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A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

327 points by shelkie 9y ago

mcv 9y ago
It's not just IBM. Dutch government IT projects also have a tendency to fail big, and those are handled by other companies. It seems governments are easy marks for mediocre IT companies.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  From my experience it's mainly that governments don't have a lot of experts on staff so a lot of decision making gets outsourced too. I worked on a gov contract a long time ago and it was pretty obvious that there were several higher ups in government who added their own conflicting requirements to the list. Everybody in the trenches saw that they made things incredibly complex for no good reason but nobody pushed back. The main contractor was happy to sell many, many more hours and inside government there was nobody who had the ability to screen requirements for consistency and feasibility before giving them to the contractor. It's like dealing with any other service business like contracts, lawyers, wedding photographers or others. If you don't give them clear guidance the result will most likely be an expensive disaster.
  - mcv 9y ago
    Another problem with governments is that they're made up of dozens or hundreds of different organisations, and they all make these mistakes on their own. Even if one organisation gets it right, other parts of the government don't benefit from that expertise. I think governments should have a special organisation that just maintains the expertise for handling these sort of big projects all across the government.
    - empath75 9y ago
      You’d think so but then you just have one more organization that doesn’t share anything with anyone else.
      - mcv 9y ago
        That organisation would have as its only job to make sure all other government organisations get this right. It should be able to work when that's their only responsibility.
jusonchan 9y ago
Seems like a baseless article that is pulling fake facts out of thin air to supplement a couple of real ones like the cost basis and failures of large government projects. It's not uncommon for large government projects to fail with all the bureaucracy and politics that is in play. I am not saying IBM is great, but this article is just not worth it.
- Shoothe 9y ago
  I've used two services from IBM: Notes and node DB2 package. Both of them were pretty low quality, the db2 package was so unstable that it constantly segfaulted the entire node process. It's not fixed for years since the issue was reported with reproducible code. Needless to say I wouldn't recommend IBM even to my enemies. Can anyone share a good IBM experience? I'm honestly interested.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    Model M keyboard ftw.
    - eesmith 9y ago
      The argument from the linked-to piece is that "IBM is a hollow shell of what it once was". The Model M keyboard is from IBM 40+ years ago.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - blakesterz 9y ago
    They bought SoftLayer a few years ago and haven't ruined it. Not sure if that really counts or not, but I was really worried. I've been there for quite a few years, and nothing went downhill after they got bought.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
geogra4 9y ago
All of the big consultancy firms are bodyshops in some sense. But in my experience IBM is truly one of the worst. And people still keep falling for it.
joncrane 9y ago
Does anyone else remember the days when "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was true? You might pay a little extra, but it was never a total fail to use IBM products. I'm not sure when that changed, but I feel like these days, IBM is closer to Oracle than AWS.
- gargravarr 9y ago
  IBM has sold off most of their divisions - hardware to Lenovo, storage to Hitachi, etc. They no longer actually produce anything. So 'buying' IBM is no longer a real concept - they're pure consultants now, and consultants never 'sell' a product, just help you implement someone else's. A lovely legal distinction that they seem all too happy to abuse.
  - AlisdairO 9y ago
    > They no longer actually produce anything This is not true. IBM produces a ton of software (spanning a range from terrible to excellent, quality-wise). This is where much of their profit comes from now. They still produce a bunch of hardware, mostly at the higher (and legacy) end.
    - gargravarr 9y ago
      Okay, my bad.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- scottLobster 9y ago
  Clearly too many people remember. Shows the power of branding. IBM has largely moved out of the consumer space, and occasionally their research labs come out with some cool new tech (Watson and such). In the common consciousness they were the Apple of their day who then ascended out of the market to bigger, cooler things. As a result most people, including non-technical business execs who make purchasing decisions, don't have a good current frame of reference. IBM rode that facade for a while, it's only recently that their blunders have started hurting their reputation within the industry.
tootie 9y ago
I get why IT contracts can balloon in some cases, but I can't even fathom $1B for setting up PeopleSoft.
- gargravarr 9y ago
  Then again, it's Oracle. I'm sure their licensing department is attempting to track how many neurons in the brain are actively engaged when using their products and billing the customer accordingly.
thaumaturgy 9y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494387 (327 comments)
reaperducer 9y ago
The article criticizes the quality of some Indian coders. Expect to be downvoted into oblivion.
- frostburg 9y ago
  The footer about Slovakia / France / Germany is a lot more disturbing. Low-rent Indian coding shops being bad isn't news or racist.
  - danso 9y ago
    Yeah, I don't know much about Slovakia but the author's broad, unsupported generalizations of the country (Slovaks are very talented at mid-level service jobs: responsible and polite if not particularly fast-moving... Slovaks, particularly in the service industry, are astonishingly honest) don't inspire a lot of confidence. I was also surprised to see the author's use of "the Ukraine". I still remember someone at my college newspaper using that archaic phrase in an otherwise innocuous article and getting a very angry letter-to-the-editor about the history/politics of Russia and Ukraine, and that was more than a decade ago.
    - frostburg 9y ago
      Given the current situation re: Russia that's practically a dogwhistle.
    - henry_flower 9y ago
      > the author's broad, unsupported generalizations > surprised to see the author's use of "the Ukraine" heh just look up his linkedin; apparently he has spent his prime years working in Russia as some kind of tv producer there.
matte_black 9y ago
Is there any proof that the technical work for IBM is sent out to Indian boiler rooms with very high turnover? Or is this just based on some belief that any software in India must automatically be shitty?
- seemstoaddup 9y ago
  A while back i was in a hostel in England. I met someone who claimed they were an IBM consultant. After testing his technical prowess verbally there were a few holes but he was very apt. He seemed legit or he was able to fool me. I always wondered what an IBM consultant is doing in a hostel unless he is from India and he wanted to keep his cost down. England is pretty expensive. That is what i was doing. This doesn't mean he is ineffective at his job. It just means there was an Indian person claiming to be an IBM consultant while staying in a hostel. :)
- aluhut 9y ago
  I work for a global US company with offices throughout the world. They outsourced IT to IBM recently. Haven't had contact to anyone not from India. They were forced to put some IT guys in our office. Those are 2 kids working as cheap freelancers for a local subcontractor hired by IBM. Service is horrible. Tickets stacking up and being deleted regularly. Project relevant IT not working, people leaving because of it. It's a mess.
- kraig911 9y ago
  I worked for a firm that sold IBM products. We had a horde of developers in India. Is that the proof you want? Some teams there was particularly great. Other's not so much. Turnover though was EXTREMELY high.
- kumarvvr 9y ago
  I wouldn't agree with the high turnover part. Its as much as in other similar sized companies. Its just that most of my colleagues hate the software made by IBM, its slow, a pain to use and has a tendency to make things very very complicated. You cannot build great stuff with mediocre tools. The IT industry has moved on to leaner and simpler tools and platforms. IBM, atleast the GBS group, is basically a sales company. Note : I worked in IBM GBS for a year before I left for more interesting and rewarding jobs. This was in 2008 though.
sg0 9y ago
Well, this news that came out last year is somewhat relevant. MD Anderson Cancer Center's IBM Watson project failed, with $62 million paid to IBM and PwC for essentially no results. However, I don't blame IBM, I blame people who dove in without clearly thinking it through. https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-cancer-centers-ibm-watson-project-fails-journalism-related/ https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-cancer-...
- ebiester 9y ago
