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This is not good for IBM indeed. As lots of people know that IBM gets 21 consecutive revenue decline and it's forced to cut down cost. But cutting down cost do
by github-cat 9y ago
This is not good for IBM indeed.
As lots of people know that IBM gets 21 consecutive revenue decline and it's forced to cut down cost. But cutting down cost doesn't mean you should shift your development work to under qualified developers or programmers. This will further affect IBM's software quality and hurt its revenue. Why not putting the money hiring less but good developers. If you are a developer, you would find what that feels like to work with under qualified developers.
To be honest, have you heard about any impressive software product or solution from IBM in recent years? I would blame this to a short-visioned management team. Maybe its management team is thinking they could hire more below averaged developers with the same money of hiring one good developer in hoping that quantity can cover quality. In fact that's totally wrong in technology field.
Moreover, those talented technical people are escaping because they are not getting what they deserved. The management team is investing far less in technical talents than in so-called business. The end result is that the product quality will become worse and worse and customers would finally give them up.
While other companies are attracting talented IT people by all means, IBM is lost and it's driving them away.
- samstave 9y agoI am just curious.. I havent purchased a single IBM roduct for maybe more than a decade (professionally and personally) -- the last major professional purchase was an AS/400 upgrade... 1998? I have never bought an IBM-->lenovo laptop, although I have been provisioned some in various jobs... What other main product(s) does IBM have that I would want? they have great eng resources, scientists, etc... but I just dont see any of my money headed their way any time soon...
- notyourwork 9y agoIBM is a massive consulting agency and they sell people's time and expertise to other companies. Customer projects, resource augmentation. Similar to Accenture and others.
- jstarfish 9y agoAs a consumer, probably nothing. But they still sell a lot of big iron to banks and FIs and try to shove QRadar down everyone's throat.
- github-cat 9y agoThose irons are only a small portion of IBM revenue now due to cloud. But they haven't put the correct resource on cloud and software. It was working in the past even though its software is very difficult to use. But now it's the other way around.
- ska 9y agoThey haven't done consumer stuff for ages. These days, IBM's competitors are companies like Deloitte, not Dell.
- kpil 9y agoMaybe DB/2 and Websphere liberty profile... They tack the name 'Watson' on a lot of stuff, but some of that might be good.
- github-cat 9y agoHave you tried to use DB2 or WebSphere? Do you feel painful when you install them?
- kpil 9y agoLiberty profile isn't exactly painful, but everything else Websphere is. Regarding DB/2, I don't think that the installation process is the most interesting property of a database. The database is about as good as you can get, but there are certainly other options. I tried installing WebSphere portal ten years ago for some reason and that killed my laptop. I'd say that that's probably the best possible outcome... Oh, and I think TAM/TFIM/ISAM might be ok for companies over a certain size. Not sure about their cloud offerings. Probably not promising.
- github-cat 9y agoThe problem is that you will fall behind if you cannot transform your research into real products. Just like the smart planet idea, this idea is very brilliant and it was proposed around a decade ago, however the business around is a failure because of execution failure. Nowadays we are seeing other companies working on smart planet while IBM is changing to cognitive. What can we expect from cognitive? Some personal thought, execution is key for business success now.
- amrrs 9y agoIBM SPSS is a product maybe not sure for you but IBM pushes a lot among Data Analytics Practitioners. They had their legacy in Market research companies. But democratisation of R and Python ate up a lot of market share from Sas and SPSS. Nevertheless still a lot of companies who used SPSS are still using it. It's an irony that IBM failed to capitalise the hype of Data science.
- arca_vorago 9y agoI have seen them pushing their vendor lock-in oriented BlueMix PAAS offering. More for dev than prod.
- skynetv2 9y ago> shift your development work to under qualified developers or programmers. How do you justify this blanket statement?
- kchoudhu 9y agoBecause I've worked with outsourced IBM tech.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- muninn_ 9y agoAnecdotes and generalizations are both useful tools for discussion as long as you recognize them and it’s understood what they are. Otherwise conversation would be largely impossible.
- wehadfun 9y agoI have been a close observer of code coming from India. I think the majority of the problems are because of vague, incomplete, and wrong requirements coming from the company that hired them. One company sent over someone. The guy spent a month talking to management, employees, probably the janitor and figured out what we actually wanted and the resulting code was decent.
- jakub_g 9y agoThis is part of the problem, and, in fact, part of the work of a software developer: given ambiguous and stupid requirements, you work with the customer to 1) make them clearer and 2) get rid of the unnecessary, complex requirements that do not bring any bussiness value. (My experience here shows though that it's not a standard thing in Indian culture to question the status quo). There's a lot of implicit requirements that need to be taken into account when writing code: maintainability, security, performance, user experience, accessibility etc. It's better if everything is explicitly stated, but we don't live in a perfect world unfortunately. (My experience here shows that those implicit requirements are often not well executed, particularly when it comes to front-end code, due to a mix of: lacking experience, time pressure, different UX sensibilities). Obviously, YMMV.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoIBM has been arguably lost in the woods since the mid 90s, it got worse when they took over a consulting company who then convinced them to optimize for short term profits. Then it just gets worse from there.
- snambi 9y agoA lot of assumptions and bias in the comment above. You are implying that more expensive means higher quality. Less expensive means lower quality. Both are not true. The truth is, "opensource software and cloud" disrupted IBM's business model of selling proprietary software that runs on IBM hardware and selling services to maintain these.
- github-cat 9y agoSorry, you misunderstood my point. My implication is that we should spent the money on the right people. For example, if we have budget of $10000, we can spend them hiring one/two good developers instead of hiring 4/5 below average developers.
- ktta 9y agoIt is possible one can hire better developers for a lower price in India than they would have to pay in the US.
- zeroxfe 9y agoThe (unconscious) bias here is via the assumption that one can't hire good developers in India.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- scholia 9y agoDo really good American developers actually want to work for IBM? Serious question....