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I worked there (Watson Health) a few years back. All that happened is IBM. That's right. They bought us (a small start-up) and this is what they did in a year t

I worked there (Watson Health) a few years back. All that happened is IBM. That's right. They bought us (a small start-up) and this is what they did in a year to us: 1. replaced managers with their own who didn't get anything, kind of old date executives taken away from mainframe 2. banned remote work (this costed them a few brilliant engineers) 3. opened one huge open space full of noise and chatter, I mean sales team next to the development team, etc (this cost them even more headcount among experienced developers) 4. For months we did nothing! There were whole teams doing nothing for months on an end. I wrote zero lines of code in over 6 month period. Why? Because management didn't know which direction should be taken... and they kept hiring too! They kept hiring new developers when the ones already at place had absolutely nothing to do! This is from my (simple developer) perspective. Not sure how it looked in sales, among executives, etc. But that was very weird environment. I had great Manager who asked me to learn react and take courses in react (mind you it was two years back!) As we "might want to do something in react in the future". So I basically spent my last six months there learning React, aka preparing to the job interviews... they even got us paid courses and all. I mean... IBM. And once they fired me (these were lay-offs, thousands affected, many of them just hired in past year, like myself) I was paid severance pay too. I went there worked a year, last 6 months was learning for job interviews... fantastic pay too. IBM is crazy.

justwalt 7y ago
What did you end up doing in a period of non-work work like that? Read books?
- bastijn 7y ago
  Advise you to read the comment again :). Spoiler: (s)he learned React.
  - justwalt 7y ago
    Not sure if I stopped reading early or just didn't comprehend what they had written. Thanks, lol.
apohn 7y ago
>Because management didn't know which direction should be taken... and they kept hiring too! They kept hiring new developers when the ones already at place had absolutely nothing to do! I think big companies trying to do things like "Capture a market segment that will be a trillion (I made this number up) dollars in 2025" suffer terrible analysis paralysis. The 5 year plan has an extreme revenue ramp up and insane targets. If you combine that with politics, there is a lot of business and financial justification that has to go into every decision, and many decisions will be safe ones that look innovative (we're going to build on Insert Latest Cloud and use AI!) but have no real value to many customers. The end result is crazy hiring (and firing a few years later) and groups with opposite experiences. Some groups have no work to do and other groups are working 80 hour weeks trying to make it seem like the marketing and growth curves are all true. It's a comedy (if you are able to stay out of the mess and politics) or a tragedy if you have a manager who feels they want to be the shining star that supports this mad rush.
StillBored 7y ago
This is normal big corp thought process. The CEO decides upon a growth area, gets some yes men to agree on a growth trajectory, and applies some standard investment/hiring metrics to assure they stay on top of the designated curve. This all rolls down a few levels of mgmt to the first line guys, who are told your in a growth area, and we expect to need to hire X people over the next 24 months, who will be tasked with XYZ (frequently fancy words which when analyzed boils down to support the product we are going to sell). This goes on for a couple years until the projected vs real revenue divergence is so large that even an CEO can't ignore the lack of growth. At which point the plug gets pulled and the next adventure starts somewhere else. Sadly though, IMHO none of that is a problem, the real problem is that the CEO's can't actually tell or make strategic decisions about why these projects are failing to have exponential growth. (see intel & mobile chips/wireless connectivity, those are so strategically necessary for their growth that they need to keep trying until they die). So, they ax them, sometimes just as they are getting a solid product portfolio together. But they don't know that because they have been fed the same line for the past 24-36 months.

justwalt 7y ago

What did you end up doing in a period of non-work work like that? Read books?

bastijn 7y ago
Advise you to read the comment again :). Spoiler: (s)he learned React.
- justwalt 7y ago
  Not sure if I stopped reading early or just didn't comprehend what they had written. Thanks, lol.

apohn 7y ago

>Because management didn't know which direction should be taken... and they kept hiring too! They kept hiring new developers when the ones already at place had absolutely nothing to do! I think big companies trying to do things like "Capture a market segment that will be a trillion (I made this number up) dollars in 2025" suffer terrible analysis paralysis. The 5 year plan has an extreme revenue ramp up and insane targets. If you combine that with politics, there is a lot of business and financial justification that has to go into every decision, and many decisions will be safe ones that look innovative (we're going to build on Insert Latest Cloud and use AI!) but have no real value to many customers. The end result is crazy hiring (and firing a few years later) and groups with opposite experiences. Some groups have no work to do and other groups are working 80 hour weeks trying to make it seem like the marketing and growth curves are all true. It's a comedy (if you are able to stay out of the mess and politics) or a tragedy if you have a manager who feels they want to be the shining star that supports this mad rush.

StillBored 7y ago

This is normal big corp thought process. The CEO decides upon a growth area, gets some yes men to agree on a growth trajectory, and applies some standard investment/hiring metrics to assure they stay on top of the designated curve. This all rolls down a few levels of mgmt to the first line guys, who are told your in a growth area, and we expect to need to hire X people over the next 24 months, who will be tasked with XYZ (frequently fancy words which when analyzed boils down to support the product we are going to sell). This goes on for a couple years until the projected vs real revenue divergence is so large that even an CEO can't ignore the lack of growth. At which point the plug gets pulled and the next adventure starts somewhere else. Sadly though, IMHO none of that is a problem, the real problem is that the CEO's can't actually tell or make strategic decisions about why these projects are failing to have exponential growth. (see intel & mobile chips/wireless connectivity, those are so strategically necessary for their growth that they need to keep trying until they die). So, they ax them, sometimes just as they are getting a solid product portfolio together. But they don't know that because they have been fed the same line for the past 24-36 months.