  We have all seen a project go wonky with requirements. However, I haven't heard of a successful product that IBM built/managed in the last decade. On the other hand, talking with friends in the government and government contracting, they argue that IBM and the major contractors have perfected the art of exploiting government into maximizing billable hours at the expense of results. It's a bit like the metaphorical malicious genie interpreting your request. It isn't possible to write specifications that can't be interpreted malevolently.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    It's been longer than a decade. See Taligent and WorkplaceOS.
  - sm64 9y ago
    IBM is likely the single largest government contractor in North America. Most governments at every level have contracted IBM for something, at some point. You don't hear about the successes because that's not news. That's just a government and contractor functioning as they should. Only large, expensive failures make the news.
zafiro17 9y ago
These stories of failure, but skew the reader simply because there are very few companies that can bid on and attempt to manage projects of this scale. This article could easily be written to focus on the failure of sweeping, enormous, poorly-thought out projects that suffer changing visions and scope, rotating project managers, and evolving systems ... that IBM happens to bid on and execute poorly. Small projects are better focused, cost less, are easier to understand, and therefore succeed more frequently (or fail more silently). It's big projects, frequently proposed and conceived by governments or enormous industrial conglomerates that are poorly thought-out, improperly managed, and suffer the worst of project management incompetence or hubris/excess. But who bids on that kind of project? Big companies like IBM. Let's be fair, they don't just bid on them, they also coax them into being, but my point stands: if you want to fail big, you've got to dream big. This isn't a defense of IBM, who deserves to own the shame of talking big but being unable to actually deliver. But it is a reminder that the project designers get equal blame for these sweeping, grandiose, visionary catastrophes.
- lopmotr 9y ago
  Sure. It's both to blame. I know plenty of small companies in other industries that refuse to do work that they expect to fail because they don't want to hurt their reputations. Those guys all probably didn't bid or dropped out when they saw it would fail.
Naga 9y ago
There's a dimension left out here on the Phoenix disaster: It wasn't really IBM's fault at all. The Canadian public service is really complex. There are multiple unions with multiple overlapping collective bargaining agreements, where the public service is allocated to different classes. These classes are paid specific rates, with retroactive pay being common for changing classes. The majority of the problems with Phoenix have been employees moving from their classes and being paid the correct amount. It has also adversely affected non-unionized positions. My understanding is that the Harper government (Prime Minister until 2015), who was responsible for the negotiation and for laying out the requirements, was trying to save a money and not responibly create a pay system. Two major factors that jump out at me: 1) Requirements did not call for training. The system was implemented and IBM was not required to train any operators on how the system functions, which is important because all new staff were hired to run the system and, 2) Due to the need for cost saving measures (the government was trying really hard to balance the budget, as the election was coming up), the previous payroll staff were terminated and a new payroll centre was opened in Miramichi, which is a small town in the middle of nowhere. So, on top of new software, the government lost all of its institutional knowledge regarding payroll and how things are supposed to work. It's actually hard to say how much of this is IBM's fault and how much is the governments, because the government doesn't know how to fix it. No one knows how Phoenix works and no one knows how it is supposed to work. It's just a big mess with no end in sight. Could IBM have done a better job? Probably, but garbage in, garbage out. For further reading, the Auditor-General's report: http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201711_01_e_42666.html http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201711_01...
- drieddust 9y ago
  As someone who works in same space, I can say this is happening because unrealistic expectations of customers are not challenged by bidding Vendors because they fear losing the project. This in turns happens because customer tries to outsmart vendors by pressing them for reducing the timelines to absolute impossible. If any vendor tries to play by the rules, they are thrown out. Smart vendors respond by crafting the contract smarty. Skipping training is one such example. It was crucial but .... In the end project is either canceled or goes over budged or barely manage to deliver anything.
hkmurakami 9y ago
With the recent demise of their stock, I wonder if we've finally reached an era where "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" will no longer be true.
jorblumesea 9y ago
If even 50% of this article is true, I feel less concerned about job security.
kraig911 9y ago
As someone who used to work in/on/underneath websphere. I can tell you I am loathe to even consider anything IBM. I was almost recruited by them and then I recalled how miserable I was on one particular project. The money was good but I said no. I recommend everyone I mean to stay away from IBM and Oracle as best I can. I just don't think the line between open source and enterprise is crystal clear anymore.
- blueside 9y ago
  As a general rule, if a work task lands on your desk that involves working with a IBM/Oracle/SAP product, preemptively apologize to those regularly around you for your miserable attitude in the near future.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    I'm not sure why Oracle is in the list. The databases are very expensive but they work well.
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      Probably due to their extremely shady business practices, first of them being bundling the JRE with crapware on Windows.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      When The Daily WTF was still maintained it reserved an entire section of the site for Oracle Database. It may rarely have catastrophic failures (although it's the second one I've seen most catastrophic failures, just after MySQL), but it is composed of one unreasonable choice after the other.
      - fphhotchips 9y ago
        What makes you say The Daily WTF isn't maintained?
alecco 9y ago
12 years ago some guy had the courage to report this predatory activity in Kuro5hin "How IBM Conned My Execs Out Of Millions" http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2005_9_27_95759_4240.html http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2005_9_27_95759_4240.html (cache) I remember the guy was harassed by IBM lawyers and even lost his job.
- protonfish 9y ago
  Yep - this is IBM's standard scam. I guess their branding is strong enough to obscure their history of catastrophic failure, to the VP level exec, at least.
linkmotif 9y ago
I really didn't understand this piece. Did anyone else struggle to follow it from sentence to sentence? Did this article really compare FreshBooks to the payroll needs of the Government of Canada? Whatt??
- le_zonzon 9y ago
  It was really badly written and difficult to follow, yes. Plus, many small typos.
- foliovision 9y ago
  Freshbooks has built from scratch two SAAS which have handled over $60 billion worth of invoices and expenses for over 10 million users. I'm suggesting that Mike McDerment could build and lead a team who would successfully build a payroll system for the Government of Canada for far less than a billion dollars. IBM has not built a working payroll system (despite starting with Oracle's Peoplesoft for that money). I suspect my company (or some of our best competitors) could build a working payroll system for about $50 million based on our success on smaller projects. Our specialty however is in publishing systems and online video. I'm specifically recommending Freshbooks as McDerment has a background in creating accounting and billing systems and scaling them. Additionally, as a Canadian, McDerment is already familiar with many of the variables to do with Canadian tax and employment legislation and geography. Any foreigner would need three to six months to assimilate Canada specific information. I also don't suggest that IBM could not have built this payroll system satisfactorily. Based on failed projects in Canada, Australia, Pennsylvania and Slovenia, big promises, poor delivery, unlimited billing and zero liability on government projects appears to be strategic policy (links to each of those projects appear in a new preface to my article). Such behaviour has made Big Blue billions.
  - linkmotif 9y ago
    > Freshbooks has built from scratch two SAAS which have handled over $60 billion worth of invoices and expenses for over 10 million users. Right but those transactions have all been more or less the same type of vanilla invoicing. Unless something has really changed in Freshbooks, that’s an app that handles very specific relatively simple needs. The government of Canada is a giant entity that is most seriously orders of mangnitude different and complex than any usecase for FreshBooks, and that’s just the reality. > I'm suggesting that Mike McDerment could build and lead a team who would successfully build a payroll system for the Government of Canada for far less than a billion dollars. Maybe, but probably not. The real problem is probably that the business needs of the government of Canada are not well defined and the bureaucrats cannot define them. The comparison to FreshBooks is just so off because it’s totally upside down. FreshBooks was built and provides certain functionality. Building a payroll system for The government of Canada is an exercise in reverse engineering the Government of Canada. It’s an exercise in squaring hundreds of not thousands of different circles and making them fit into a box.
