4 ms·

Making thing simpler is hard. Any technical excellence at IBM is probably an island and definitely doesn't represent the rest of the company. In my time there

Making thing simpler is hard. Any technical excellence at IBM is probably an island and definitely doesn't represent the rest of the company. In my time there, only one thing mattered: head count (or more precisely, body count). It didn't matter if those heads could think. It was all about closing outsourcing contracts and making a profit. With the occasional sprinkle of Watson propaganda sprinkled on top to make it look like you were at the pinnacle of computing. I'm surprised IBM still exists. I can't remember a single company that I worked for where IBM would have helped anything.

hinkley 3y ago
IBM isn’t just accidentally leaving things complex, they sell tools that fix problems almost nobody has. What’s that XML RPC gateway they were peddling years ago? Jesus Christ just use nginx and learn to manage certs.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  'Fond' memories for monstrosities like Websphere or MQ servers. Take trivial JMS or less-trivial-but-grokkable J2EE spec, add 10x more ultra-proprietary stuff that is very complex to grok compared to original spec, solves little on top in real world, makes you utterly vendor-locked in for every app until complete rewrite. You need additional Eclipse-based apps to work with it at all, and IIRC they were costly as hell too. Rinse and repeat. Then there was Weblogic, that worked as well and mostly by standards. Devs I met everywhere loved it.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    > Take trivial JMS or less-trivial-but-grokkable J2EE spec, MQSeries predates Java itself and started out on MVS; it was already the way it is when the JMS spec was developed. There's no real excuse for WebSphere, though.
- twisteriffic 3y ago
  From painful personal experience there are about 3 people in all of IBM who understand PKI well enough to configure a server.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Maybe it's because I have very good spatial intelligence, but I always found PKI to be a lot simpler than most people made it out to be. People treating me like some sort of priest of the church of crypto when generating and signing keys is really not that hard. PKI is like a kitchen knife. The hard part is not getting one, or picking it up, it's using it without cutting yourself. But people treat the 'knife' like all aspects are magical.
    - bbkane 3y ago
      I've found it ok to understand maybe 70% of PKI, but that I always need to review that last 30% (OSCP stapling, cross signing certs, whatever the heck the formats are, different extensions, more that I'm forgetting). I've put my favorite learning resources and tools into https://www.bbkane.com/blog/learn-ssl/ https://www.bbkane.com/blog/learn-ssl/
  - eropple 3y ago
    I was at IBM for about five months, a few years ago. It took from ~2 weeks after my start date until ~1 week before my last day to get a vSphere cluster provisioned for my development work. PKI? Sounds hard, by comparison.
    - twisteriffic 3y ago
      Probably outsourced internal dev environments to Kyndryl too?
      - eropple 3y ago
        Surprisingly no, not for this project. It was an acquisition, and the developers had come with - so had their data center. I was hired to try to help move it out of their on-prem location. They'd hired me specifically saying it was going to AWS; then they went "whoops! all IBM Cloud" a couple weeks in, and they never actually got me a fully working environment to build against in the few months I was there. (The one nice thing I'd say is that teams from all over IBM were incredibly helpful; some externally-facing consultants actually volunteered a couple hours to try to help undo whatever Softlayer had open-palm slammed onto my virtual machines. They too were confused.)
gregw134 3y ago
LLMs are sure going to make the Watson advertising look outdated.
- nnurmanov 3y ago
  IBM is offering a Cobol to Java migration service and it is based on LLM (watsonx). Will it save them?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

hinkley 3y ago

IBM isn’t just accidentally leaving things complex, they sell tools that fix problems almost nobody has. What’s that XML RPC gateway they were peddling years ago? Jesus Christ just use nginx and learn to manage certs.

saiya-jin 3y ago
'Fond' memories for monstrosities like Websphere or MQ servers. Take trivial JMS or less-trivial-but-grokkable J2EE spec, add 10x more ultra-proprietary stuff that is very complex to grok compared to original spec, solves little on top in real world, makes you utterly vendor-locked in for every app until complete rewrite. You need additional Eclipse-based apps to work with it at all, and IIRC they were costly as hell too. Rinse and repeat. Then there was Weblogic, that worked as well and mostly by standards. Devs I met everywhere loved it.
- meepmorp 3y ago
  > Take trivial JMS or less-trivial-but-grokkable J2EE spec, MQSeries predates Java itself and started out on MVS; it was already the way it is when the JMS spec was developed. There's no real excuse for WebSphere, though.
twisteriffic 3y ago
From painful personal experience there are about 3 people in all of IBM who understand PKI well enough to configure a server.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Maybe it's because I have very good spatial intelligence, but I always found PKI to be a lot simpler than most people made it out to be. People treating me like some sort of priest of the church of crypto when generating and signing keys is really not that hard. PKI is like a kitchen knife. The hard part is not getting one, or picking it up, it's using it without cutting yourself. But people treat the 'knife' like all aspects are magical.
  - bbkane 3y ago
    I've found it ok to understand maybe 70% of PKI, but that I always need to review that last 30% (OSCP stapling, cross signing certs, whatever the heck the formats are, different extensions, more that I'm forgetting). I've put my favorite learning resources and tools into https://www.bbkane.com/blog/learn-ssl/ https://www.bbkane.com/blog/learn-ssl/
- eropple 3y ago
  I was at IBM for about five months, a few years ago. It took from ~2 weeks after my start date until ~1 week before my last day to get a vSphere cluster provisioned for my development work. PKI? Sounds hard, by comparison.
  - twisteriffic 3y ago
    Probably outsourced internal dev environments to Kyndryl too?
    - eropple 3y ago
      Surprisingly no, not for this project. It was an acquisition, and the developers had come with - so had their data center. I was hired to try to help move it out of their on-prem location. They'd hired me specifically saying it was going to AWS; then they went "whoops! all IBM Cloud" a couple weeks in, and they never actually got me a fully working environment to build against in the few months I was there. (The one nice thing I'd say is that teams from all over IBM were incredibly helpful; some externally-facing consultants actually volunteered a couple hours to try to help undo whatever Softlayer had open-palm slammed onto my virtual machines. They too were confused.)

gregw134 3y ago

LLMs are sure going to make the Watson advertising look outdated.

nnurmanov 3y ago
IBM is offering a Cobol to Java migration service and it is based on LLM (watsonx). Will it save them?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]