IBM's organizational structure is book-ended with great talent. The engineers, developers, and even front-line managers are really fantastic, and the people at

IBM's organizational structure is book-ended with great talent. The engineers, developers, and even front-line managers are really fantastic, and the people at the very top are pretty good. In the middle, there are 100 layers of middle managers that completely cock everything up, and the really sad part is that they have enough say to really cause damage. One of my first proper white collar technical jobs with them was an L2 support job for this network performance monitoring suite for huge networks... mostly large, national ISPs and the like. The job required maybe a just-post-jr-level sys-admin knowlege of networks and UNIX systems while also having smooth customer service skills. Definitely a great step up from my previous lower-mid-level IT jobs and call center work. I had three(3) managers. Three! I had a technical manager, a non-technical manager, and my actual manager, who was the head of the department. At the highest levels, the management was talking about switching everybody's workstation over to Linux. Everybody from admin assistants to developers to managers was supposed to be moved off of Windows at some point in the relatively near future. I was psyched— I hated windows, and the product I supported ran on Solaris, so not having to deal with the extremely primitive (at the time) tools like Cygwin to get some UNIX functionality on my machine was great. They seemed to be positioning themselves to sell the consulting for other large companies to do the same thing. Though we got no word of this internally— I only knew from what I had read in articles— I found the internal workstation disk image on the intranet and eagerly installed it. It was pretty smooth! I was excited! As I was getting my tools set up, I noticed that it didn't have the internal bug/ticket tracking clients installed, so I cruised on over to their intranet page... hmmm, nothing listed for Linux. After hours of searching, I found some internal discussion showing that, months earlier, the department that writes that software unilaterally decided that they were discontinuing their initiative to port those applications to Linux. While there was an extremely limited CLI to these tools, critical functionality was literally impossible without the GUI app. Without the ability for anybody on their Linux workstations to interact with tickets or bug reports, the Linux initiative was pretty much dead-in-the-water for most technical people and their managers. Perfect example of just how badly their forest of middle managers completely messes up great executive initiatives that the bottom of the food chain really wants to embrace. (I might have gotten some of the details wrong. It was 13 or 14 years ago and I drank a lot back then.)