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> I had thought that having superior IT infrastructure was one of the things that propelled Wal-Mart to success when it was not yet a giant. Tbh, of the two co

> I had thought that having superior IT infrastructure was one of the things that propelled Wal-Mart to success when it was not yet a giant. Tbh, of the two companies I know of that deal with Walmart IT...100% of the people in those two companies think Walmart IT is pretty inept and opaque.

kminehart 10y ago
I live in Bentonville and I can tell you it's a mess. They switch IT contractors every few years because each one agrees to more than it can handle to get the contract. Just recently, like 2012-2013, NCR had it. CompuCom made a killer deal which they couldn't actually afford and cut a lot of corners and provided shitty service because they didn't hire enough competent staff. CompuCom lost the contract to NCR again, so everyone in CompuCom got laid off. Now since Toshiba bought out IBM's "Retail Store Point-of-Sale Solutions Business", they also hired on their own support team, a lot of them were previous CompuCom employees. There's layers and layers and layers of tech support and bureaucracy, it's amazing anything ever gets fixed. Their inhouse service, "Information Service Desk", or "ISD" is full of people here on H1B visas, shoulder to shoulder in a huge building called the "David Glass Technology Center". There are no cubicles, just long rows of tiny tiny desks. It's a damn terrifying sight.
- earlz 10y ago
  I have a CS friend who just recently got hired for walmart (not sure on terminology, but he does some analytics stuff). Your account sounds pretty accurate to what he described, but add in a dollop of basically every technology that's ever existed and was ever popular at any point. He's been there a short time and already had to look into systems running on cobol, hadoop, oracle database, SQL Server, MySQL, Firebase, C, C++... Pretty much they hire contractors to implement any new project, and then hire H1-Bs to maintain it afterwards. He said his job is mostly managing H1-Bs, rather than actually writing code.
  - kminehart 10y ago
    At Toshiba I dealt with Java, C, and CBASIC. I've heard Cobol nightmares though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBASIC
- fweespeech 10y ago
  > I live in Bentonville and I can tell you it's a mess. They switch IT contractors every few years because each one agrees to more than it can handle to get the contract. > It's a damn terrifying sight. Yeah, I'm not surprised. Thank you for confirming my suspicions. :)

kminehart 10y ago

I live in Bentonville and I can tell you it's a mess. They switch IT contractors every few years because each one agrees to more than it can handle to get the contract. Just recently, like 2012-2013, NCR had it. CompuCom made a killer deal which they couldn't actually afford and cut a lot of corners and provided shitty service because they didn't hire enough competent staff. CompuCom lost the contract to NCR again, so everyone in CompuCom got laid off. Now since Toshiba bought out IBM's "Retail Store Point-of-Sale Solutions Business", they also hired on their own support team, a lot of them were previous CompuCom employees. There's layers and layers and layers of tech support and bureaucracy, it's amazing anything ever gets fixed. Their inhouse service, "Information Service Desk", or "ISD" is full of people here on H1B visas, shoulder to shoulder in a huge building called the "David Glass Technology Center". There are no cubicles, just long rows of tiny tiny desks. It's a damn terrifying sight.

earlz 10y ago
I have a CS friend who just recently got hired for walmart (not sure on terminology, but he does some analytics stuff). Your account sounds pretty accurate to what he described, but add in a dollop of basically every technology that's ever existed and was ever popular at any point. He's been there a short time and already had to look into systems running on cobol, hadoop, oracle database, SQL Server, MySQL, Firebase, C, C++... Pretty much they hire contractors to implement any new project, and then hire H1-Bs to maintain it afterwards. He said his job is mostly managing H1-Bs, rather than actually writing code.
- kminehart 10y ago
  At Toshiba I dealt with Java, C, and CBASIC. I've heard Cobol nightmares though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBASIC
fweespeech 10y ago
> I live in Bentonville and I can tell you it's a mess. They switch IT contractors every few years because each one agrees to more than it can handle to get the contract. > It's a damn terrifying sight. Yeah, I'm not surprised. Thank you for confirming my suspicions. :)