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IBM felt to me like the last holdout of the shiny shoed salesmen when I briefly worked for them. Before the internet and big tech companies with leaders who wer

by t43562 4y ago

IBM felt to me like the last holdout of the shiny shoed salesmen when I briefly worked for them. Before the internet and big tech companies with leaders who were theoretically technical there were the companies dominated by salesmen because selling was the critical part. I imagine that getting a board to spend a lot of money on some project is hard and you need the support of the kind of people that can influence board members. So to get your project past a lot of people who basically don't respect or believe in nerds you had to hire a company with non-nerdy salesmen to back you up. i.e. the entire thing is social. And just because the nerds (us) have trounced them for the last N years, it doesn't mean that the world has converted into 100% nerd. Shiny shoed salesmen are probably still quite necessary. I joined as part of an acquisition. I am probably biased but they spent a year making the product multilingual and not fixing anything. Everyone knows the name of the Open Source knock-off of that product but not the name of the product anymore. It's probably still there taking almost no investment of effort. So I got the impression that IBM is a company where software goes to live out its old age and die. I think of Redhat (perhaps unfairly) with their super complicated Linux distribution which must be a nightmare to maintain because it does so many things and needs to keep long compatibility guarantees. I'm not expecting any innovation whatsoever from them. Perhaps this is very unfair and ignorant of me. I'm happy to be corrected.

Gooblebrai 4y ago
How do you think selling is being handled nowadays that the nerd percentage has increased within the companies?
- t43562 4y ago
  The salesmen have adapted to a new style with smart casual clothes. They have a new vocabulary and perhaps ride mountain bikes instead of playing golf. They still mock technical knowledge by wading around in a new sea of acronyms which they don't truly understand or care about. Think of the CEO of a company that makes a build system - every 10th word at one point in time might have been "CD" which means Continuous Delivery which is something his own company never did. But it's the most important thing in the world for that year or two and lots of sententious things are said about it without any connection to the possibility of "walking the walk" to use one of their favorite and least honest terms. As a technical person one listens to them and wonders what planet they came from and how they could possibly have any connection with the reality of the business they're supposed to be running. But... they're salesmen and have sold themselves as the first product. They know what impresses non-technical people and it isn't the plain honest truth. I think it boils down to some facts: we have it better than it has been for a long time but there are real situations where one must be a master of bullshit and have the ability to appear supremely confident and all-knowing whilst actually knowing very little. This confidence founded on nothing transmits itself to other people. If you are lucky and appear to be a winner or if you can hide your mistakes and advertise your success then people will take your lead or offer you opportunities.
pdevr 4y ago
I am more of a Debian/Ubuntu guy, but it is indeed unfair to call RedHat's distribution super complicated. RHEL is not that difficult to maintain. CentOS was the default OS used by many hosting companies in the past, before technology changes occurred. It was fairly easy to maintain. Agree with you that many of the salesman are typically technology-agnostic [I use the term "agnostic" in the sense it is used to define religious belief :) ]. They have capable technical guys supporting the salesmen, though.
- t43562 4y ago
  I use Artix now - love it because it is so easy to make packages or at least update one that you need to update for some reason. RPMs are super super difficult much of the time. I think the most horrible bit is selinux - that really upped the level of difficulty a lot. I'm also really fed up with Fedora's frequent releases - so hard to keep your machine current because upgrading usually only works properly once or twice and then you need to do a reinstall. That might be harsh - maybe 3 times but you still end up having to do it or lose updates. For me this feels liked they've reached a peak of complexity. Now there are flatpacks and other things to torture us with and it's obviously not just them. I found something that suits me at last and am typing to you from it now. Rolling updates so I NEVER have to do a full upgrade - it's so liberating. I can make choices like not having systemd - I use dinit and it's fine. Development packages are always installed so I want to build something from source and I never have to worry about whether the header files I need are there. So far I cannot find a negative. OK it was a nuisance to make pipewire start automatically and I probably haven't done it right yet - not good for any new users - but that's it.
  - cmdlinecowboy 4y ago
    The most horrible bit about Microsoft is that pesky release of new mandated security features! My windows 7 has everything just the way I like it /s your characterization of red hat makes sense from where it sounds like you’re coming from but you miss the mark a bit I feel RHEL isn’t meant for the everyday developer and red hat does a lousy job enabling them. Ubuntu and Debian do a much better job as is proven by the wide availability of developer tools on Ubuntu/Debian. But look at the enterprise software market share, of which red hat focuses on entirely — canonical has a sub 5% market share for enterprise Linux or something pathetic along those lines while RHEL is over 85% or something close. Canonical has done the opposite by catering to workstations and developers and have done exquisite things with their workstations but their real enterprise servers suck. SElinux isn’t meant to just run static on your box while you’re using it to everyday browse or develop that’d be brutal. It’s meant to secure an application or files with predefined egress based on business logic. Now on the other hand, fedora— it’s upstream my man. Frequent releases is… the point? it’s community based upstream development if you’re looking for the latest features it’s perfect but you’re also getting the latest bugs. Ubuntu sounds appropriate for you! That doesn’t mean RHEL or fedora “has reached peak complexity” If you wanted RHEL or Cent/Rocky/Alma: - disable selinux on your home or personal workstation. you can get granular with how to do it too if you choose. - automate your patching it takes 5 minutes one time - if you want RHEL benefits with Fedora-adjacent (but not as buggy) releases you’re describing what is now CentOS Stream which is also a rolling-release distro I felt similar to you last year but my company uses RHEL and we just did some worth while quick training. When explained in ways that make sense, it makes sense. Unfortunately I think red hat has been lackluster several times over on how to say what I just said edit: meant to add that I hope this helps!

