9 ms·

Here's what I don't get... If you have any options at all, why stay at a company with sub-par technology that abuses their workers? They've been stuck in low

Here's what I don't get... If you have any options at all, why stay at a company with sub-par technology that abuses their workers? They've been stuck in low 3 Glassdoor [0] range for a while. It's layoff after layoff as they slowly dismantle the company. Why stay? Geographic limitations? Narrow skillsets? [0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/IBM-Reviews-E354.htm#trends-overallRating https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/IBM-Reviews-E354.htm#trend...

redblacktree 11y ago
Fear of the unknown? Atrophy of key interviewing skills? Comfort with their position? There are a lot of reasons that people stay, even when a position or company is not optimal.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  Maybe it's the weak job market? It's not like it's 1999 out there.
- eggy 11y ago
  Fear guides all of us in some way, and striving to live means taking chances. The myth of the 'stable big company' that you can work at, and get your kid a job at after college, is past history. The U.S. changed directions when they closed a lot of the vocational schools, and the luxury afforded by being the first world economy, drove low to mid-level wages up. Dinosaurs like IBM cannot feed the machine. Manufacturing, though a different industry from IBM, disappeared, although it is making somewhat of a small team, or maker comeback. I've always struck out on my own. Getting laid off sucks, but I think most of them are just unhappy about the compensation, and most people I know who have 'overstayed' their usefulness at big corporations, usually own up and admit they weren't happy there, and they were not producing. I've been on both ends, and it never feels right, but change drives the world and life. The myth of stasis is one most humans embrace illogically. This dialogue will manifest itself in the reincarnation of xenophobia - 'Foreigners taking U.S. jobs!' - wait for Trump to chime in...
  - toyg 11y ago
    Sure, sure, but mortgages and kids' needs tend to get in the way of philosophical and strategic thinking.
    - im_down_w_otp 11y ago
      People with mortgages and kids don't move to new places where there's more, or at least more immediate, economic opportunity? Why not? Kids are mobile. Mortgages can be covered by tenants or by selling the property (usually). I only have kid (singular) and lack a mortgage, but I'd definitely move my family to a place with more opportunity if the well ran dry where we're at now. I wouldn't even hesitate or think twice about it. The temporary pain of transition is going to be a lot easier than the long-tail of fruitless toiling and economic decay.
      - paganel 11y ago
        > Kids are mobile I was a spoiled kid, I admit, but I remember that back when I was 9 or 10 and my parents asked me if I'd be ok with us moving 4 or 5 blocks down the street, in a better area, my answer was a loud "no way!", because that meant losing my play-mates and God knows what else. We ended up not moving. I know it's anecdotal, but looking at what Hollywood is feeding us (with the latest example being the excellent animation "Inside Out") I get the feeling that is actually hard for kids being "mobile". Parents ignore that at their own risk.
      - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
        Kids are hardly mobile. Remember that they're kids and may not be capable of coping fully with losing their friends and familiar surroundings to a different place with no guarantee of things being better for them. Minor anecdote, when I moved from Canada to USA in my childhood, my little brother who was 12 at the time tried to run away to avoid losing all his friends he had made.
        im_down_w_otp 11y ago
        A kid living in a household where neither parent can adequately provide for them because the economic opportunities are shrinking and offering no signs of ever improving, which often results in other toxic environmental conditions (stress about money, substance abuse, divorce, etc.), seems to me to be almost always worse than relocating to a new place in the long-term.
- Terr_ 11y ago
  Also: Social-anxiety, insecurity/impostor-syndrome.
mrbill 11y ago
Probably also a lot of people who have been with the company for decades and expected to retire from there as well.
Quanticles 11y ago
Some of these locations don't have any other companies in the area. Example: You're 22, straight out of college, you take a job at IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY because it was a great fit for you and you liked the area. You raise a family there, get friends there, establish a lot of roots over 10+ years. Now IBM is "transforming", what are you going to do? There are no other companies in the area
- ggamecrazy 11y ago
  You can commute to NYC. It's a 1 hour ride on the Metro-North. It's not ideal but when times are hard you survive by any means necessary. It's also quite enjoyable. I get so much reading and personal time commuting on the train.
  - cpwright 11y ago
