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IBM email fiasco complicates sales deals, is worse than biz is letting on
- meepmorp 5y agoThat brings back memories from years ago. Of Notes not working then, either.
- RedShift1 5y agoWhat exactly is it about Notes that makes it unreliable? I've never used it, my first groupware experience was Exchange 2003.
- throwawayboise 5y agoJust a guess: it's software from the early 1990s (maybe older) that has received just enough maintenance to keep it running, but is not architected to perform well in today's computing environments.
- blackearl 5y agoIt was never really made for email and it's been hobbling along for years.
- pkaye 5y agoLate 90s my first employer was using some old mainframe based email system. When we switched to something new I found out it was Notes and gave a deep sigh when I saw it. It looked antiquated and clunky even for the 90s.
- thrower123 5y agoDistributed document databases that have to replicate. When it works, it's great. When it doesn't, ye gods
- magicalhippo 5y agoNotes mostly kinda worked when I used it 20 years ago. Company had built up some forms and whatnot and it was clunky but worked. However I do especially recall a hilarious incident, where one employee sent an e-mail to the entire company email alias, forging the sender address to that of his boss. The e-mail contained some NSFW pictures and text. As most here will know, back then there was no validation of the sender address with SMTP, so forging that was easy. However the Notes gateway happily translated the e-mail address such that what we got in Notes did indeed look exactly as if our boss had sent it from Notes.
- 6f8986c3 5y agoThis is what happens when you spend literally decades outsourcing your core competencies.
- ipaddr 5y agoTheir core competency is sales.
- zdragnar 5y agoWait... They moved critical systems right before the end of the quarter? Isn't that just begging for disaster?
- johannes1234321 5y agoDeadline was set for the quarter. Else the team doesn't meet their goals.
- throw_nbvc1234 5y agoThere's nothing quite like promo driven development to add some "excitement" to your job.
- gbil 5y agoI work for an equally big firm, any big changes planned by IT for the end of the quarter get shutdown ASAP so nowadays IT never plans anything for the end of the quarter. Even the end of a "simple" month is met with worries. I can't believe that in IBM the don't act the same Maybe they had to do it now after all the delays due to a different deadline ?
- johannes1234321 5y agoWhile slipping the quarter in this case means extending the contract with HCL ....
- khazhoux 5y agoHa, my team (faang) just moved to quaterly OKRs. You’re a success if you land your goal on June 30, a failure if it drags into July 1. Good stuff.
- throwawaysea 5y agoWow what a disaster. This doesn't make for good PR for either IBM or HCL. I'm sure such migrations are complicated in practice, but email comes off as something simplistic that should just work. Customers may look at this and wonder how they can trust an organization that claims to be experts in software when they can't get their own house in order for something basic.
- Clewza313 5y agoIBM is migrating off HCL, I'm not sure how much of the blame HCL has to bear here. (Although, knowing HCL, I'm entirely unsurprised that they are trying to get the hell away.)
- tssva 5y ago'"They claim it’s only about a dozen 'clusters,'" the individual said, insisting that the number of affected clusters is more like 15' The article used this quote to imply there is some deception going on regarding the number of clusters affected. 15 is close enough to 12 that I would consider it within the scope of about a dozen.
- ineedasername 5y agoAnd whether it's 12 or 15, it's clearly plenty enough to bring things to a halt. If it shuts down major operations, it really doesn't matter whether it's 1 or 100, except possibly for the ETA on a resolution.
- rodgerd 5y agoAlso worth noting that at one point part of their Linux on Z brag book was Notes consolidation letting them run all of IBM on a handful of mainframes.
- ineedasername 5y agoNot a good sign when the company you might hire to help migrate your systems (to their platform) can't even do it themselves.
- akiselev 5y ago> The Register has been unable to determine the specific technical problem that upended the email migration. But in a comment posted to Hacker News, software engineer Bernd Verst suggested that people who really understand how to deal with Notes data are few and far between. This is a first. Do journalists make it a habit of using random HN comments as an authoritative source?
- test_epsilon 5y agoAs far as I can see the comment is being used as an authoritative source for the opinion of the person who posted the comment, and nothing more. Journalists have long had a habit of printing opinions of random bystanders, self-proclaimed (and possibly actual) experts, and even people with particular opinions that will push the angle that the journalist hopes for. This particular case seems pretty harmless and probably correct although it doesn't actually say anything about whether IBM is lacking in Notes experts or has anything to do with the problem (it could be in a different layer of the stack).
- mbreese 5y agoThis is a pretty bad quote to include though. The original comment (which they at least linked to) doesn't actually say anything about IBM specifically. Rather, it references generic Notes knowledge at Google. I'm not sure it's okay to publish a comment someone left on HN using their full name (the user account doesn't currently include a full name). I'd hope they at least contacted the user before including their comment (but I'm not holding my breath).
- test_epsilon 5y ago> This is a pretty bad quote to include though. The original comment (which they at least linked to) doesn't actually say anything about IBM specifically. Rather, it references generic Notes knowledge at Google. That's why I say it doesn't necessarily relate to the situation at IBM. As I said, journalists like quoting people to push an agenda or lend legitimacy to a story even if they are not experts or on the complete periphery of the story. It's nothing new though, and very tame as far as journalistic honesty goes -- it is not incorrect to say that there is some email problem at IBM, that IBM has been known to use Notes for email, and that there are not many Notes experts around. > I'm not sure it's okay to publish a comment someone left on HN using their full name (the user account doesn't currently include a full name). I'd hope they at least contacted the user before including their comment (but I'm not holding my breath). I'm not sure what you mean by okay, but journalists have been quoting people's public utterings and public writings for as long as there have been journalists. Including taking selective parts out of context to push their agenda. If it's a verbatim quote even out of context I consider that to be well clear of the bar for journalistic integrity. And really, anything you say in public will be used against you. And it will be linked with your person if you don't cover your tracks carefully. We all know this. No journalist is going to contact us before taking something from a comment we write here!
