Not meant as a snark, a constant reminder I keep telling myself every day, that there is way more in IT than I'll ever have time to learn. All I have to do if I

Not meant as a snark, a constant reminder I keep telling myself every day, that there is way more in IT than I'll ever have time to learn. All I have to do if I ever think I'm beginning to get my arms around it all is look to someone like Fabrice Bellard or innumerable others. We only win as a team, not many such Free Electrons in the world to pass around, I'm certainly not such a talent, I just heave against the entropy with the gang and share like everyone else. For IBM professional services, you'll have no quibble from me. Very mixed bag from what customers tell me, and customers nearly have to be domain experts to make smart purchase decisions on contractors. A non-trivial chunk of big name professional services placements (not just IBM) are third parties, most of those third parties get run through mandatory sub-sub-contracting relationships and there is even a thriving industry feeding off of sub-sub-sub-contracting relationships. IBM Support however, IME while it has declined markedly in L1 and marginally in L2 (you need to get to the L2 leads quickly if you know what you're doing and want to save time), is still quite good in L3, and if you pay for the enhanced support, exceptionally good (but it is so expensive that few people outside the IBM ecosystem have even heard it is an option). IBM's documentation has always been very thorough, but I've seen a decline in accuracy and editing (to organize the typically voluminous standards) that corresponds with their gutting of the US technical writing teams who when I worked with Redbooks upon were typically very technically proficient in their own right. I try to help out these days by insisting upon a documentation APAR when I run across documentation defects in my accounts, but I'm likely in the minority of users. Ever since they took away the ability to comment on individual pages in Knowledge Center, they've considerably increased the friction for users to help increase the quality of documentation. YMMV of course, just sharing my perspective.