    People do commute to NYC; but it sucks from Poughkeepsie. The train is not 1 hour, it is 1 hour 45 minutes. You need to drive to the station and park, figure at least 15 minutes. That also assumes you're going to be working very close to 42nd street. Otherwise add another 20 minutes for the subway/walking. You're lucky if this is going to be less than 2.5 hours each way. I live 38 miles north of the city; Poughkeepsie is 73.5. It takes me about an hour and 45 minutes door-to-door to get to work at 22nd street. 10-15 minutes to the train station, probably about 5 minutes of waiting [because if you miss one train, you have to wait 20-30 minutes or so for another depending on the time of morning], 60 minutes on the train, then about another 25 minutes of walking (or alternatively 5 minutes to get to the subway, 2-5 minutes to wait for it, then 5 minutes on the subway, and another 5 minutes of walking).
    - saiya-jin 11y ago
      some time ago I read a study (sorry no links around) that people get used to almost anything, positive or negative, over time. With 2 clear exceptions: - pets like dogs/cats always tend to raise happiness levels - daily long commutes to work tend to make people more unhappy (and of course it helps if you have the time for yourself and are nto constantly stuck at traffic jam)
gozur88 11y ago
Geographic limitations are a big deal. I'm in the same sort of position as the IBM'ers, in that my company is slowly farming out what used to be internal apps to SaaS companies and moving the remaining jobs to a contractor in India. My family is local, and as I get older that's more and more important. If I have to leave town it's going to have a big impact on my happiness. So much so, in fact, that I may take a huge pay cut and work at, I dunno, Starbucks or something so I can stay local.
- x0x0 11y ago
  And before someone suggests moving to silly valley, consider doing so requires accepting a 98%+ chance you will never own a home unless you're willing to put up with a horrific commute. In most of sf/peninsula detached homes cost $1.5m+. And even a condo is difficult to afford on the salaries available. Home ownership for most of us requires a startup win giving you at least $0.5m after taxes plus you and your spouse both having good incomes. I like living in cities, but I can understand it's not everyone's cup of tea, particularly if you or your upstairs neighbors have kids. And all my friends with kids say the secret to happiness is having local grandparents. Or an au pair. Further, if you live in an economically depressed area, there's no guarantee you can easily or quickly sell your home. Family in CT a little over 2 hours outside of nyc had a house on the market for 8 months before it sold.
  - tryitnow 11y ago
    Plus there's no guarantee that moving to the Bay Area will prevent similar problems. There's a boatload of reckless spending on developers and engineers right now. It's only a matter of time before financiers start pushing for headcount reductions.
    - jonesb6 11y ago
      I'll just leave this [1] here.. [1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CcBl4edUMAASf7X.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CcBl4edUMAASf7X.jpg:large
    - 11y ago
mattgrice 11y ago
Say you're a support person working at IBM in Dubuque, Iowa, where local and state taxpayers spent $50M to lure IBM in a delusion of becoming a tech hub. [1] You specialize in Lotus Notes support for local businesses like Hormel. Last year, IBM laid off 2/3 of their Dubuque workforce, 700 people, in a city of 60,000. More than 1% of the population. Your only skill is Notes, same as dozens of other people that were laid off. The nearest cities of any note are Cedar Rapids and Madison, both more than an hour away. You know you need to get out, but where and how? [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-19/iowa-spent-50-million-to-lure-ibm-then-the-firings-started http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-19/iowa-spent...
- zanny 11y ago
  But you take that risk moving to a no-tech area. The best solution is to not put yourself in a position you need to get out of. And if that means the next Dubuque company needs to be offering million dollar salaries to engineers to get commit themselves out there - since there would be no other opportunities and you would be stuck, so you better have a massive nest egg after five years - then so be it.
  - rfdave 11y ago
    But there are many situations what you get yourself into that seem like a good idea at the time. It's impossible to make predictions about future events. The IBM employees getting laid off here are not responsible for the corporate decisions to outsource their jobs, and don't deserve the blame.
  - jonesb6 11y ago
    Or reverse it, what if you're a blue collard worker in a disadvantaged community that IBM just moved into, they lure you into training at IBM in a narrow skill set with the promise of becoming white collard. Can't blame someone for taking that risk.
- mathattack 11y ago
  Very good point - the human toll is tough. Did Dubuque get anything in writing about the jobs to be provided? $50M in tax breaks to support 1000 jobs is very expensive!
PhantomGremlin 11y ago
Narrow skillsets? Purely anecdotal, but what I've heard is that chip jobs at IBM (and at Intel FWIW) are very narrow and silo-ed. Good for the company in two ways: 1) employee gets really good at that particular job 2) IBM internal tools and procedures are different than general practice. Other companies that are looking for X don't want to hire an employee who has only done Y, even though X and Y aren't too different, and even though any smart person can quickly pick up X. Consequently, employee can't easily go elsewhere.
