9 ms·

I'm happy to be harsh because I've had years and years of experience dealing with IBM. Their tools are trash for the cost they want. The majority of their offe

I'm happy to be harsh because I've had years and years of experience dealing with IBM. Their tools are trash for the cost they want. The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting. They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath. We ended up getting stuck with the IBM version of work item management, called Jazz Team Concert. From the "source control" to the actual setup and configuration, the product was a nightmare. The worst part was when we looked at license renewal. They wanted three quarters of a million dollars for something that was essentially dog shit wrapped in cat shit. In case you thought I might be on the fence with IBM, I'll add one final clarifying point: Fuck IBM.

nthcolumn 9y ago
Hey Willie I'm feeling some negative customer feedback here.
emmelaich 9y ago
Yeah, IBM (and Oracle, and SAP and ...) have always been like this. My own anecdote -- we had a need for a GIS/charting/mapping system. IBM responded to the RFP as did many others. IBM proposed an entire office automation system with a minor charting system hanging off the side somewhere. Most of the components were unfamiliar to everyone. Though maybe there was Wordperfect or Lotus Notes in there. I remember meetings with IBM always had whole bunch of shiny suits whereas more focussed proposals just had one or two people visit. After one or two rounds of pointless meetings our fairly technical director told them to go fuck off and never come back.
filereaper 9y ago
Hey man, you're not alone, even internal teams at IBM using Jazz Team Concert have been calling it "dog shit wrapped in cat shit" for years now. Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner. Not all of them have the power to influence other products and often times end up stuck with it and cannot move on to other tools (i.e git). More often than not, customers have higher priority on bugs than other teams dog-fooding the product. Its insane.
- objclxt 9y ago
  > Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner. I think you mean don't be so harsh on the people on the ground at IBM. If the issue is IBM's internal structure is fractured and disorganized then I think it's perfectly fair to blame the company.
- flukus 9y ago
  > Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner. Not all of them have the power to influence other products and often times end up stuck with it and cannot move on to other tools (i.e git). The do this so different divisions can lean on each other and benefit from the IBM brand name. If they want the benefits of this shared branding then the deserve the downsides from it too. I've noticed many companies recently thinking they can have it both ways (samsung and sony come to mind). Live by the brand, die by the brand!
Swizec 9y ago
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"
- throwaway91111 9y ago
  Please, let this quote be ironic.
  - bdamm 9y ago
    No, it's historic.
    - throwaway7645 9y ago
      No, it's current at many places.
  - sgift 9y ago
    It's a prevailing attitude in buying non-cheap ("enterprise") systems. If you buy one of the big names and it fails you can always say "they are a market leader, it was the best decision with the information we had available" - if you take a leap of faith for a not so well known name and the project fails it will probably cost you your job. People behave accordingly.
- MaysonL 9y ago
  And IBM often tried to get people fired for not buying IBM – a former colleague was once the CIO of the only Fortune 100 company that didn't have a corporate IBM mainframe (one or two of their subsidiaries did, but the conglomerate mother ship did not, only Univac). IBM had quite a few golfing conversations with the CEO trying to get him fired. [This was back in the '70s].
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - _jal 9y ago
    In the late 90s, the startup I worked for made a marketing deal with IBM. We were mostly running Sun hardware, I was in charge of IT purchasing. After I made it clear we would not be migrating to IBM hardware, they went after my job. The tradition was still going at that point.
blueside 9y ago
This sounds no different than my experience with some Oracle and SAP products that we had the unfortunate pleasure of supporting.
- odammit 9y ago
  Oracle's Responsys is definetly dog shit wrapped in cat shit. I hope you'll never had to deal with that dumpster fire.
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    Even just trying to install Oracle 11g correctly was hard. I think it expected to be installed in /usr/local and company procedures demanded that it was installed in /opt (or the other way around). For this it would consequently misplace some permissions on some of the files causing a later stage in the installer to fail and bork the installation.
    - staofbur 9y ago
      Back in about 1999, I was working for a big corporate and one of our Oracle admins lost her shit and had a meltdown, think it was around 8i era. She just got up and walked out shouting "fuck this fucking shit, I quit". This was on a freshly delivered HP N-Class HPUX box and they just couldn't get it to run after a month of going back and forth between HP and Oracle. I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London and she was still angry about it 17 years later! And that's what Oracle does to your soul :) Edit: that N class and Oracle NEVER got deployed in the end. It just sat there unused, licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity and it got chucked in a skip after 5 years. About £200k of expenditure down the pan.
      - reitanqild 9y ago
        licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity [...] About £200k of expenditure down the pan. I guess you could easily lost even more money. Good thing they stopped it at £200k.
deepGem 9y ago
What perplexes me is that none of these seem to affect their services business. 39 billion in services revenues is nothing to scoff at. I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services ? Do these units operate like two separate entities.
- sumedh 9y ago
  > I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services Wasn't there a saying that no one got fired for buying IBM.
  - Teever 9y ago
    Yeah, in like 1975.
    - sgift 9y ago
      Or 2017. Things may change, but not as fast as some people hope.
      - chii 9y ago
        if i ran a company, and the manager/*EO level personnel purchased IBM, i would've fired them.
        recursive 9y ago
        but you didn't, right?
  - 77pt77 9y ago
    It's used in real life in a non joking manner. I've seen it many times.
- hrktb 9y ago
  Traditionnaly at that scale, the people buying the product and the ones ending up using it are completely insulated by layers of bureaucracy. As long as the product can somewhat work, there won't be much repercussions for making shitty choices: the feedback won't go up enough or be ignored (as it is inconvenient)
