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ex-IBMer here. I was at IBM research (as an engineer), and thankfully I can say most of my direct colleagues were great and highly competent ...when it came t
by kmarc 5y ago
ex-IBMer here.
I was at IBM research (as an engineer), and thankfully I can say most of my direct colleagues were great and highly competent
...when it came to actual research. I think we had a good engineering core team too, but whenever we had to interact with "big IBM" (outside research) we mostly bumped into incompetent people, and career(money)-focused managers.
Fun fact, due incompetent management 90%+ of my team left in the past 5 years.
Since then I had to work with other IBMers (both engineers and managers/team leads) on different projects and although some of them I'd consider knowledgeable, none of the engineers were able to create high quality output.
But I guess this is the same in any monstrously huge organizations.
I would have been surprised if IBM could tackle such a complicated engineering problem like this migration.
- ElViajero 5y ago> Fun fact, due incompetent management 90%+ of my team left in the past 5 years. Not fun, but I get the idea. That is never a good situation. I has been a manager in the past, and I have seen many people that despises the position. I think that it is more important that people gives credit for, and that everybody seems to call out bad management but few appreciate good management because is "transparent" and it seems that everything will work without them.
- kmarc 5y agoFWIW, my direct manager was indeed "transparent", as in, he wasn't managing us textbook-properly, but he definitely shielded us from upper management BS, while helping us out to achieve our goals and enable our engineering work. I usually try to avoid assessing management as "bad" (it's just a downward spiral, everyone just says it, and trigger each other), but in this particular case it was so exceptionally bad that we all went into long discussions and analysis of it.