dredmorbius 11y ago
Among other factors mentioned: employer-specific skillsets. Technology jobs are very highly specialised. And I'm not just speaking of computer tech. I'm old enough to have seen several generations of obsoleted "gold tickets". Nuclear Engineering, future destroyed March 28, 1979. Freeway engineers, the freeway protests of the 1960s/1970s. Big Three auto manufacturers, dream destroyed with the first oil embargo, and sudden onslaught of more fuel efficient, less expensive, and better quality imports from Japan and Germany. Petroleum engineers, dream destroyed as the oil market collapsed in the 1980s. Aerospace engineers, dream destroyed with the fall of the Soviet Union and redundancies in the military-industrial complex throughout NATO powers. Travel agents, newspaper journalists, and Perl hackers are only more recent victims of the same levels of specialisation. It's not that these people are dumb, many were brilliant. But they're also laden with a tremendous amount of arcane knowledge, that, unfortunately, gets in the way of learning new skills. It's been painfully obvious for a long time that, individual success stories notwithstanding, retraining and "reskilling" typically does very little to alleviate this. Yes, future generations get trained into new skills, some of which may still be germaine 4-8 years after they've completed schooling. But my observation is that job and skill cycles are iterating faster. So that's a part of it. Yes, there are other dimensions. Obligations, family ties, social ties, fears, the fact that the most mobile do jump ship first, and more. But really, it's quite crushing. You may not understand it now, but you almost certainly will, eventually.
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  I've been simultaneously waiting for and dreading the same future for rails engineers, since so many are under the belief that web development is the ticket...
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    Yeah, I've started seeing occasional queries on HN about what the Next Big Thing will be. Which raises another challenge: chasing the tech curve. It's one thing to have found the right tech, another to correctly anticipate the market's next move. The worse when you realise everything that's up-and-coming is recapitulating all the mistakes you recognised from the last time.
hkmurakami 11y ago
Because H1B.
moonlighter 11y ago
Most IBMers get great benefits (great 401K plan, great health insurance, etc), and the running joke was to rather wait and get laid off to receive the generous severance package (which used to be 6 month's salary plus 12 months continued health insurance). However, given the new severance only being 1 month's salary leaves them with less incentive to wait. Of course, the really good ones have already left anyway (money isn't the prime motivation there), but the folks remaining there, especially the ones who will have to pick up the slack (more work, same pay) will have much less incentive then previously.
tallanvor 11y ago
If you're working in startups, you're used to expecting everyone to do a bit of everything. In large companies, however, you're expected to specialize within a specific area. The problem is, even if you're spending a few hours a week outside of work learning new things, you're not likely to have many opportunities to show off your other skills, which makes it harder and harder to move not only within the company, but to other companies.
neeel 11y ago
I needed a job. You make it sounds incredibly easy to find work. I have less than 2 years experience in the industry. After getting fired from a startup, I was desperate to get my foot in the door anywhere. I was also desperate to pay my rent. IBM have filled both those needs.
wtbob 11y ago
> If you have any options at all, why stay at a company with sub-par technology that abuses their workers? I used to work there, and I can say that it's a lot like an abusive marriage: IBM is really, really good at convincing one that the IT job market is a tough place (!), that one got really lucky getting a job with IBM, and that one could never find another job anywhere else (!), and that $70,000 is a great salary for a world-class technical talent (!!!). The sad thing is that there are so many smart, good people there, absolutely wasted in their positions. IBM could be an amazing, powerful company if it actually knew how to release the energy of its employees.
freehunter 11y ago
As someone who works at IBM currently: because they have the best technology in my area of expertise. Some of their tech in dying industries is sub-par, sure, but you're hard pressed to find a better security appliance than QRadar. Couple that with the many, many security acquisitions they've made over the last year or so, and it's easy to see why someone would go there and stay there for a few years. It's hard to say no when your coworker is Bruce Schneier, for example. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/resilient_syste_2.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/resilient_sys...