expertentipp 9y ago
Global American consultancies are paying 25-40k USD annually in post-Communist EU countries. The teams are run as little dictatures by the "directors" who are facing the outside world. What are you expecting to extract from such arrangement? BTW There is no place for IBM in Germany, they have their own three-letter named IT moloch.
bartread 9y ago
It's not just IBM: any of the larger enterprise consultancies should, at best, be regarded with suspicion. I well remember the EDS/UK Inland Revenue fiasco of the late nineties/early noughties, and there are plenty of other examples involving other big players.
- zokier 9y ago
  If you think that all big consultancies fail so equally, then doesn't that hint strongly that maybe, just maybe, the issues are on the other side?
  - bartread 9y ago
    Well, I'd be lying if I suggested I had an overabundance of respect for large consultancies, but actually I don't think it's so simple in either direction. Consultancies mis-sell and misrepresent their services, whilst public service/government scopes the project poorly and is more than happy to buy into the fantasy. Every project is different so this is still an oversimplification. Nevertheless, when an enterprise IT service provider is involved in a project it's often a red flag on successful delivery. Whether that's correlation or causation is up for debate.
  - harry8 9y ago
    No. No really. The issues on the other side are the opportunity ibm, accenture, oracle etc exploit. They're not just aware of those issues going in, they are 100% counting on them. They're not even interested unless those issues exist - it's one or two orders of magnitude less profit. In fact you can say that those issues are why these consultancies get hired in the first place. No competent manager would go near these carpet baggers. You can blame the marks for being marks and say they deserve it (tax payers) but this has nothing to do with IBM being a con. A con they are. If they don't like that reputation they shouldn't do it, again and again. But it's so profitable it pays for the PR to restore reputation up to a point. We've now got that point. No PR can cover the stench. IBM - only an idiot or the corrupt on kickbacks would engage them to con.
RachelF 9y ago
There are very similar stories from Australia, with IBM being sued for being late on major (billion dollar) government projects and releasing products that just don't work. IBM produced a $1.2 billion payroll project for Queensland heath that just never worked.
- guidedlight 9y ago
  This is mentioned in the article. NZ also had a disastrous police database project fail that was managed by IBM.
seemstoaddup 9y ago
This is an interesting narrative. However it cannot be the only one. Let us explore some alternatives and side notes. Who was responsible for picking IBM? Are they still working for the CA gov? Have they passed the hot potato to someone else? How were their technical skills and soft skills evaluated? Did they receive any donations for the contract? Where are the safety clauses in the contract? Is IBM the only benefactor of this contract? Any political implications? Remember that Gov. point person also bears a lot of the responsibility for shopping for IT services in a magazine or trough their business network. If IBM has been so ineffective at delivering services there would be more cases like this and it would ultimately hurt their bottom line. If this was wide spread practice across their business units. Maybe their business as a whole is insulated by the other better performing parts of it's corporation. It seems to me that these "Governments" should investigate anyone who touched these contracts. To the widespread corruption present in Eastern Europe. It does exist. However this article goes to show that corruption is present at a larger scale in some of the "most" developed nations on earth.
- na85 9y ago
  Because government contracts have to be transparent, the award process tends to be overly bureaucratic and algorithmic. There's no real mechanism with which the Canadian government could bar IBM from bidding, and they're obliged to take the best bid. Usually this is lowest cost per rated point, scored against a large matrix of must-haves and nice-to-haves that are assigned weights.
  - seemstoaddup 9y ago
    Sounds like the system is set up in such a way as to deliver a under-performing product. Especially if it optimizes for "lowest cost per rated point". Quality things require significant investment. No wonder IBM has to go get developers outside of the US/CA/AU if they were the lowest bid. Now it all fits together. Whenever i go to my states web services and they look odd. I now know why. That is changing though.
    - 794CD01 9y ago
AzzieElbab 9y ago
IBM is a horrible vendor, but the author is obviously clueless about the levels of incompetence, irresponsibility and indecisiveness of the stakeholders on client side for this kind of projects. All governmens should simply always pick the cheapest vendor because 90% of their projects fail regardless of who the implementers are
- RobLach 9y ago
  They did pick the cheapest. IBM was the only bidder.
throw7 9y ago
I'm hesitant to just blame IBM and call it the day. What about the U.S. healthcare.gov website? Do we also blame CGI Federal and Accenture? There's probably blame on both sides, but it seems nowadays that "it needs to be a roaring dumpster fire until we do things the right way". Unfortunately, either no one _in_ government seems competent to know that right way or be empowered enough to fight for it (maybe they've all left).
- ebiester 9y ago
  It's a combined issue: the big players have perfected the "malevolent genie" process: bid low, then take every requirement and find the way to extract the most billable hours and change requests from it. On the government side, many of them realize they're playing a losing game, but they don't have the resources to change the system, and it's not a priority for people to get elected, so congress doesn't step in. (And would they know enough to do so?)
- empath75 9y ago
  All things considered, healthcare.gov wasn’t that bad. Having to scale to the size of the entire country on day one is a hard-to-impossible task and the managed to recover impressively quickly.
  - SyneRyder 9y ago
    Didn't they recover by hiring a completely different team to rebuild the entire site from scratch? "Here is the tl;dr version of their story: Marketplace Lite, or “MPL” as they came to be known, devoted months to rewriting Healthcare.gov functions in full, working as a startup within the government and replacing contractor-made apps with ones costing one-fiftieth of the price." https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-s...
tptacek 9y ago
Historically Slovakia gets lumped with Eastern Europe in popular perception - Slovakia is nothing like Romania, the Ukraine, Albania or even Poland in turning out petty criminals or promiscuous online fraudsters. Not to forget Western Europe, France has a far more unhealthy work culture and fraud at work and as a way of living is far more acceptable than in Slovakia. Germany and Austria tend to value probity far more highly than the Mediterranean countries. Hundreds of years of late Roman Empire corruption left an undying footprint. This attitude is shot through the whole piece (essentializing not just Europeans but also Indians), and it's weird and creepy.
- alexk 9y ago
  Thanks for calling this out. I think we should do more of it on HN (and everywhere else). People should try harder to decouple their biases from facts especially in their public writing.
  - Mizza 9y ago
    I'll play devil's advocate here: I actually greatly prefer when people expose their biases early on rather than try to hide them through weaselly or bland language. I think immediate total aversion to nationally biased language is a specifically American trait (and left-coast American at that) - as the result of contemporary cultural conditioning and general lack of exposure to international identities. Europeans are more comfortable with it as it happens more there, there is much more international exchange, and as a result, people can be given the benefit of the doubt by default, in the sense that "oh, I know that when the author says Slovakian culture, he obviously doesn't mean every single individual Slovakian person, but rather his perception of the traits of their culture as a whole."
    - danso 9y ago
      If Europeans are more exposed than Americans to folks of different nationalities, wouldn't they be less inclined to broadly generalize them? No one would accuse the author of meaning to judge "every single individual Slovakian person". It's ironic that you state your dislike of "weaselly or bland language", and then go on to describe the author as having a "perception of the traits of their culture as a whole". Most people would describe that as simply having stereotypes.
devit 9y ago