77pt77 9y ago
>They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath. I have seen middle management say very clearly that no one was ever fired for choosing IBM.
taneq 9y ago
> The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting. What do you mean by 'over engineered' in this context? The usual way I've seen that term used would imply 'reliable but more expensive than necessary' rather than 'unreliable'.
- mahyarm 9y ago
  In software it sometimes means overcomplicated for the scope that delivers little value but high cost in usage due to the complexity. Think J2EE and their xml config files. Or using hadoop and kubernetes when a sqllite db on digital ocean will do
lewisl9029 9y ago
I remember hearing a lot of great things about Cloudant, which happens to be from IBM, on HN and elsewhere. Is that just a notable exception or are there better alternatives out there these days for hosted CouchDB?
- chipperyman573 9y ago
  Didn't IBM buy Cloudant? And wasn't it based off of an Apache application? Not saying it's not good (I've never used it), but IBM can't really get any credit for this. They just happen to have bought a decent product and now they sell it.
  - lewisl9029 9y ago
    Right, my intention by pointing out Cloudant wasn't to offer it as a counter-example (I personally have 0 experience with it), but rather to see if anyone might have some red flags to share, as I'm considering using Cloudant instead of hosting my own CouchDB instances for a new project I'm speccing out, and especially since nobody has mentioned it as a counter-example in this thread so far.
    - throwawaybbq1 9y ago
      Disclaimer: this is a throwaway account, and I used to work for IBM. I like Cloudant .. it is not too bad. In a recent project (after I left IBM), I needed to get a data tier up quickly and I actually used it for the initial POC. And yes, it was an acquisition by IBM. I was a bit worried that bluewashing would have made Cloudant crap but looks like they have managed to avoid it. The caveat I'd suggest is look closely at the pricing model. If you want QoS and scale, be careful of the pricing model. For small projects and projects that need fast completion (what project today doesn't?), it is actually very nice. You asked for caveats .. I think some of the language bindings were a bit out of date .. but since it uses REST calls, it wasn't too hard to bypass.
    - doublerebel 9y ago
      I've been using Cloudant for several years and it's been extremely reliable. Support is good and they have contributed a ton of open source code and docs back to the community. The communication has been transparent throughout the IBM acquisition process so I feel confident in continuing to start new projects on the platform. It's really easy (largely thanks to Cloudant) to host your own Couch instance but it's also really affordable to let them do it.
Jemm 9y ago
Canada's Federal Government payroll division would probably agree with you. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-pay-system-psac-campaign-1.3644351 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-pay-system-psac...
tthayer 9y ago
I get to use a transmogrified version of Jazz called IBM Control Desk. Literally dog shit.
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  At least it's not further wrapped in cat shit, I guess?
  - ucho 9y ago
    Now it is wrapped in "SmartCloud" instead. I am not sure if that is an improvement.
bradley-holt 9y ago
I work for IBM as a Developer Advocate, though my opinions here are my own. One of my goals as a Developer Advocate is to represent the shift in buying power from "non-technical management" (as you described it) to individual developers and other technical staff. If those who have to use or have to integrate with the software are a part of the decision making process, then I believe that this will result in better quality software. IBM is a very large company, with many different offerings. However, I think you'll see this shift towards a developer-focused mindset happening more-and-more within IBM over the next few years.
- sumoboy 9y ago
  Non-technicals for most corporations will always make the buying decisions because it's about $$$. There is IBM's fundamental problem, "next few years" which means we're guessing today and guessing tomorrow.
- squeaky-clean 9y ago
  This message has just as little substance as the other IBM employee's comment. Care to share any real examples of what > However, I think you'll see this shift towards a developer-focused mindset happening more-and-more within IBM over the next few years. means? In a discussion about not trusting IBM's marketing, you can't simply say "I hear you and it will get better, trust me."
  - pm90 9y ago
    What exactly do you expect him to say? Gimme a break. I don't work in the same role so I only know things from a 10,000 ft view. But a lot of orgs that IBM works with have inane bureaucratic structures with their in house devs pretty much at the bottom of the food chain, or in an "IT department". All decisions on using tech tools are made by "higher ups" a lot of whom have 0 technical background. We're trying to change this culture to one where devs get to make those decisions AFAIK. Disclosure: IBM dev, but not a Developer Advocate.
    - sumoboy 9y ago
ionised 9y ago
My first dev job was with a civil engineering consultancy that also built a suite of tools for hydraulic modelling, geo-spatioal and logging and telemetry use cases. We used the IBM ILOG JViews framework for a lot of our software and honestly it was a pain to use and clunky as hell. The worst thing though that was despite paying an inordinate amount of money to license this software each year and receive support for it they would not fix a bug we found in their mapping modules. Specifically it was their use of float for X and Y coordinates in the IlvPoint object that you pretty much had to use to make a map work with their tech. In certain parts of the world there is an extra digit on the Y coordinate (projections) and the float they insisted on using couldn't store the whole value, meaning they would just round it up or down causing inconsistencies between our representation of a client's dataand the client's representation. That was an absolute no-go for us and the workarounds IBM suggested to us were absurd and bordering on insulting honestly. We had a lot of trouble with our affected clients because of this and all we could tell them was that it was an IBM issue. The absolutely refused to fix their product and eventually sold it to Rogue Wave, washing their hands of it. By that point though we had already decided on a few alternatives lest we start to lose customers (who were essentially massive utility companies from around the globe). Fuck IBM.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
zaphod_ibm 9y ago
Thank you for your feedback. I work for IBM and would like to share the details with our product team so that we can improve. What were your issues with Jazz Team Concert and how do you think we can do better next time?