redblacktree 11y ago

Fear of the unknown? Atrophy of key interviewing skills? Comfort with their position? There are a lot of reasons that people stay, even when a position or company is not optimal.

ryandrake 11y ago
Maybe it's the weak job market? It's not like it's 1999 out there.
eggy 11y ago
Fear guides all of us in some way, and striving to live means taking chances. The myth of the 'stable big company' that you can work at, and get your kid a job at after college, is past history. The U.S. changed directions when they closed a lot of the vocational schools, and the luxury afforded by being the first world economy, drove low to mid-level wages up. Dinosaurs like IBM cannot feed the machine. Manufacturing, though a different industry from IBM, disappeared, although it is making somewhat of a small team, or maker comeback. I've always struck out on my own. Getting laid off sucks, but I think most of them are just unhappy about the compensation, and most people I know who have 'overstayed' their usefulness at big corporations, usually own up and admit they weren't happy there, and they were not producing. I've been on both ends, and it never feels right, but change drives the world and life. The myth of stasis is one most humans embrace illogically. This dialogue will manifest itself in the reincarnation of xenophobia - 'Foreigners taking U.S. jobs!' - wait for Trump to chime in...
- toyg 11y ago
  Sure, sure, but mortgages and kids' needs tend to get in the way of philosophical and strategic thinking.
  - im_down_w_otp 11y ago
    People with mortgages and kids don't move to new places where there's more, or at least more immediate, economic opportunity? Why not? Kids are mobile. Mortgages can be covered by tenants or by selling the property (usually). I only have kid (singular) and lack a mortgage, but I'd definitely move my family to a place with more opportunity if the well ran dry where we're at now. I wouldn't even hesitate or think twice about it. The temporary pain of transition is going to be a lot easier than the long-tail of fruitless toiling and economic decay.
    - paganel 11y ago
      > Kids are mobile I was a spoiled kid, I admit, but I remember that back when I was 9 or 10 and my parents asked me if I'd be ok with us moving 4 or 5 blocks down the street, in a better area, my answer was a loud "no way!", because that meant losing my play-mates and God knows what else. We ended up not moving. I know it's anecdotal, but looking at what Hollywood is feeding us (with the latest example being the excellent animation "Inside Out") I get the feeling that is actually hard for kids being "mobile". Parents ignore that at their own risk.
    - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
      Kids are hardly mobile. Remember that they're kids and may not be capable of coping fully with losing their friends and familiar surroundings to a different place with no guarantee of things being better for them. Minor anecdote, when I moved from Canada to USA in my childhood, my little brother who was 12 at the time tried to run away to avoid losing all his friends he had made.
      - im_down_w_otp 11y ago
        A kid living in a household where neither parent can adequately provide for them because the economic opportunities are shrinking and offering no signs of ever improving, which often results in other toxic environmental conditions (stress about money, substance abuse, divorce, etc.), seems to me to be almost always worse than relocating to a new place in the long-term.
Terr_ 11y ago
Also: Social-anxiety, insecurity/impostor-syndrome.

mrbill 11y ago

Probably also a lot of people who have been with the company for decades and expected to retire from there as well.

Quanticles 11y ago

Some of these locations don't have any other companies in the area. Example: You're 22, straight out of college, you take a job at IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY because it was a great fit for you and you liked the area. You raise a family there, get friends there, establish a lot of roots over 10+ years. Now IBM is "transforming", what are you going to do? There are no other companies in the area