by t43562 4y ago

Gooblebrai 4y ago

How do you think selling is being handled nowadays that the nerd percentage has increased within the companies?

t43562 4y ago
The salesmen have adapted to a new style with smart casual clothes. They have a new vocabulary and perhaps ride mountain bikes instead of playing golf. They still mock technical knowledge by wading around in a new sea of acronyms which they don't truly understand or care about. Think of the CEO of a company that makes a build system - every 10th word at one point in time might have been "CD" which means Continuous Delivery which is something his own company never did. But it's the most important thing in the world for that year or two and lots of sententious things are said about it without any connection to the possibility of "walking the walk" to use one of their favorite and least honest terms. As a technical person one listens to them and wonders what planet they came from and how they could possibly have any connection with the reality of the business they're supposed to be running. But... they're salesmen and have sold themselves as the first product. They know what impresses non-technical people and it isn't the plain honest truth. I think it boils down to some facts: we have it better than it has been for a long time but there are real situations where one must be a master of bullshit and have the ability to appear supremely confident and all-knowing whilst actually knowing very little. This confidence founded on nothing transmits itself to other people. If you are lucky and appear to be a winner or if you can hide your mistakes and advertise your success then people will take your lead or offer you opportunities.

pdevr 4y ago

I am more of a Debian/Ubuntu guy, but it is indeed unfair to call RedHat's distribution super complicated. RHEL is not that difficult to maintain. CentOS was the default OS used by many hosting companies in the past, before technology changes occurred. It was fairly easy to maintain. Agree with you that many of the salesman are typically technology-agnostic [I use the term "agnostic" in the sense it is used to define religious belief :) ]. They have capable technical guys supporting the salesmen, though.

t43562 4y ago
I use Artix now - love it because it is so easy to make packages or at least update one that you need to update for some reason. RPMs are super super difficult much of the time. I think the most horrible bit is selinux - that really upped the level of difficulty a lot. I'm also really fed up with Fedora's frequent releases - so hard to keep your machine current because upgrading usually only works properly once or twice and then you need to do a reinstall. That might be harsh - maybe 3 times but you still end up having to do it or lose updates. For me this feels liked they've reached a peak of complexity. Now there are flatpacks and other things to torture us with and it's obviously not just them. I found something that suits me at last and am typing to you from it now. Rolling updates so I NEVER have to do a full upgrade - it's so liberating. I can make choices like not having systemd - I use dinit and it's fine. Development packages are always installed so I want to build something from source and I never have to worry about whether the header files I need are there. So far I cannot find a negative. OK it was a nuisance to make pipewire start automatically and I probably haven't done it right yet - not good for any new users - but that's it.
- cmdlinecowboy 4y ago
  The most horrible bit about Microsoft is that pesky release of new mandated security features! My windows 7 has everything just the way I like it /s your characterization of red hat makes sense from where it sounds like you’re coming from but you miss the mark a bit I feel RHEL isn’t meant for the everyday developer and red hat does a lousy job enabling them. Ubuntu and Debian do a much better job as is proven by the wide availability of developer tools on Ubuntu/Debian. But look at the enterprise software market share, of which red hat focuses on entirely — canonical has a sub 5% market share for enterprise Linux or something pathetic along those lines while RHEL is over 85% or something close. Canonical has done the opposite by catering to workstations and developers and have done exquisite things with their workstations but their real enterprise servers suck. SElinux isn’t meant to just run static on your box while you’re using it to everyday browse or develop that’d be brutal. It’s meant to secure an application or files with predefined egress based on business logic. Now on the other hand, fedora— it’s upstream my man. Frequent releases is… the point? it’s community based upstream development if you’re looking for the latest features it’s perfect but you’re also getting the latest bugs. Ubuntu sounds appropriate for you! That doesn’t mean RHEL or fedora “has reached peak complexity” If you wanted RHEL or Cent/Rocky/Alma: - disable selinux on your home or personal workstation. you can get granular with how to do it too if you choose. - automate your patching it takes 5 minutes one time - if you want RHEL benefits with Fedora-adjacent (but not as buggy) releases you’re describing what is now CentOS Stream which is also a rolling-release distro I felt similar to you last year but my company uses RHEL and we just did some worth while quick training. When explained in ways that make sense, it makes sense. Unfortunately I think red hat has been lackluster several times over on how to say what I just said edit: meant to add that I hope this helps!