5 ms·

I dont know about this. Its clear that IBM's products aren't as good as Amazon/Google, is this because their workforce? I can see AWS & Google has much younger

by rb808 9y ago

I dont know about this. Its clear that IBM's products aren't as good as Amazon/Google, is this because their workforce? I can see AWS & Google has much younger devs who are fluent in more modern systems. I really have to retire before 50 because it doesn't look good.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
> I really have to retire before 50 because it doesn't look good. I'll make a killing as an old fashioned java developer at that age, probably.
- kls 9y ago
  COBOL developers did just fine, you may not get to work in the new hot tech but there is a huge market for aging entrenched technologies. You average Java developer is late 30's to 40's and it's not uncommon to see whole teams of 40 something developers in a java shop. There is life outside the valley.
  - le-mark 9y ago
    Can confirm, I'm in such a team now.
  - twunde 9y ago
    I'll mention that COBOL devs are no longer doing just fine. I had an ex-coworker that had trouble finding well-paying COBOL jobs. A lot of it has been offshored or outsourced to low-paid consulting companies like Tata and the like.
    - le-mark 9y ago
      I have anecdotal evidence of this as well. A local company that formerly employed thousands of cobol devs has had aggressive layoffs and offshoring over the past 10 years. Lots and lots of unemployed cobol devs here.
    - praneshp 9y ago
      Sorry, I should've put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16650380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16650380 as a reply here.
  - praneshp 9y ago
    I wonder if COBOL devs are doing fine. My sister went to a shit college in India and was hired at one of the shit firms (I want to say Wipro, could've been Infosys). An entire batch of young, just graduated kids were trained on COBOL/batch processing for about 3 months. All of them were then placed to work with IBM, which in turn does that work offshore for US companies. My sister left after the training, but she says a vast majority of her friends from the training still work at IBM doing COBOL. Each of that is probably 1/10th or so of an old COBOL dev's job gone.
- psyc 9y ago
  I worked with a 70 year old dev back in 2000 who was doing great as the company’s only skilled Java programmer.
rusk 9y ago
From what I'd heard I thought it was more to do with their executive culture?
meddlepal 9y ago
Contract work, entrepreneurship, specialization and management are all options as you get older.
eeks 9y ago
> Its clear that IBM's products aren't as good as Amazon/Google You may want to reformulate. Neither Amazon or Google are competitors to IBM because they don't target B2B. Besides, IBM has products in many market segments where these companies aren't.
- otachack 9y ago
  Don't target B2B? What about AWS?
  - eeks 9y ago
    You are right, this is B2B. However, AWS is mostly used by large corps as IT offloading, which is not a business where IBM is a competitor.
saalweachter 9y ago
> Its clear that IBM's products aren't as good as Amazon/Google, is this because their workforce? I'll note Google's New York office has a healthy smattering of ex-IBM Grayglers (Greyglers?).
smarterclayton 9y ago
IBM typically does things “first” (social media product efforts at IBM predated Facebook, for example), and IBM research has routinely produced innovations decades earlier than their adoption. WebSphere was a platform as a service in 2004. My personal opinion (having worked there 10 years with a lot of extremely talented people) is that the scale and types of customers IBM sells to distorts the engineering incentives. They don’t (because they can’t) build the simple MVP and iterate on it. Instead they have to bolt on “enterprise magic” like security integration, support for three different databases (db2, sqlserver, Oracle) from day one, and generally gold plate it. In addition deep pocket customers have massive pull and can distort product schedules because 90% of the revenue is concentrated in a few massive deals. That means “do what’s right for the user” becomes “id like this icon in cornflower Blue”. The price of massive success is perverse engineering incentives up and down the stack. It’s hard to appreciate from the outside, it’s just what end state enterprise story looks like when your deals are $20M and up.
- nova22033 9y ago
  >WebSphere was a platform as a service in 2004. WebSphere is also a bloated piece of crap so maybe not the best example..
  - smarterclayton 9y ago
    I work on Kubernetes today, and you could argue it’s on it’s way to being bloated too. Successful platforms grow until they are replaced by younger, hungrier, more purpose built platforms that solve problems the old platforms couldn’t. It’s just the way of the world :)
peterwwillis 9y ago
> IBM's products aren't as good as Amazon/Google You can't compare the first to the other two. Amazon and Google don't make business products. Sure, they sell "cloud services", but these aren't business products, these are IT services. Amazon and Google sell phones that somebody else makes. They write software that somebody else retrofits. They sell advertising. They sell inexpensive consumer goods, like a voice-activated interface to their search engines, or a stick to stream video to your TV. Outside of cloud computing, they maintain almost exclusively consumer-oriented services and applications. IBM makes mainframes that sit in someone's bank and last decades. They make tools that you buy and install and run your entire business with. They are the one-stop shop for a business that needs technology and can't or won't make it themselves from scratch. It's like comparing apples to quinoa. It's like comparing IKEA to a building contractor.
- rb808 9y ago
  > IBM makes mainframes that sit in someone's bank and last decades. They make tools that you buy and install and run your entire business with. You're kinda right but the tech world is changing. My experience 1) First job had an expensive IBM powerpc based AIX box. We now have cheap x86 with free Linux. 2) 10 years ago my project had an expensive DB2 database. Current job has a lot of files and open source noSQL applications. (some Oracle is still around but we hate it) 3) My current job is first to use cloud hosts. No need for mainframes any more. 4) I used to have IBM HDD, but they no longer make anything like that
le-mark 9y ago
It's generally not a problem with the workers, but a problem with calcified management organizations who are risk averse, short sighted, and myopic in focus. Management protects their rice bowl, everything else be damned. Which is especially ironic that older workers are targetted.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Bad management unfortunately doesn't lay itself off first, but last until forced by the board. Long after all the best employees have been lost.