ggamecrazy 11y ago
You can commute to NYC. It's a 1 hour ride on the Metro-North. It's not ideal but when times are hard you survive by any means necessary. It's also quite enjoyable. I get so much reading and personal time commuting on the train.
- cpwright 11y ago
  People do commute to NYC; but it sucks from Poughkeepsie. The train is not 1 hour, it is 1 hour 45 minutes. You need to drive to the station and park, figure at least 15 minutes. That also assumes you're going to be working very close to 42nd street. Otherwise add another 20 minutes for the subway/walking. You're lucky if this is going to be less than 2.5 hours each way. I live 38 miles north of the city; Poughkeepsie is 73.5. It takes me about an hour and 45 minutes door-to-door to get to work at 22nd street. 10-15 minutes to the train station, probably about 5 minutes of waiting [because if you miss one train, you have to wait 20-30 minutes or so for another depending on the time of morning], 60 minutes on the train, then about another 25 minutes of walking (or alternatively 5 minutes to get to the subway, 2-5 minutes to wait for it, then 5 minutes on the subway, and another 5 minutes of walking).
  - saiya-jin 11y ago
    some time ago I read a study (sorry no links around) that people get used to almost anything, positive or negative, over time. With 2 clear exceptions: - pets like dogs/cats always tend to raise happiness levels - daily long commutes to work tend to make people more unhappy (and of course it helps if you have the time for yourself and are nto constantly stuck at traffic jam)

gozur88 11y ago

Geographic limitations are a big deal. I'm in the same sort of position as the IBM'ers, in that my company is slowly farming out what used to be internal apps to SaaS companies and moving the remaining jobs to a contractor in India. My family is local, and as I get older that's more and more important. If I have to leave town it's going to have a big impact on my happiness. So much so, in fact, that I may take a huge pay cut and work at, I dunno, Starbucks or something so I can stay local.

x0x0 11y ago
And before someone suggests moving to silly valley, consider doing so requires accepting a 98%+ chance you will never own a home unless you're willing to put up with a horrific commute. In most of sf/peninsula detached homes cost $1.5m+. And even a condo is difficult to afford on the salaries available. Home ownership for most of us requires a startup win giving you at least $0.5m after taxes plus you and your spouse both having good incomes. I like living in cities, but I can understand it's not everyone's cup of tea, particularly if you or your upstairs neighbors have kids. And all my friends with kids say the secret to happiness is having local grandparents. Or an au pair. Further, if you live in an economically depressed area, there's no guarantee you can easily or quickly sell your home. Family in CT a little over 2 hours outside of nyc had a house on the market for 8 months before it sold.
- tryitnow 11y ago
  Plus there's no guarantee that moving to the Bay Area will prevent similar problems. There's a boatload of reckless spending on developers and engineers right now. It's only a matter of time before financiers start pushing for headcount reductions.
  - jonesb6 11y ago
    I'll just leave this [1] here.. [1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CcBl4edUMAASf7X.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CcBl4edUMAASf7X.jpg:large
  - 11y ago

mattgrice 11y ago

Say you're a support person working at IBM in Dubuque, Iowa, where local and state taxpayers spent $50M to lure IBM in a delusion of becoming a tech hub. [1] You specialize in Lotus Notes support for local businesses like Hormel. Last year, IBM laid off 2/3 of their Dubuque workforce, 700 people, in a city of 60,000. More than 1% of the population. Your only skill is Notes, same as dozens of other people that were laid off. The nearest cities of any note are Cedar Rapids and Madison, both more than an hour away. You know you need to get out, but where and how? [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-19/iowa-spent-50-million-to-lure-ibm-then-the-firings-started http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-19/iowa-spent...

zanny 11y ago
But you take that risk moving to a no-tech area. The best solution is to not put yourself in a position you need to get out of. And if that means the next Dubuque company needs to be offering million dollar salaries to engineers to get commit themselves out there - since there would be no other opportunities and you would be stuck, so you better have a massive nest egg after five years - then so be it.
- rfdave 11y ago
  But there are many situations what you get yourself into that seem like a good idea at the time. It's impossible to make predictions about future events. The IBM employees getting laid off here are not responsible for the corporate decisions to outsource their jobs, and don't deserve the blame.
- jonesb6 11y ago
  Or reverse it, what if you're a blue collard worker in a disadvantaged community that IBM just moved into, they lure you into training at IBM in a narrow skill set with the promise of becoming white collard. Can't blame someone for taking that risk.
mathattack 11y ago
Very good point - the human toll is tough. Did Dubuque get anything in writing about the jobs to be provided? $50M in tax breaks to support 1000 jobs is very expensive!