Can anyone explain what's so complex about a "payroll system"? Presumably you just have a table with people with salary, and every month you wire the money and record information about the wire or otherwise have a way to record when the person has taken cash. You might want to have more complex rules for determining schedule and amount of salaries, and support for contractors, unpaid leave, taxes, etc. but that doesn't seem particulary complex either. How can this possibly take more than 100 person-years (i.e. < $30 million) to make even a truly extravagant version of? Not to mention that presumably such software already exists and could be used instead of writing a new one. [obviously my explanation would be corruption, but I wonder if I miss something]
- gerbilly 9y ago
  Remembering and tracking all the agreements made with workers and unions going back decades and handling the cases where workers change jobs and union designations (or even move from one union to another). There are thousands of byzantine rules in the contracts and agreements, some mutually contradictory. The old code likely contained a lot of business logic that represented an institutional memory of how to handle all these corner cases. Anyone wishing to reimplement a system like that will have to rediscover these corner cases one at a time in production, while thousands of people complain that their paycheque is short. Then there are also pensions to keep track of etc...
  - Chyzwar 9y ago
    That why you should start small but cover most common cases first. Then gradually work on policies to simplify byzantine rules. Retrain some people and keep internal dev team. IBM promised a big bang that would be finished before the election. What could possibly go wrong? I think that there is a positive aspect. Other governments will learn from mistakes when ordering expensive projects like this.
- wvanbergen 9y ago
  Start by reading this: http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard
wooshy 9y ago
I'd imagine this is common with all large IT consultancy services. I had bad experiences with IBM as well as TCS.
oh_sigh 9y ago
Is there a breakdown of where the $780M went? As in, how much to engineer salaries, how much for hardware, operational support, etc? I have a really hard time wrapping my mind around a project that expensive
mcguire 9y ago
Shhhh! Many of us work in these kinds of industries.
zeristor 9y ago
IBM: I've Been Mugged
Paperweight 9y ago
"Nobody who could ever get fired would buy IBM."
sundvor 9y ago
Oh, but the con-census is that they did such a brilliant job in Australia! http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-in-compensation-for-census-fail/8057240 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-i... http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and-on-could-have-prevented-census-outage/7963916 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and...
- SyneRyder 9y ago
  Indeed, some Australian states actually have a ban on government agencies contracting out to IBM: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-420969 https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-... The quote from Queensland's Premier at the time of the ban: “I don’t want companies that have this sort of culture doing work for the people of this state.”
xab9 9y ago
Wife worked for them as sales something, sometimes I saw the tools she had been using, couple of presentations - real nightmare fuel. I remember once talking about how they (big blue) see Atlassian as a competitor and how they have to try harder to convince companies to use IBM products... the very moment someone replaced Jira with some IBM shit or Gmail Business or even Outlook with Lotus Notes I would quit.
- kumarvvr 9y ago
  Not trying to defend IBM here, but as a one time Lotus Notes dev, I can assure you that LN is not just an email program, but a whole platform that enables you to build workflow apps very very quickly. Not unlike sharepoint, but the catch being that it worked best from the LN client rather than the browser. When I worked for IBM Global Business Service div as a dev, most of our payroll, billing, travel approvals and what not were done on LN. IIRC email was just another app on the platform.
jimjimjim 9y ago
If you've never worked for a team responding to RFPs/RFIs for large projects then it's difficult to know what's mismanagement and what's "normal". Generally you respond with a proposal that on the surface ticks ALL the boxes. Later you show the proposed product and state that all the missing parts will be implemented or altered during implementation. You get a bunch of senior people or architects to estimate the work +/- 1000% (mostly for the time estimates). The difference between what is charged to the customer and the actual cost of the work is swallowed by the bidder with the idea that it will be gouged back during additional work that wasn't in the initial scope. Then you present your proposal and if you win the bid you then try everything to make it profitable from that point on. ps. None of this is compatible with agile.
bastawhiz 9y ago
If you're struggling to read the text like I am, setting the `font-weight` to 400 (instead of 300) makes the page infinitely more readable.
- foliovision 9y ago
  Thanks for the input. Personally my own bugbear in terms of web readability is contrast ratios in "modern" web design. I didn't realise that font-weight could give people such issues. I'll think about changing font-weight soon as good design is about making information more readable and not less.
Lazare 9y ago
> IBM instead sold the Canadian government someone else's software (Oracle's Peoplesoft) on a sweetheart contract which did not require delivery of a working solution. Okay, so Canada signed a bad contract and didn't make IBM promise to delivery the goods. > In cases like this in the past, the Canadian Government would just be able to tell IBM to deliver the goods as promised or IBM would be banned from doing business in Canada - effectively frozen. But you just got done telling us that IBM didn't promise to deliver the goods. > Under NAFTA and similar trade pacts, governments have lost all leverage and these sweetheart deals continue to be pushed through. NAFTA and similar trade agreements neither require governments to sign contracts that don't require delivery of working solutions, not require governments to not sue to enforce contract terms once signed. If IBM broke the contract terms, Canada can sue. But if Canada signed a really dumb contract, there's a number of remedies here, but violating the contract terms and just demanding other parties do things they have no obligation to do to make up for your mistake doesn't seem like a good choice. You know, "rule of law" and all that? > Why should the Canadian taxpayer foot the bills for corrupt contracts with devious suppliers? The They shouldn't. But, well, was it corrupt? Prove it in court, and the contract can be voided. NAFTA won't stop that either. If you can't prove it in court, they maybe it was just dumb (and not bribery), in which case yes, the taxpayers should foot the bill. If they don't like it, they can vote in a better government. That's democracy.
PeterStuer 9y ago
I you think this is an 'IBM' only problem, you're in for a surprise. I've worked on very large projects with other very large service companies, and the experience is very much alike. From day one the client company gets swamped by an army of vendor analysts, the prime reason for this is to establish that it is the clients fault the project will fail as they couldn't respond to requests for information fast enough. Any information you manage to supply will be scrutinized for 'discovery' of 'change requests' to pad the meters and CYA. Meanwhile, a 'technical specialist' room chock full of developers is installed to (a) put on extra time pressure and (b) start the billing engine in top gear. When you went into that room there were literally people sitting at desks watching the vendor's equivalent of CS 101 video courses. Also, a team of lawyers is already preparing the documents for the 'settlement' in case of the (very likely) project failure. All status information to the project's steering committee gets 'green shifted' until the supplier is ready to shift to litigation mode and then overnight the project's near unrecoverable disaster gets revealed alongside a proposed 'rescue' plan that is priced so ridiculously it makes the 'settlement' look cheap. In the private sector these train-wrecks are often settled with non-publish clauses as making the press would make both parties look bad. In our case the supplier dropped a small percentage on the billing. The client was left with a room (literally) full of boxes of A4 'analysis' documents and 25M€ out of pocket. (this was in the financial industry, so it was basically pocket change) All involved, both supplier side and customer side seem to have not suffered career wise from this disaster, moving swiftly to new clients and new projects. P.S. Am I the only one that finds the author's sweeping generalizations of nationalities a bit in bad taste?
sidcool 9y ago
It's sad that a lot of blame comes to the low skilled programmers in India. It may be true, but it's sad.
webninja 9y ago
“IBM instead sold the Canadian government someone else's software (Oracle's Peoplesoft) on a sweetheart contract which did not require delivery of a working solution. Then IBM failed to successfully implement while taking payment all the way along.” So they outsourced the work to Oracle which is known to churn out garbage. Also just a lot of blame shifting between garbage-quality companies.

