Food for Deep Thought: 42 is IBM's answer to Life, the Universe and Everything... Deep Thought calculated the number 42 to be the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. Over at IBM it was the frequency the word "transform" was used to explain another dire quarter. The supercomputer in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy took 7.5 million years to determine the importance of …
It all began with a BBC radio play :) The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Hmm.
"IBM carved up the business in spring 2015 after selling System x to Lenovo, is making multiple buys of cloud and software companies, and seems to be constantly hiring new skills while expunging some of the old guard."
"IBM carved up the business in spring 2015 after selling System x to Lenovo, is making multiple buys of cloud and software companies, and seems to be constantly expunging new skills while keeping most of the old guard."
Fixed that one for you.
IBM's problems are manifold, but the largest is that their products are all old. Mainframe, AIX, DB2, Tivoli, WebSphere, Lotus, Cognos, etc. You are not going to find one of those in a business which has been created in the last 20 years and most of the older businesses are moving off, at a snail's pace in some cases. IBM makes good products. People, especially their old guard customers, might be willing to deal with not having the latest and greatest (and paying a premium) if IBM treated them like they used to treat them... but customers are getting the same Wall St beat down employees are getting... software audits, cut rate support, fewer people helping them, etc. It's a shame. I worked at IBM and thoroughly enjoyed it for the vast majority of my time there. Really smart, dedicated, organized and mostly helpful people. It isn't the front lines causing this problem. It is management decision making. Somewhere along the line Palmisano and co, including Rometty, decided that they could just stop innovating because, as Palmisano put it, they are a "mature business" whose shareholders expected a better return (according to his magic 8 ball). IBM stopped investing in innovation and acquisitions at anywhere near the rate they needed to in order to stay on top of the always spinning tech treadmill. Even the acquisitions mentioned are small ball, like the Weather Company's digital assets. That isn't going to move the needle at IBM.
Also, this is the same Wall St "shareholder return" thinking that is killing many of the older tech companies. IBM is just more aggressive than the others. If you start worrying about buybacks and such in tech, you are going to get passed by some other company pumping every dime they can borrow into their org and product to compete.
So much like the round-robin ouroboros email process they use to get things (not)done.
Seriously, the day to day bureaucratic metric nightmare for the average IBM contractor employee and managers is literally taking up half of their 8 hour workday.
Do not EVER work for IBM. It looks good on your CV/resume, but you will never again respect them nor recommend them nor accept work for them. Barring a "transformative" miracle, their time is coming to an end over the next decades.
I think IBM is a great place to work when you are starting out (not the launching pad it once was, but still pretty good). I have a difficult time speaking poorly of IBM because they were great to me even though I know exactly what you are talking about. They provided me with excellent training and great opportunities. They were always more than fair to me until the last year or two. I think, like many large companies, it is ALL about where you work within the company. If you work in GTS/GBS at IBM, that isn't going to be good. Likewise with systems group and most of software. They are considered legacy businesses which they are just trying to squeeze profit out of at this point. You need to find a division on an up swing with a ton of cash. Watson or security would probably be that division today at IBM. I work for another giant tech company now and it has become apparent to me in the first few months that I am not in one of the good divisions. That is the amazing thing to me about these large tech firms. Success or failure is basically predetermined based upon which group you happen to be hired into... and there is little you can do at the outset to know that you are getting into a good or bad position. There is no notion, despite the giant HR orgs, that employees should be given the same or similar criteria for success or failure across roles and divisions. I see people who cannot tie their shoes who are treated as heroes at my current company because their job roles are just cake with low performance bars. Others, like myself, who are just put behind the 8 ball from day one. I was probably in one of the easier division at IBM, so it worked out well. I certainly know people in services, in particular, who didn't have a chance and I could have told them that the day they started. Check out Glassdoor and you will find people writing glowing reviews of IBM. I think it is because they are either in a good division or they have a cake job (e.g. marketing, HR). There is no singular IBM or any other firm. It is all about the division, function and your manager.... If these HR divisions actually were doing their jobs, they would run some retention stats and performance stats across all functions and all divisions. They would then normalize them. You would then come up with questions like "why are the sales/pre-sales engineering people 8x as likely to leave the company, voluntarily or not, as an HR or marketing employee?" "Why is everyone in division x a low performer with low tenure while everyone in division y is high performer with high tenure?"
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