PhantomGremlin 11y ago

Narrow skillsets? Purely anecdotal, but what I've heard is that chip jobs at IBM (and at Intel FWIW) are very narrow and silo-ed. Good for the company in two ways: 1) employee gets really good at that particular job 2) IBM internal tools and procedures are different than general practice. Other companies that are looking for X don't want to hire an employee who has only done Y, even though X and Y aren't too different, and even though any smart person can quickly pick up X. Consequently, employee can't easily go elsewhere.

dredmorbius 11y ago

Among other factors mentioned: employer-specific skillsets. Technology jobs are very highly specialised. And I'm not just speaking of computer tech. I'm old enough to have seen several generations of obsoleted "gold tickets". Nuclear Engineering, future destroyed March 28, 1979. Freeway engineers, the freeway protests of the 1960s/1970s. Big Three auto manufacturers, dream destroyed with the first oil embargo, and sudden onslaught of more fuel efficient, less expensive, and better quality imports from Japan and Germany. Petroleum engineers, dream destroyed as the oil market collapsed in the 1980s. Aerospace engineers, dream destroyed with the fall of the Soviet Union and redundancies in the military-industrial complex throughout NATO powers. Travel agents, newspaper journalists, and Perl hackers are only more recent victims of the same levels of specialisation. It's not that these people are dumb, many were brilliant. But they're also laden with a tremendous amount of arcane knowledge, that, unfortunately, gets in the way of learning new skills. It's been painfully obvious for a long time that, individual success stories notwithstanding, retraining and "reskilling" typically does very little to alleviate this. Yes, future generations get trained into new skills, some of which may still be germaine 4-8 years after they've completed schooling. But my observation is that job and skill cycles are iterating faster. So that's a part of it. Yes, there are other dimensions. Obligations, family ties, social ties, fears, the fact that the most mobile do jump ship first, and more. But really, it's quite crushing. You may not understand it now, but you almost certainly will, eventually.

hkmurakami 11y ago
I've been simultaneously waiting for and dreading the same future for rails engineers, since so many are under the belief that web development is the ticket...
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Yeah, I've started seeing occasional queries on HN about what the Next Big Thing will be. Which raises another challenge: chasing the tech curve. It's one thing to have found the right tech, another to correctly anticipate the market's next move. The worse when you realise everything that's up-and-coming is recapitulating all the mistakes you recognised from the last time.

hkmurakami 11y ago

Because H1B.

moonlighter 11y ago

Most IBMers get great benefits (great 401K plan, great health insurance, etc), and the running joke was to rather wait and get laid off to receive the generous severance package (which used to be 6 month's salary plus 12 months continued health insurance). However, given the new severance only being 1 month's salary leaves them with less incentive to wait. Of course, the really good ones have already left anyway (money isn't the prime motivation there), but the folks remaining there, especially the ones who will have to pick up the slack (more work, same pay) will have much less incentive then previously.

tallanvor 11y ago

If you're working in startups, you're used to expecting everyone to do a bit of everything. In large companies, however, you're expected to specialize within a specific area. The problem is, even if you're spending a few hours a week outside of work learning new things, you're not likely to have many opportunities to show off your other skills, which makes it harder and harder to move not only within the company, but to other companies.

neeel 11y ago

I needed a job. You make it sounds incredibly easy to find work. I have less than 2 years experience in the industry. After getting fired from a startup, I was desperate to get my foot in the door anywhere. I was also desperate to pay my rent. IBM have filled both those needs.

wtbob 11y ago

> If you have any options at all, why stay at a company with sub-par technology that abuses their workers? I used to work there, and I can say that it's a lot like an abusive marriage: IBM is really, really good at convincing one that the IT job market is a tough place (!), that one got really lucky getting a job with IBM, and that one could never find another job anywhere else (!), and that $70,000 is a great salary for a world-class technical talent (!!!). The sad thing is that there are so many smart, good people there, absolutely wasted in their positions. IBM could be an amazing, powerful company if it actually knew how to release the energy of its employees.

freehunter 11y ago

As someone who works at IBM currently: because they have the best technology in my area of expertise. Some of their tech in dying industries is sub-par, sure, but you're hard pressed to find a better security appliance than QRadar. Couple that with the many, many security acquisitions they've made over the last year or so, and it's easy to see why someone would go there and stay there for a few years. It's hard to say no when your coworker is Bruce Schneier, for example. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/resilient_syste_2.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/resilient_sys...