327 points by shelkie 9y ago

mcv 9y ago

It's not just IBM. Dutch government IT projects also have a tendency to fail big, and those are handled by other companies. It seems governments are easy marks for mediocre IT companies.

maxxxxx 9y ago
From my experience it's mainly that governments don't have a lot of experts on staff so a lot of decision making gets outsourced too. I worked on a gov contract a long time ago and it was pretty obvious that there were several higher ups in government who added their own conflicting requirements to the list. Everybody in the trenches saw that they made things incredibly complex for no good reason but nobody pushed back. The main contractor was happy to sell many, many more hours and inside government there was nobody who had the ability to screen requirements for consistency and feasibility before giving them to the contractor. It's like dealing with any other service business like contracts, lawyers, wedding photographers or others. If you don't give them clear guidance the result will most likely be an expensive disaster.
- mcv 9y ago
  Another problem with governments is that they're made up of dozens or hundreds of different organisations, and they all make these mistakes on their own. Even if one organisation gets it right, other parts of the government don't benefit from that expertise. I think governments should have a special organisation that just maintains the expertise for handling these sort of big projects all across the government.
  - empath75 9y ago
    You’d think so but then you just have one more organization that doesn’t share anything with anyone else.
    - mcv 9y ago
      That organisation would have as its only job to make sure all other government organisations get this right. It should be able to work when that's their only responsibility.

jusonchan 9y ago

Seems like a baseless article that is pulling fake facts out of thin air to supplement a couple of real ones like the cost basis and failures of large government projects. It's not uncommon for large government projects to fail with all the bureaucracy and politics that is in play. I am not saying IBM is great, but this article is just not worth it.

Shoothe 9y ago
I've used two services from IBM: Notes and node DB2 package. Both of them were pretty low quality, the db2 package was so unstable that it constantly segfaulted the entire node process. It's not fixed for years since the issue was reported with reproducible code. Needless to say I wouldn't recommend IBM even to my enemies. Can anyone share a good IBM experience? I'm honestly interested.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  Model M keyboard ftw.
  - eesmith 9y ago
    The argument from the linked-to piece is that "IBM is a hollow shell of what it once was". The Model M keyboard is from IBM 40+ years ago.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- blakesterz 9y ago
  They bought SoftLayer a few years ago and haven't ruined it. Not sure if that really counts or not, but I was really worried. I've been there for quite a few years, and nothing went downhill after they got bought.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

geogra4 9y ago

All of the big consultancy firms are bodyshops in some sense. But in my experience IBM is truly one of the worst. And people still keep falling for it.

joncrane 9y ago

Does anyone else remember the days when "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was true? You might pay a little extra, but it was never a total fail to use IBM products. I'm not sure when that changed, but I feel like these days, IBM is closer to Oracle than AWS.

gargravarr 9y ago
IBM has sold off most of their divisions - hardware to Lenovo, storage to Hitachi, etc. They no longer actually produce anything. So 'buying' IBM is no longer a real concept - they're pure consultants now, and consultants never 'sell' a product, just help you implement someone else's. A lovely legal distinction that they seem all too happy to abuse.
- AlisdairO 9y ago
  > They no longer actually produce anything This is not true. IBM produces a ton of software (spanning a range from terrible to excellent, quality-wise). This is where much of their profit comes from now. They still produce a bunch of hardware, mostly at the higher (and legacy) end.
  - gargravarr 9y ago
    Okay, my bad.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
scottLobster 9y ago
Clearly too many people remember. Shows the power of branding. IBM has largely moved out of the consumer space, and occasionally their research labs come out with some cool new tech (Watson and such). In the common consciousness they were the Apple of their day who then ascended out of the market to bigger, cooler things. As a result most people, including non-technical business execs who make purchasing decisions, don't have a good current frame of reference. IBM rode that facade for a while, it's only recently that their blunders have started hurting their reputation within the industry.

tootie 9y ago

I get why IT contracts can balloon in some cases, but I can't even fathom $1B for setting up PeopleSoft.

gargravarr 9y ago
Then again, it's Oracle. I'm sure their licensing department is attempting to track how many neurons in the brain are actively engaged when using their products and billing the customer accordingly.

thaumaturgy 9y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494387 (327 comments)

reaperducer 9y ago

The article criticizes the quality of some Indian coders. Expect to be downvoted into oblivion.

frostburg 9y ago
The footer about Slovakia / France / Germany is a lot more disturbing. Low-rent Indian coding shops being bad isn't news or racist.
- danso 9y ago
  Yeah, I don't know much about Slovakia but the author's broad, unsupported generalizations of the country (Slovaks are very talented at mid-level service jobs: responsible and polite if not particularly fast-moving... Slovaks, particularly in the service industry, are astonishingly honest) don't inspire a lot of confidence. I was also surprised to see the author's use of "the Ukraine". I still remember someone at my college newspaper using that archaic phrase in an otherwise innocuous article and getting a very angry letter-to-the-editor about the history/politics of Russia and Ukraine, and that was more than a decade ago.
  - frostburg 9y ago
    Given the current situation re: Russia that's practically a dogwhistle.
  - henry_flower 9y ago
    > the author's broad, unsupported generalizations > surprised to see the author's use of "the Ukraine" heh just look up his linkedin; apparently he has spent his prime years working in Russia as some kind of tv producer there.

matte_black 9y ago

Is there any proof that the technical work for IBM is sent out to Indian boiler rooms with very high turnover? Or is this just based on some belief that any software in India must automatically be shitty?

seemstoaddup 9y ago
A while back i was in a hostel in England. I met someone who claimed they were an IBM consultant. After testing his technical prowess verbally there were a few holes but he was very apt. He seemed legit or he was able to fool me. I always wondered what an IBM consultant is doing in a hostel unless he is from India and he wanted to keep his cost down. England is pretty expensive. That is what i was doing. This doesn't mean he is ineffective at his job. It just means there was an Indian person claiming to be an IBM consultant while staying in a hostel. :)
aluhut 9y ago
I work for a global US company with offices throughout the world. They outsourced IT to IBM recently. Haven't had contact to anyone not from India. They were forced to put some IT guys in our office. Those are 2 kids working as cheap freelancers for a local subcontractor hired by IBM. Service is horrible. Tickets stacking up and being deleted regularly. Project relevant IT not working, people leaving because of it. It's a mess.
kraig911 9y ago
I worked for a firm that sold IBM products. We had a horde of developers in India. Is that the proof you want? Some teams there was particularly great. Other's not so much. Turnover though was EXTREMELY high.
kumarvvr 9y ago
I wouldn't agree with the high turnover part. Its as much as in other similar sized companies. Its just that most of my colleagues hate the software made by IBM, its slow, a pain to use and has a tendency to make things very very complicated. You cannot build great stuff with mediocre tools. The IT industry has moved on to leaner and simpler tools and platforms. IBM, atleast the GBS group, is basically a sales company. Note : I worked in IBM GBS for a year before I left for more interesting and rewarding jobs. This was in 2008 though.

sg0 9y ago

Well, this news that came out last year is somewhat relevant. MD Anderson Cancer Center's IBM Watson project failed, with $62 million paid to IBM and PwC for essentially no results. However, I don't blame IBM, I blame people who dove in without clearly thinking it through. https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-cancer-centers-ibm-watson-project-fails-journalism-related/ https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-cancer-...