nthcolumn 9y ago

Hey Willie I'm feeling some negative customer feedback here.

emmelaich 9y ago

Yeah, IBM (and Oracle, and SAP and ...) have always been like this. My own anecdote -- we had a need for a GIS/charting/mapping system. IBM responded to the RFP as did many others. IBM proposed an entire office automation system with a minor charting system hanging off the side somewhere. Most of the components were unfamiliar to everyone. Though maybe there was Wordperfect or Lotus Notes in there. I remember meetings with IBM always had whole bunch of shiny suits whereas more focussed proposals just had one or two people visit. After one or two rounds of pointless meetings our fairly technical director told them to go fuck off and never come back.

filereaper 9y ago

Hey man, you're not alone, even internal teams at IBM using Jazz Team Concert have been calling it "dog shit wrapped in cat shit" for years now. Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner. Not all of them have the power to influence other products and often times end up stuck with it and cannot move on to other tools (i.e git). More often than not, customers have higher priority on bugs than other teams dog-fooding the product. Its insane.

objclxt 9y ago
> Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner. I think you mean don't be so harsh on the people on the ground at IBM. If the issue is IBM's internal structure is fractured and disorganized then I think it's perfectly fair to blame the company.
flukus 9y ago
> Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner. Not all of them have the power to influence other products and often times end up stuck with it and cannot move on to other tools (i.e git). The do this so different divisions can lean on each other and benefit from the IBM brand name. If they want the benefits of this shared branding then the deserve the downsides from it too. I've noticed many companies recently thinking they can have it both ways (samsung and sony come to mind). Live by the brand, die by the brand!