- johnwheeler 5y agoYou know, it serves them right. They’re a major part of the opaque, shitty “enterprise” software ecosystem that over-promises, under-delivers, and somehow manages to bag a fortune in the process. Looks like they’re eating their own dog food on this one.
- vidanay 5y agoLooks like they're eating their own dog food, after it was run through the dog first.
- marktangotango 5y agoIt's really remarkable how out of touch large companies can get; especially after years of cost cutting and out sourcing. I once worked at a company that who, after 15 years of RIFs, offshoring and chasing ever increasing margins, finally cut too deep. One of the critical people cut was my boss, the VP over a product that was an add on to one of the companies major products. Due to accounting the profits showed up on the main products financials, but our product was a critical enabling piece. My boss was RIF'd, simply called one day and told not to come in again, ever. Like some low level employee. After the boss was gone there was literally no one in the executive team who knew anything about the product, it's customers or customer commitments ie signed contracts for features to be delivered. It was a beautiful train wreck I watched first hand. It was amazing to see the VP who did take over slowly learn the magnitude of the f-ck up over the course of several months. They lost several customers. These customers were pissed and literally had no one to talk to at our company. We had support reps fielding calls from CEOs at our customers complaining. A few law suits ensued. It was glorious to see.
- fire 5y agoDumb Q: what's a RIF?
- StevePerkins 5y agoReductions in force. Fancy term for layoffs.
- MattGaiser 5y agoIt almost seems worse than layoff. Like you are just draining a tank a bit to reduce the pressure.
- sgerenser 5y agoNo no, that would be a Reduction In Pressure, RIP.
- tomrod 5y ago
- s5300 5y agoI feel like I've been reading only bad things about IBM for a long time now. Like, over a decade. If I had to take a shot in the dark, I'd guess it's likely a complete middle-upper MBA management fuckup catastrophe grinding the company into the ground.
- solarkraft 5y agoYet they keep winning public contracts (5 blockchains [0]). They clearly aren't cutting back on sales ... [0]: (German; millions for inventing digital signatures) https://www.heise.de/news/Digitaler-Corona-Impfpass-IBM-Ubirch-und-fuenf-Blockchains-5076161.html https://www.heise.de/news/Digitaler-Corona-Impfpass-IBM-Ubir...
- bluedevil2k 5y agoNo MBAs would work there, it’s untrained management leading to the duck ups.
- test_epsilon 5y agoYou're saying no MBAs work at IBM, and implying that things wouldn't be going wrong an MBA-run organization. This is a joke, right?
- bluedevil2k 5y agoClearly you have a preconceived stereotype of what an MBA is and I doubt I’d be able to change that with facts.
- pas 5y agoAn MBA does not mean trained management is present either. You implied that MBAs wouldn't work there. Which is pretty, safe to say, false. (They even have a page advertising to MBAs: https://www.ibm.com/services/careers/mba-graduate https://www.ibm.com/services/careers/mba-graduate )
- test_epsilon 5y ago
- randomstring 5y agoI worked at IBM a few years ago. When I started we were had to use Notes for email, not long after we got migrated to Verse (IBM's webmail system). Verse was better than Notes (damning with faint praise). One day I wondered why Verse took so long to start, i.e. time to first render of emails. So I profiled the startup using a browser performance profiler. It didn't take me long to discover there was a sleep(5) in one of the Javascript files. Every employee was subjected to a sleep(5) for every single login. Of course for security reasons your email session timed out every 12 hours or so, meaning that every employee is logging into email at least once a work day. Some napkin math: at the time IBM had almost 400k employees, so that's 555 hours per day of wasted employee time. Or 138,888 hours per year of wasted employee time. To be fair some large number of IBMers may not have had jobs that subjected them to Verse.
- bqmjjx0kac 5y agoMaybe you spotted the mythical "speedup loop" in the wild? https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
- cstrat 5y agoI'd never seen this before thats hilarious. Wonder how much of this really exists in the wild.
- vvanders 5y agoOh it's very much a thing although maybe in different contexts. My tech director in games used to have a ~40mb static array at the top of main.cpp with a big comment along the lines of "DO NOT TOUCH". When we'd come up on a demo or critical milestone and just could not get everything to fit in the ~512mb of ram we needed because the art team put in too many textures or our new subsystem too much memory he'd go in and knock 5-10mb from it and "save the day". The same tech director removed mip level zero to get back ~33% of our texture memory. About a week later he told the art team that we'd optimized the game and asked if they noticed any visual differences. The art team said they didn't, about 4 weeks later it got out what he actually did and they were livid.
- stereoradonc 5y agoSolely a snide comment - Didn't IBM Watson predict all this?
- pas 5y agoIt did actually! All the brain scan images of the actual IT operations folks involved showed very strange signs! /s
- mathattack 5y agoDoes their split have anything to do with this?
- pas 5y agoYes. For some brilliant reason (probably lack of time) they decided to do the migration in one big batch on the weekend. As "Exhibit A" shows it did not go as planned.
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoRelated discussion about the email migration disaster from a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27692965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27692965