ebiester 9y ago
We have all seen a project go wonky with requirements. However, I haven't heard of a successful product that IBM built/managed in the last decade. On the other hand, talking with friends in the government and government contracting, they argue that IBM and the major contractors have perfected the art of exploiting government into maximizing billable hours at the expense of results. It's a bit like the metaphorical malicious genie interpreting your request. It isn't possible to write specifications that can't be interpreted malevolently.
- mcguire 9y ago
  It's been longer than a decade. See Taligent and WorkplaceOS.
- sm64 9y ago
  IBM is likely the single largest government contractor in North America. Most governments at every level have contracted IBM for something, at some point. You don't hear about the successes because that's not news. That's just a government and contractor functioning as they should. Only large, expensive failures make the news.

zafiro17 9y ago

These stories of failure, but skew the reader simply because there are very few companies that can bid on and attempt to manage projects of this scale. This article could easily be written to focus on the failure of sweeping, enormous, poorly-thought out projects that suffer changing visions and scope, rotating project managers, and evolving systems ... that IBM happens to bid on and execute poorly. Small projects are better focused, cost less, are easier to understand, and therefore succeed more frequently (or fail more silently). It's big projects, frequently proposed and conceived by governments or enormous industrial conglomerates that are poorly thought-out, improperly managed, and suffer the worst of project management incompetence or hubris/excess. But who bids on that kind of project? Big companies like IBM. Let's be fair, they don't just bid on them, they also coax them into being, but my point stands: if you want to fail big, you've got to dream big. This isn't a defense of IBM, who deserves to own the shame of talking big but being unable to actually deliver. But it is a reminder that the project designers get equal blame for these sweeping, grandiose, visionary catastrophes.

lopmotr 9y ago
Sure. It's both to blame. I know plenty of small companies in other industries that refuse to do work that they expect to fail because they don't want to hurt their reputations. Those guys all probably didn't bid or dropped out when they saw it would fail.

Naga 9y ago

There's a dimension left out here on the Phoenix disaster: It wasn't really IBM's fault at all. The Canadian public service is really complex. There are multiple unions with multiple overlapping collective bargaining agreements, where the public service is allocated to different classes. These classes are paid specific rates, with retroactive pay being common for changing classes. The majority of the problems with Phoenix have been employees moving from their classes and being paid the correct amount. It has also adversely affected non-unionized positions. My understanding is that the Harper government (Prime Minister until 2015), who was responsible for the negotiation and for laying out the requirements, was trying to save a money and not responibly create a pay system. Two major factors that jump out at me: 1) Requirements did not call for training. The system was implemented and IBM was not required to train any operators on how the system functions, which is important because all new staff were hired to run the system and, 2) Due to the need for cost saving measures (the government was trying really hard to balance the budget, as the election was coming up), the previous payroll staff were terminated and a new payroll centre was opened in Miramichi, which is a small town in the middle of nowhere. So, on top of new software, the government lost all of its institutional knowledge regarding payroll and how things are supposed to work. It's actually hard to say how much of this is IBM's fault and how much is the governments, because the government doesn't know how to fix it. No one knows how Phoenix works and no one knows how it is supposed to work. It's just a big mess with no end in sight. Could IBM have done a better job? Probably, but garbage in, garbage out. For further reading, the Auditor-General's report: http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201711_01_e_42666.html http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201711_01...

drieddust 9y ago
As someone who works in same space, I can say this is happening because unrealistic expectations of customers are not challenged by bidding Vendors because they fear losing the project. This in turns happens because customer tries to outsmart vendors by pressing them for reducing the timelines to absolute impossible. If any vendor tries to play by the rules, they are thrown out. Smart vendors respond by crafting the contract smarty. Skipping training is one such example. It was crucial but .... In the end project is either canceled or goes over budged or barely manage to deliver anything.

hkmurakami 9y ago

With the recent demise of their stock, I wonder if we've finally reached an era where "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" will no longer be true.

jorblumesea 9y ago

If even 50% of this article is true, I feel less concerned about job security.

kraig911 9y ago

As someone who used to work in/on/underneath websphere. I can tell you I am loathe to even consider anything IBM. I was almost recruited by them and then I recalled how miserable I was on one particular project. The money was good but I said no. I recommend everyone I mean to stay away from IBM and Oracle as best I can. I just don't think the line between open source and enterprise is crystal clear anymore.

blueside 9y ago
As a general rule, if a work task lands on your desk that involves working with a IBM/Oracle/SAP product, preemptively apologize to those regularly around you for your miserable attitude in the near future.
- user5994461 9y ago
  I'm not sure why Oracle is in the list. The databases are very expensive but they work well.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    Probably due to their extremely shady business practices, first of them being bundling the JRE with crapware on Windows.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    When The Daily WTF was still maintained it reserved an entire section of the site for Oracle Database. It may rarely have catastrophic failures (although it's the second one I've seen most catastrophic failures, just after MySQL), but it is composed of one unreasonable choice after the other.
    - fphhotchips 9y ago
      What makes you say The Daily WTF isn't maintained?

alecco 9y ago

12 years ago some guy had the courage to report this predatory activity in Kuro5hin "How IBM Conned My Execs Out Of Millions" http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2005_9_27_95759_4240.html http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2005_9_27_95759_4240.html (cache) I remember the guy was harassed by IBM lawyers and even lost his job.

protonfish 9y ago
Yep - this is IBM's standard scam. I guess their branding is strong enough to obscure their history of catastrophic failure, to the VP level exec, at least.

linkmotif 9y ago

I really didn't understand this piece. Did anyone else struggle to follow it from sentence to sentence? Did this article really compare FreshBooks to the payroll needs of the Government of Canada? Whatt??

le_zonzon 9y ago
It was really badly written and difficult to follow, yes. Plus, many small typos.
foliovision 9y ago
Freshbooks has built from scratch two SAAS which have handled over $60 billion worth of invoices and expenses for over 10 million users. I'm suggesting that Mike McDerment could build and lead a team who would successfully build a payroll system for the Government of Canada for far less than a billion dollars. IBM has not built a working payroll system (despite starting with Oracle's Peoplesoft for that money). I suspect my company (or some of our best competitors) could build a working payroll system for about $50 million based on our success on smaller projects. Our specialty however is in publishing systems and online video. I'm specifically recommending Freshbooks as McDerment has a background in creating accounting and billing systems and scaling them. Additionally, as a Canadian, McDerment is already familiar with many of the variables to do with Canadian tax and employment legislation and geography. Any foreigner would need three to six months to assimilate Canada specific information. I also don't suggest that IBM could not have built this payroll system satisfactorily. Based on failed projects in Canada, Australia, Pennsylvania and Slovenia, big promises, poor delivery, unlimited billing and zero liability on government projects appears to be strategic policy (links to each of those projects appear in a new preface to my article). Such behaviour has made Big Blue billions.
- linkmotif 9y ago
  > Freshbooks has built from scratch two SAAS which have handled over $60 billion worth of invoices and expenses for over 10 million users. Right but those transactions have all been more or less the same type of vanilla invoicing. Unless something has really changed in Freshbooks, that’s an app that handles very specific relatively simple needs. The government of Canada is a giant entity that is most seriously orders of mangnitude different and complex than any usecase for FreshBooks, and that’s just the reality. > I'm suggesting that Mike McDerment could build and lead a team who would successfully build a payroll system for the Government of Canada for far less than a billion dollars. Maybe, but probably not. The real problem is probably that the business needs of the government of Canada are not well defined and the bureaucrats cannot define them. The comparison to FreshBooks is just so off because it’s totally upside down. FreshBooks was built and provides certain functionality. Building a payroll system for The government of Canada is an exercise in reverse engineering the Government of Canada. It’s an exercise in squaring hundreds of not thousands of different circles and making them fit into a box.

