in 1993.
|
| In 1993 IMB was converted into one more consulting companies,
| like McKinsey, Accenture or Deloitte. Nowadays IBM "tech" part is
| mostly PR, as most of the "tech" was sold, with a notable
| exception which is IBM Z Series.
| sofixa wrote:
| > as most of the "tech" was sold, with a notable exception
| which is IBM Z Series
|
| And IBM Cloud, which is quite niche.
| jerlam wrote:
| And IBM Cloud is an acquisition - it's from Softlayer which
| IBM purchased in 2013. Likely any new IBM tech is going to be
| a rebranded acquisition. It's just a revolving door.
| zoobab wrote:
| IBM is a patent troll:
|
| http://zoobab.wikidot.com/ibm-turbohercules-patent-threat-le...
| thebiglebrewski wrote:
| Isn't IBM responsible for the massive systems failure in the NYC
| Public School system yesterday when they were supposed to be
| doing "remote learning" for the snow day?
|
| When I heard this on NPR, I couldn't believe the city used them
| as a vendor for authentication instead of like AWS, Google Cloud,
| Auth0, etc.
|
| People probably will get fired for choosing IBM, contrary to the
| old tagline.
| mass_and_energy wrote:
| "thinking I'd learn how they ran truly global projects." ...
| Watson Business Machines has entered the chat. The Holocaust
| couldn't have happened without IBM's help, they're war criminals
| that we allow to conduct business because... Why?
| psunavy03 wrote:
| IBM's current staff are war criminals?
| mass_and_energy wrote:
| Well in the USA companies have the same rights as an
| individual, so doesn't it seem fair to hold them to the same
| legal standard of what is and isn't considered genocide? Or
| the fact that between the years of 1941 and 1945 they
| actively engaged in trade with a country their country was at
| war with, a federal crime of no small stature?
| zubairq wrote:
| Amazing history of IBM, thanks
| dav_Oz wrote:
| A very dark chapter of IBM - to me common knowledge - but only a
| few days ago I've touched this topic with a much younger person,
| provocatively stating: "Well, IBM provided the technology for the
| first heavily automated genocide and forced labor allocation"
| _Hollerith erfasst._ He didn 't believe me.
|
| So, granted Dehomag[0] was _only_ an IBM subsidiary, there is
| some evidence that IBM 's US-headquarter was well informed and
| decided do not forgo the excellent business relationship and thus
| large profits (funneled through Switzerland).[1][2]
|
| However the case might be here, it is nevertheless a cautionary
| tale how the ease of mass data collection can immensely leverage
| (bad) intent.
|
| [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag
|
| [1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.hig..
| .
|
| [2]https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0609607995/theameric..
| .
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(page generated 2024-02-14 23:01 UTC)