Swizec 9y ago

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"

throwaway91111 9y ago
Please, let this quote be ironic.
- bdamm 9y ago
  No, it's historic.
  - throwaway7645 9y ago
    No, it's current at many places.
- sgift 9y ago
  It's a prevailing attitude in buying non-cheap ("enterprise") systems. If you buy one of the big names and it fails you can always say "they are a market leader, it was the best decision with the information we had available" - if you take a leap of faith for a not so well known name and the project fails it will probably cost you your job. People behave accordingly.
MaysonL 9y ago
And IBM often tried to get people fired for not buying IBM – a former colleague was once the CIO of the only Fortune 100 company that didn't have a corporate IBM mainframe (one or two of their subsidiaries did, but the conglomerate mother ship did not, only Univac). IBM had quite a few golfing conversations with the CEO trying to get him fired. [This was back in the '70s].
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- _jal 9y ago
  In the late 90s, the startup I worked for made a marketing deal with IBM. We were mostly running Sun hardware, I was in charge of IT purchasing. After I made it clear we would not be migrating to IBM hardware, they went after my job. The tradition was still going at that point.

blueside 9y ago

This sounds no different than my experience with some Oracle and SAP products that we had the unfortunate pleasure of supporting.

odammit 9y ago
Oracle's Responsys is definetly dog shit wrapped in cat shit. I hope you'll never had to deal with that dumpster fire.
- reitanqild 9y ago
  Even just trying to install Oracle 11g correctly was hard. I think it expected to be installed in /usr/local and company procedures demanded that it was installed in /opt (or the other way around). For this it would consequently misplace some permissions on some of the files causing a later stage in the installer to fail and bork the installation.
  - staofbur 9y ago
    Back in about 1999, I was working for a big corporate and one of our Oracle admins lost her shit and had a meltdown, think it was around 8i era. She just got up and walked out shouting "fuck this fucking shit, I quit". This was on a freshly delivered HP N-Class HPUX box and they just couldn't get it to run after a month of going back and forth between HP and Oracle. I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London and she was still angry about it 17 years later! And that's what Oracle does to your soul :) Edit: that N class and Oracle NEVER got deployed in the end. It just sat there unused, licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity and it got chucked in a skip after 5 years. About £200k of expenditure down the pan.
    - reitanqild 9y ago
      licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity [...] About £200k of expenditure down the pan. I guess you could easily lost even more money. Good thing they stopped it at £200k.

deepGem 9y ago

What perplexes me is that none of these seem to affect their services business. 39 billion in services revenues is nothing to scoff at. I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services ? Do these units operate like two separate entities.

sumedh 9y ago
> I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services Wasn't there a saying that no one got fired for buying IBM.
- Teever 9y ago
  Yeah, in like 1975.
  - sgift 9y ago
    Or 2017. Things may change, but not as fast as some people hope.
    - chii 9y ago
      if i ran a company, and the manager/*EO level personnel purchased IBM, i would've fired them.
      - recursive 9y ago
        but you didn't, right?
- 77pt77 9y ago
  It's used in real life in a non joking manner. I've seen it many times.
hrktb 9y ago
Traditionnaly at that scale, the people buying the product and the ones ending up using it are completely insulated by layers of bureaucracy. As long as the product can somewhat work, there won't be much repercussions for making shitty choices: the feedback won't go up enough or be ignored (as it is inconvenient)

77pt77 9y ago

>They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath. I have seen middle management say very clearly that no one was ever fired for choosing IBM.

taneq 9y ago

> The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting. What do you mean by 'over engineered' in this context? The usual way I've seen that term used would imply 'reliable but more expensive than necessary' rather than 'unreliable'.

mahyarm 9y ago
In software it sometimes means overcomplicated for the scope that delivers little value but high cost in usage due to the complexity. Think J2EE and their xml config files. Or using hadoop and kubernetes when a sqllite db on digital ocean will do

lewisl9029 9y ago

I remember hearing a lot of great things about Cloudant, which happens to be from IBM, on HN and elsewhere. Is that just a notable exception or are there better alternatives out there these days for hosted CouchDB?