expertentipp 9y ago

Global American consultancies are paying 25-40k USD annually in post-Communist EU countries. The teams are run as little dictatures by the "directors" who are facing the outside world. What are you expecting to extract from such arrangement? BTW There is no place for IBM in Germany, they have their own three-letter named IT moloch.

bartread 9y ago

It's not just IBM: any of the larger enterprise consultancies should, at best, be regarded with suspicion. I well remember the EDS/UK Inland Revenue fiasco of the late nineties/early noughties, and there are plenty of other examples involving other big players.

zokier 9y ago
If you think that all big consultancies fail so equally, then doesn't that hint strongly that maybe, just maybe, the issues are on the other side?
- bartread 9y ago
  Well, I'd be lying if I suggested I had an overabundance of respect for large consultancies, but actually I don't think it's so simple in either direction. Consultancies mis-sell and misrepresent their services, whilst public service/government scopes the project poorly and is more than happy to buy into the fantasy. Every project is different so this is still an oversimplification. Nevertheless, when an enterprise IT service provider is involved in a project it's often a red flag on successful delivery. Whether that's correlation or causation is up for debate.
- harry8 9y ago
  No. No really. The issues on the other side are the opportunity ibm, accenture, oracle etc exploit. They're not just aware of those issues going in, they are 100% counting on them. They're not even interested unless those issues exist - it's one or two orders of magnitude less profit. In fact you can say that those issues are why these consultancies get hired in the first place. No competent manager would go near these carpet baggers. You can blame the marks for being marks and say they deserve it (tax payers) but this has nothing to do with IBM being a con. A con they are. If they don't like that reputation they shouldn't do it, again and again. But it's so profitable it pays for the PR to restore reputation up to a point. We've now got that point. No PR can cover the stench. IBM - only an idiot or the corrupt on kickbacks would engage them to con.

RachelF 9y ago

There are very similar stories from Australia, with IBM being sued for being late on major (billion dollar) government projects and releasing products that just don't work. IBM produced a $1.2 billion payroll project for Queensland heath that just never worked.

guidedlight 9y ago
This is mentioned in the article. NZ also had a disastrous police database project fail that was managed by IBM.

seemstoaddup 9y ago

This is an interesting narrative. However it cannot be the only one. Let us explore some alternatives and side notes. Who was responsible for picking IBM? Are they still working for the CA gov? Have they passed the hot potato to someone else? How were their technical skills and soft skills evaluated? Did they receive any donations for the contract? Where are the safety clauses in the contract? Is IBM the only benefactor of this contract? Any political implications? Remember that Gov. point person also bears a lot of the responsibility for shopping for IT services in a magazine or trough their business network. If IBM has been so ineffective at delivering services there would be more cases like this and it would ultimately hurt their bottom line. If this was wide spread practice across their business units. Maybe their business as a whole is insulated by the other better performing parts of it's corporation. It seems to me that these "Governments" should investigate anyone who touched these contracts. To the widespread corruption present in Eastern Europe. It does exist. However this article goes to show that corruption is present at a larger scale in some of the "most" developed nations on earth.

na85 9y ago
Because government contracts have to be transparent, the award process tends to be overly bureaucratic and algorithmic. There's no real mechanism with which the Canadian government could bar IBM from bidding, and they're obliged to take the best bid. Usually this is lowest cost per rated point, scored against a large matrix of must-haves and nice-to-haves that are assigned weights.
- seemstoaddup 9y ago
  Sounds like the system is set up in such a way as to deliver a under-performing product. Especially if it optimizes for "lowest cost per rated point". Quality things require significant investment. No wonder IBM has to go get developers outside of the US/CA/AU if they were the lowest bid. Now it all fits together. Whenever i go to my states web services and they look odd. I now know why. That is changing though.
  - 794CD01 9y ago

AzzieElbab 9y ago

IBM is a horrible vendor, but the author is obviously clueless about the levels of incompetence, irresponsibility and indecisiveness of the stakeholders on client side for this kind of projects. All governmens should simply always pick the cheapest vendor because 90% of their projects fail regardless of who the implementers are

RobLach 9y ago
They did pick the cheapest. IBM was the only bidder.

throw7 9y ago

I'm hesitant to just blame IBM and call it the day. What about the U.S. healthcare.gov website? Do we also blame CGI Federal and Accenture? There's probably blame on both sides, but it seems nowadays that "it needs to be a roaring dumpster fire until we do things the right way". Unfortunately, either no one _in_ government seems competent to know that right way or be empowered enough to fight for it (maybe they've all left).

ebiester 9y ago
It's a combined issue: the big players have perfected the "malevolent genie" process: bid low, then take every requirement and find the way to extract the most billable hours and change requests from it. On the government side, many of them realize they're playing a losing game, but they don't have the resources to change the system, and it's not a priority for people to get elected, so congress doesn't step in. (And would they know enough to do so?)
empath75 9y ago
All things considered, healthcare.gov wasn’t that bad. Having to scale to the size of the entire country on day one is a hard-to-impossible task and the managed to recover impressively quickly.
- SyneRyder 9y ago
  Didn't they recover by hiring a completely different team to rebuild the entire site from scratch? "Here is the tl;dr version of their story: Marketplace Lite, or “MPL” as they came to be known, devoted months to rewriting Healthcare.gov functions in full, working as a startup within the government and replacing contractor-made apps with ones costing one-fiftieth of the price." https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-s...

tptacek 9y ago

Historically Slovakia gets lumped with Eastern Europe in popular perception - Slovakia is nothing like Romania, the Ukraine, Albania or even Poland in turning out petty criminals or promiscuous online fraudsters. Not to forget Western Europe, France has a far more unhealthy work culture and fraud at work and as a way of living is far more acceptable than in Slovakia. Germany and Austria tend to value probity far more highly than the Mediterranean countries. Hundreds of years of late Roman Empire corruption left an undying footprint. This attitude is shot through the whole piece (essentializing not just Europeans but also Indians), and it's weird and creepy.

alexk 9y ago
Thanks for calling this out. I think we should do more of it on HN (and everywhere else). People should try harder to decouple their biases from facts especially in their public writing.
- Mizza 9y ago
  I'll play devil's advocate here: I actually greatly prefer when people expose their biases early on rather than try to hide them through weaselly or bland language. I think immediate total aversion to nationally biased language is a specifically American trait (and left-coast American at that) - as the result of contemporary cultural conditioning and general lack of exposure to international identities. Europeans are more comfortable with it as it happens more there, there is much more international exchange, and as a result, people can be given the benefit of the doubt by default, in the sense that "oh, I know that when the author says Slovakian culture, he obviously doesn't mean every single individual Slovakian person, but rather his perception of the traits of their culture as a whole."
  - danso 9y ago
    If Europeans are more exposed than Americans to folks of different nationalities, wouldn't they be less inclined to broadly generalize them? No one would accuse the author of meaning to judge "every single individual Slovakian person". It's ironic that you state your dislike of "weaselly or bland language", and then go on to describe the author as having a "perception of the traits of their culture as a whole". Most people would describe that as simply having stereotypes.

