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My last CEO was ex-IBM. He was pissed when we (his technical team), nixed his attempt to do a storage related deal with IBM. We went through endless meetings wi

My last CEO was ex-IBM. He was pissed when we (his technical team), nixed his attempt to do a storage related deal with IBM. We went through endless meetings with dozens of people on the calls. They wanted to bring in some giant complex product and we just wanted boxes with disks. They couldn't understand that we didn't need all the striping tools they had, because our storage was just using full multiple copies across servers/disks. It was a total square peg / round hole situation and their sales team tactics were to try to discredit people individually with what amounted to as being complete lies. It really put a bad taste in my mouth to ever deal with those type of people again.

Deprecate9151 3y ago
I was at a company where that exec won. In this case it was the Infosphere suite to replace a fully mature Informatica/Teradata environment and fix all the "issues". Obviously the issues were all design and management, not technical. 3 years a tens of millions later the whole project is shut down with no value delivered except a single data store and a couple API endpoints. That exec went back to his IBM sales job. Last I heard they were still paying for and maintaining all of it because that endpoint was used in a key product offering.
- blastro 3y ago
  This is like one of those "horror stories in 2 sentences" type things.
sys_64738 3y ago
Most ex-IBMers want to "go home" in some form. It's some bizarre rationale about returning to the mothership when they were actually jettisoned. Don't get me wrong, working at IBM in the 90s was fascinating but a lot of them only had careers there.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I've known and know a not insignificant number of IBMers who were there on the order of 30 years. I've tended to stay in most jobs a fairly long time (decade plus or minus) but nothing like that. A former manager at another fairly old-line company, it will presumably be the only company he will have ever worked for--albeit through a couple acquisitions and some stuff during dot-bomb.
secretforest 3y ago
A lot of this mentality has to do with wanting a throat to choke if something goes south. The bigger the throat, the more the C-Suite rests easy, despite the costs. The old "Nobody ever got fired buying IBM has morphed into nobody ever got fired buying Microsoft/Oracle/AWS/whatever the flavor of the day." I've worked in places that refused to allow us (IT) to write programs to automate processes that would have saved enough money yearly to buy a house. They were "severely concerned" because "if you leave or get hit by a bus, who will maintain it?" I work at a place now where I can automate away with permission and prototype to show use case. I've been at this job a year and have already automated a goodly portion of the grunt work. Some of my colleagues look askance at me, and one has said, "you're automating us out of jobs, eventually, you do know this, right?" These guys/girls fear AI. I don't. I don't use it because God gave me a brain and I'm expected to exercise it. AI also feels like cheating to me. Sure, I may have to read the docs more, hit up someone on Stack Exchange, debug my code a little more, but you know what? I enjoy the challenge. I'm basically getting paid to have fun, despite the daily grind.
- latchkey 3y ago
  > A lot of this mentality has to do with wanting a throat to choke if something goes south. You're absolutely right about this on many levels. I also heard that quite a few times from my CEO, even though we often went with single smaller providers for things because he also wanted to cut corners. In this case though, I'd say it was more about nepotism. The CEO wanted the deal with his old pals in exchange for access to the IBM sales pipeline so that we could sell their customers on storage deals on our hardware deployment. The only way to get access to the deals was to buy IBM hardware that was extremely over priced and far more "capable" than what we actually needed. The fact that their sales teams outright lied about things they didn't even fully understand, was sickening for me. Thankfully other people on my team stepped up and helped prevent anything from moving forward. I agree with you, automation is key.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  >Some of my colleagues look askance at me, and one has said, "you're automating us out of jobs, eventually, you do know this, right?" These guys/girls fear AI. I don't. I don't use it because God gave me a brain and I'm expected to exercise it. AI also feels like cheating to me. I'm... Not seeing the logical connection here. If you could automate more of the work faster using AI than not using AI, why wouldn't you?

Deprecate9151 3y ago

I was at a company where that exec won. In this case it was the Infosphere suite to replace a fully mature Informatica/Teradata environment and fix all the "issues". Obviously the issues were all design and management, not technical. 3 years a tens of millions later the whole project is shut down with no value delivered except a single data store and a couple API endpoints. That exec went back to his IBM sales job. Last I heard they were still paying for and maintaining all of it because that endpoint was used in a key product offering.

blastro 3y ago
This is like one of those "horror stories in 2 sentences" type things.

sys_64738 3y ago

Most ex-IBMers want to "go home" in some form. It's some bizarre rationale about returning to the mothership when they were actually jettisoned. Don't get me wrong, working at IBM in the 90s was fascinating but a lot of them only had careers there.

ghaff 3y ago
I've known and know a not insignificant number of IBMers who were there on the order of 30 years. I've tended to stay in most jobs a fairly long time (decade plus or minus) but nothing like that. A former manager at another fairly old-line company, it will presumably be the only company he will have ever worked for--albeit through a couple acquisitions and some stuff during dot-bomb.

secretforest 3y ago

A lot of this mentality has to do with wanting a throat to choke if something goes south. The bigger the throat, the more the C-Suite rests easy, despite the costs. The old "Nobody ever got fired buying IBM has morphed into nobody ever got fired buying Microsoft/Oracle/AWS/whatever the flavor of the day." I've worked in places that refused to allow us (IT) to write programs to automate processes that would have saved enough money yearly to buy a house. They were "severely concerned" because "if you leave or get hit by a bus, who will maintain it?" I work at a place now where I can automate away with permission and prototype to show use case. I've been at this job a year and have already automated a goodly portion of the grunt work. Some of my colleagues look askance at me, and one has said, "you're automating us out of jobs, eventually, you do know this, right?" These guys/girls fear AI. I don't. I don't use it because God gave me a brain and I'm expected to exercise it. AI also feels like cheating to me. Sure, I may have to read the docs more, hit up someone on Stack Exchange, debug my code a little more, but you know what? I enjoy the challenge. I'm basically getting paid to have fun, despite the daily grind.

latchkey 3y ago
> A lot of this mentality has to do with wanting a throat to choke if something goes south. You're absolutely right about this on many levels. I also heard that quite a few times from my CEO, even though we often went with single smaller providers for things because he also wanted to cut corners. In this case though, I'd say it was more about nepotism. The CEO wanted the deal with his old pals in exchange for access to the IBM sales pipeline so that we could sell their customers on storage deals on our hardware deployment. The only way to get access to the deals was to buy IBM hardware that was extremely over priced and far more "capable" than what we actually needed. The fact that their sales teams outright lied about things they didn't even fully understand, was sickening for me. Thankfully other people on my team stepped up and helped prevent anything from moving forward. I agree with you, automation is key.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
>Some of my colleagues look askance at me, and one has said, "you're automating us out of jobs, eventually, you do know this, right?" These guys/girls fear AI. I don't. I don't use it because God gave me a brain and I'm expected to exercise it. AI also feels like cheating to me. I'm... Not seeing the logical connection here. If you could automate more of the work faster using AI than not using AI, why wouldn't you?