chipperyman573 9y ago
Didn't IBM buy Cloudant? And wasn't it based off of an Apache application? Not saying it's not good (I've never used it), but IBM can't really get any credit for this. They just happen to have bought a decent product and now they sell it.
- lewisl9029 9y ago
  Right, my intention by pointing out Cloudant wasn't to offer it as a counter-example (I personally have 0 experience with it), but rather to see if anyone might have some red flags to share, as I'm considering using Cloudant instead of hosting my own CouchDB instances for a new project I'm speccing out, and especially since nobody has mentioned it as a counter-example in this thread so far.
  - throwawaybbq1 9y ago
    Disclaimer: this is a throwaway account, and I used to work for IBM. I like Cloudant .. it is not too bad. In a recent project (after I left IBM), I needed to get a data tier up quickly and I actually used it for the initial POC. And yes, it was an acquisition by IBM. I was a bit worried that bluewashing would have made Cloudant crap but looks like they have managed to avoid it. The caveat I'd suggest is look closely at the pricing model. If you want QoS and scale, be careful of the pricing model. For small projects and projects that need fast completion (what project today doesn't?), it is actually very nice. You asked for caveats .. I think some of the language bindings were a bit out of date .. but since it uses REST calls, it wasn't too hard to bypass.
  - doublerebel 9y ago
    I've been using Cloudant for several years and it's been extremely reliable. Support is good and they have contributed a ton of open source code and docs back to the community. The communication has been transparent throughout the IBM acquisition process so I feel confident in continuing to start new projects on the platform. It's really easy (largely thanks to Cloudant) to host your own Couch instance but it's also really affordable to let them do it.

Jemm 9y ago

Canada's Federal Government payroll division would probably agree with you. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-pay-system-psac-campaign-1.3644351 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-pay-system-psac...

tthayer 9y ago

I get to use a transmogrified version of Jazz called IBM Control Desk. Literally dog shit.

mfoy_ 9y ago
At least it's not further wrapped in cat shit, I guess?
- ucho 9y ago
  Now it is wrapped in "SmartCloud" instead. I am not sure if that is an improvement.

bradley-holt 9y ago

I work for IBM as a Developer Advocate, though my opinions here are my own. One of my goals as a Developer Advocate is to represent the shift in buying power from "non-technical management" (as you described it) to individual developers and other technical staff. If those who have to use or have to integrate with the software are a part of the decision making process, then I believe that this will result in better quality software. IBM is a very large company, with many different offerings. However, I think you'll see this shift towards a developer-focused mindset happening more-and-more within IBM over the next few years.

sumoboy 9y ago
Non-technicals for most corporations will always make the buying decisions because it's about $$$. There is IBM's fundamental problem, "next few years" which means we're guessing today and guessing tomorrow.
squeaky-clean 9y ago
This message has just as little substance as the other IBM employee's comment. Care to share any real examples of what > However, I think you'll see this shift towards a developer-focused mindset happening more-and-more within IBM over the next few years. means? In a discussion about not trusting IBM's marketing, you can't simply say "I hear you and it will get better, trust me."
- pm90 9y ago
  What exactly do you expect him to say? Gimme a break. I don't work in the same role so I only know things from a 10,000 ft view. But a lot of orgs that IBM works with have inane bureaucratic structures with their in house devs pretty much at the bottom of the food chain, or in an "IT department". All decisions on using tech tools are made by "higher ups" a lot of whom have 0 technical background. We're trying to change this culture to one where devs get to make those decisions AFAIK. Disclosure: IBM dev, but not a Developer Advocate.
  - sumoboy 9y ago

ionised 9y ago

My first dev job was with a civil engineering consultancy that also built a suite of tools for hydraulic modelling, geo-spatioal and logging and telemetry use cases. We used the IBM ILOG JViews framework for a lot of our software and honestly it was a pain to use and clunky as hell. The worst thing though that was despite paying an inordinate amount of money to license this software each year and receive support for it they would not fix a bug we found in their mapping modules. Specifically it was their use of float for X and Y coordinates in the IlvPoint object that you pretty much had to use to make a map work with their tech. In certain parts of the world there is an extra digit on the Y coordinate (projections) and the float they insisted on using couldn't store the whole value, meaning they would just round it up or down causing inconsistencies between our representation of a client's dataand the client's representation. That was an absolute no-go for us and the workarounds IBM suggested to us were absurd and bordering on insulting honestly. We had a lot of trouble with our affected clients because of this and all we could tell them was that it was an IBM issue. The absolutely refused to fix their product and eventually sold it to Rogue Wave, washing their hands of it. By that point though we had already decided on a few alternatives lest we start to lose customers (who were essentially massive utility companies from around the globe). Fuck IBM.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

zaphod_ibm 9y ago

Thank you for your feedback. I work for IBM and would like to share the details with our product team so that we can improve. What were your issues with Jazz Team Concert and how do you think we can do better next time?