devit 9y ago

Can anyone explain what's so complex about a "payroll system"? Presumably you just have a table with people with salary, and every month you wire the money and record information about the wire or otherwise have a way to record when the person has taken cash. You might want to have more complex rules for determining schedule and amount of salaries, and support for contractors, unpaid leave, taxes, etc. but that doesn't seem particulary complex either. How can this possibly take more than 100 person-years (i.e. < $30 million) to make even a truly extravagant version of? Not to mention that presumably such software already exists and could be used instead of writing a new one. [obviously my explanation would be corruption, but I wonder if I miss something]

gerbilly 9y ago
Remembering and tracking all the agreements made with workers and unions going back decades and handling the cases where workers change jobs and union designations (or even move from one union to another). There are thousands of byzantine rules in the contracts and agreements, some mutually contradictory. The old code likely contained a lot of business logic that represented an institutional memory of how to handle all these corner cases. Anyone wishing to reimplement a system like that will have to rediscover these corner cases one at a time in production, while thousands of people complain that their paycheque is short. Then there are also pensions to keep track of etc...
- Chyzwar 9y ago
  That why you should start small but cover most common cases first. Then gradually work on policies to simplify byzantine rules. Retrain some people and keep internal dev team. IBM promised a big bang that would be finished before the election. What could possibly go wrong? I think that there is a positive aspect. Other governments will learn from mistakes when ordering expensive projects like this.
wvanbergen 9y ago
Start by reading this: http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard

wooshy 9y ago

I'd imagine this is common with all large IT consultancy services. I had bad experiences with IBM as well as TCS.

oh_sigh 9y ago

Is there a breakdown of where the $780M went? As in, how much to engineer salaries, how much for hardware, operational support, etc? I have a really hard time wrapping my mind around a project that expensive

mcguire 9y ago

Shhhh! Many of us work in these kinds of industries.

zeristor 9y ago

IBM: I've Been Mugged

Paperweight 9y ago

"Nobody who could ever get fired would buy IBM."

sundvor 9y ago

Oh, but the con-census is that they did such a brilliant job in Australia! http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-in-compensation-for-census-fail/8057240 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-i... http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and-on-could-have-prevented-census-outage/7963916 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and...

SyneRyder 9y ago
Indeed, some Australian states actually have a ban on government agencies contracting out to IBM: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-420969 https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-... The quote from Queensland's Premier at the time of the ban: “I don’t want companies that have this sort of culture doing work for the people of this state.”

xab9 9y ago

Wife worked for them as sales something, sometimes I saw the tools she had been using, couple of presentations - real nightmare fuel. I remember once talking about how they (big blue) see Atlassian as a competitor and how they have to try harder to convince companies to use IBM products... the very moment someone replaced Jira with some IBM shit or Gmail Business or even Outlook with Lotus Notes I would quit.

kumarvvr 9y ago
Not trying to defend IBM here, but as a one time Lotus Notes dev, I can assure you that LN is not just an email program, but a whole platform that enables you to build workflow apps very very quickly. Not unlike sharepoint, but the catch being that it worked best from the LN client rather than the browser. When I worked for IBM Global Business Service div as a dev, most of our payroll, billing, travel approvals and what not were done on LN. IIRC email was just another app on the platform.

jimjimjim 9y ago

If you've never worked for a team responding to RFPs/RFIs for large projects then it's difficult to know what's mismanagement and what's "normal". Generally you respond with a proposal that on the surface ticks ALL the boxes. Later you show the proposed product and state that all the missing parts will be implemented or altered during implementation. You get a bunch of senior people or architects to estimate the work +/- 1000% (mostly for the time estimates). The difference between what is charged to the customer and the actual cost of the work is swallowed by the bidder with the idea that it will be gouged back during additional work that wasn't in the initial scope. Then you present your proposal and if you win the bid you then try everything to make it profitable from that point on. ps. None of this is compatible with agile.

bastawhiz 9y ago

If you're struggling to read the text like I am, setting the `font-weight` to 400 (instead of 300) makes the page infinitely more readable.

foliovision 9y ago
Thanks for the input. Personally my own bugbear in terms of web readability is contrast ratios in "modern" web design. I didn't realise that font-weight could give people such issues. I'll think about changing font-weight soon as good design is about making information more readable and not less.

Lazare 9y ago

> IBM instead sold the Canadian government someone else's software (Oracle's Peoplesoft) on a sweetheart contract which did not require delivery of a working solution. Okay, so Canada signed a bad contract and didn't make IBM promise to delivery the goods. > In cases like this in the past, the Canadian Government would just be able to tell IBM to deliver the goods as promised or IBM would be banned from doing business in Canada - effectively frozen. But you just got done telling us that IBM didn't promise to deliver the goods. > Under NAFTA and similar trade pacts, governments have lost all leverage and these sweetheart deals continue to be pushed through. NAFTA and similar trade agreements neither require governments to sign contracts that don't require delivery of working solutions, not require governments to not sue to enforce contract terms once signed. If IBM broke the contract terms, Canada can sue. But if Canada signed a really dumb contract, there's a number of remedies here, but violating the contract terms and just demanding other parties do things they have no obligation to do to make up for your mistake doesn't seem like a good choice. You know, "rule of law" and all that? > Why should the Canadian taxpayer foot the bills for corrupt contracts with devious suppliers? The They shouldn't. But, well, was it corrupt? Prove it in court, and the contract can be voided. NAFTA won't stop that either. If you can't prove it in court, they maybe it was just dumb (and not bribery), in which case yes, the taxpayers should foot the bill. If they don't like it, they can vote in a better government. That's democracy.

PeterStuer 9y ago

I you think this is an 'IBM' only problem, you're in for a surprise. I've worked on very large projects with other very large service companies, and the experience is very much alike. From day one the client company gets swamped by an army of vendor analysts, the prime reason for this is to establish that it is the clients fault the project will fail as they couldn't respond to requests for information fast enough. Any information you manage to supply will be scrutinized for 'discovery' of 'change requests' to pad the meters and CYA. Meanwhile, a 'technical specialist' room chock full of developers is installed to (a) put on extra time pressure and (b) start the billing engine in top gear. When you went into that room there were literally people sitting at desks watching the vendor's equivalent of CS 101 video courses. Also, a team of lawyers is already preparing the documents for the 'settlement' in case of the (very likely) project failure. All status information to the project's steering committee gets 'green shifted' until the supplier is ready to shift to litigation mode and then overnight the project's near unrecoverable disaster gets revealed alongside a proposed 'rescue' plan that is priced so ridiculously it makes the 'settlement' look cheap. In the private sector these train-wrecks are often settled with non-publish clauses as making the press would make both parties look bad. In our case the supplier dropped a small percentage on the billing. The client was left with a room (literally) full of boxes of A4 'analysis' documents and 25M€ out of pocket. (this was in the financial industry, so it was basically pocket change) All involved, both supplier side and customer side seem to have not suffered career wise from this disaster, moving swiftly to new clients and new projects. P.S. Am I the only one that finds the author's sweeping generalizations of nationalities a bit in bad taste?

sidcool 9y ago

It's sad that a lot of blame comes to the low skilled programmers in India. It may be true, but it's sad.

webninja 9y ago

“IBM instead sold the Canadian government someone else's software (Oracle's Peoplesoft) on a sweetheart contract which did not require delivery of a working solution. Then IBM failed to successfully implement while taking payment all the way along.” So they outsourced the work to Oracle which is known to churn out garbage. Also just a lot of blame shifting between garbage-quality companies.