by rb808 9y ago

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

> I really have to retire before 50 because it doesn't look good. I'll make a killing as an old fashioned java developer at that age, probably.

kls 9y ago
COBOL developers did just fine, you may not get to work in the new hot tech but there is a huge market for aging entrenched technologies. You average Java developer is late 30's to 40's and it's not uncommon to see whole teams of 40 something developers in a java shop. There is life outside the valley.
- le-mark 9y ago
  Can confirm, I'm in such a team now.
- twunde 9y ago
  I'll mention that COBOL devs are no longer doing just fine. I had an ex-coworker that had trouble finding well-paying COBOL jobs. A lot of it has been offshored or outsourced to low-paid consulting companies like Tata and the like.
  - le-mark 9y ago
    I have anecdotal evidence of this as well. A local company that formerly employed thousands of cobol devs has had aggressive layoffs and offshoring over the past 10 years. Lots and lots of unemployed cobol devs here.
  - praneshp 9y ago
    Sorry, I should've put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16650380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16650380 as a reply here.
- praneshp 9y ago
  I wonder if COBOL devs are doing fine. My sister went to a shit college in India and was hired at one of the shit firms (I want to say Wipro, could've been Infosys). An entire batch of young, just graduated kids were trained on COBOL/batch processing for about 3 months. All of them were then placed to work with IBM, which in turn does that work offshore for US companies. My sister left after the training, but she says a vast majority of her friends from the training still work at IBM doing COBOL. Each of that is probably 1/10th or so of an old COBOL dev's job gone.
psyc 9y ago
I worked with a 70 year old dev back in 2000 who was doing great as the company’s only skilled Java programmer.

rusk 9y ago

From what I'd heard I thought it was more to do with their executive culture?

meddlepal 9y ago

Contract work, entrepreneurship, specialization and management are all options as you get older.

eeks 9y ago

> Its clear that IBM's products aren't as good as Amazon/Google You may want to reformulate. Neither Amazon or Google are competitors to IBM because they don't target B2B. Besides, IBM has products in many market segments where these companies aren't.

otachack 9y ago
Don't target B2B? What about AWS?
- eeks 9y ago
  You are right, this is B2B. However, AWS is mostly used by large corps as IT offloading, which is not a business where IBM is a competitor.

saalweachter 9y ago

> Its clear that IBM's products aren't as good as Amazon/Google, is this because their workforce? I'll note Google's New York office has a healthy smattering of ex-IBM Grayglers (Greyglers?).

smarterclayton 9y ago

IBM typically does things “first” (social media product efforts at IBM predated Facebook, for example), and IBM research has routinely produced innovations decades earlier than their adoption. WebSphere was a platform as a service in 2004. My personal opinion (having worked there 10 years with a lot of extremely talented people) is that the scale and types of customers IBM sells to distorts the engineering incentives. They don’t (because they can’t) build the simple MVP and iterate on it. Instead they have to bolt on “enterprise magic” like security integration, support for three different databases (db2, sqlserver, Oracle) from day one, and generally gold plate it. In addition deep pocket customers have massive pull and can distort product schedules because 90% of the revenue is concentrated in a few massive deals. That means “do what’s right for the user” becomes “id like this icon in cornflower Blue”. The price of massive success is perverse engineering incentives up and down the stack. It’s hard to appreciate from the outside, it’s just what end state enterprise story looks like when your deals are $20M and up.

nova22033 9y ago
>WebSphere was a platform as a service in 2004. WebSphere is also a bloated piece of crap so maybe not the best example..
- smarterclayton 9y ago
  I work on Kubernetes today, and you could argue it’s on it’s way to being bloated too. Successful platforms grow until they are replaced by younger, hungrier, more purpose built platforms that solve problems the old platforms couldn’t. It’s just the way of the world :)

peterwwillis 9y ago

> IBM's products aren't as good as Amazon/Google You can't compare the first to the other two. Amazon and Google don't make business products. Sure, they sell "cloud services", but these aren't business products, these are IT services. Amazon and Google sell phones that somebody else makes. They write software that somebody else retrofits. They sell advertising. They sell inexpensive consumer goods, like a voice-activated interface to their search engines, or a stick to stream video to your TV. Outside of cloud computing, they maintain almost exclusively consumer-oriented services and applications. IBM makes mainframes that sit in someone's bank and last decades. They make tools that you buy and install and run your entire business with. They are the one-stop shop for a business that needs technology and can't or won't make it themselves from scratch. It's like comparing apples to quinoa. It's like comparing IKEA to a building contractor.

rb808 9y ago
> IBM makes mainframes that sit in someone's bank and last decades. They make tools that you buy and install and run your entire business with. You're kinda right but the tech world is changing. My experience 1) First job had an expensive IBM powerpc based AIX box. We now have cheap x86 with free Linux. 2) 10 years ago my project had an expensive DB2 database. Current job has a lot of files and open source noSQL applications. (some Oracle is still around but we hate it) 3) My current job is first to use cloud hosts. No need for mainframes any more. 4) I used to have IBM HDD, but they no longer make anything like that

le-mark 9y ago

It's generally not a problem with the workers, but a problem with calcified management organizations who are risk averse, short sighted, and myopic in focus. Management protects their rice bowl, everything else be damned. Which is especially ironic that older workers are targetted.

mixmastamyk 9y ago
Bad management unfortunately doesn't lay itself off first, but last until forced by the board. Long after all the best employees have been lost.