What the IBM Layoffs Look Like
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Our client gave IBM the IP addresses to be white listed. They filled in a lengthy time consuming form that got sent through layers of IBM management till some ops team in India finally implemented the change one week later.
We started testing. It didn't work. We went back and forth for weeks. Finally we put a conference call together with all parties. Live on the phone we sent a series of SOAP requests over the wire. "Yes, we can see the requests", came the answer. We saw no response.
Finally whilst on the phone call, one of the IBM Tech's piped up.
"Did you want this traffic to go in AND out?", he asked.
"Well, HTTP traffic isn't going to be of much use if we don't get a response to our request you idiots", was the answer I wanted to give.
They pulled out the initial firewall request form. The request was to "allow traffic from our IP addresses in through the firewall to reach the client".
They took that absolutely literally, and nobody thought to question it. They also absolved themselves of any blame.
I detested IBM from that day on.
Maybe it's a language barrier?
We're seeing this a lot - doing projects directly with marketing department, largely so they can completely circumvent internal IT department's and their apparent stonewalling on seemingly simple requests.
(Of course it also means we're seeing things like completely outlandish requests that indicate fundamental security/privacy misunderstandings ("What do you mean you can't import our entire customer database into the WordPress site you're building and hosting cheaply for us?"), as well as last minute compliance intrusions ("Oh, you need this to live on a big-corp.com subdomain? That requires a security audit and risk assessment and mitigation document! How on earth have you got this far without knowing that?")
Though I don't understand the problem you experienced -- HTTP runs over a bidirectional TCP connection, if they got your request, then packets for that session were already flowing in both directions (the TCP session wouldn't set up otherwise). The only way I could see what you described would be if they had a proxy or some sort of deep inspection firewall in the middle that was blocking the return response.
Sure thing, do exactly what you're told.
That doesn't preclude you from firing back a message to say "Hey, this request is unusual and almost certainly wrong, are you sure this is what you wanted?"
When a nurse sees an order for 10000 mg of a drug that's never normally administered above 200mg, it's not their job to correct anything, but it is their job to ask the doctor "Hey, did you mean to write 100.00mg? Is this actually correct?"
I'm not sure why you're being down voted if other big enterprises didn't have this issue they would not put up with IBM having this issue. It is all about minimal work, CYA, and minimal thinking. It is why I always tell people that anyone who can really do IT (probably most on this site), will always have a job.
If you're outsourcing your operations, that's what you have to expect. They're not going to be as invested in your success as your own employees would be.
Question sounds reasonable - could be a fire & forget scenario.
Problem isn't the question but that it takes a week between iterations. If you had to order lunch and it was a week between asking for your steak and being asked if you want it medium or well done then the question isn't the problem
They were incredibly dependent on their filter rules, and their process assumed the filter rules were always correct and accurate.
One night I got confused about which window I was in and ssh'd into my desktop machine (on the internal 9/8 network) from one of the ibm.com backend servers (on the open internet). A "routine update" caused routes for 9.0.0.0/8 to be advertised on the open internet. Although I had a short escalation path it still took an hour from when I discovered the hole to get anyone in Global Services to accept it as a problem.
I doubt there are many companies who are 100% on top of things, but I get the sense that's more down to the department or the individuals you're dealing with. There are people who don't think things through everywhere. I certainly wouldn't bear a grudge against IBM for too long!
Now I avoid dealing with outsourcers as much as possible unless I have 100% understanding of the issue and can describe it precisely.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487035155045761420...
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/beh...
http://www.rozinskiy.com/why-india-outsourcing-is-doomed/
Those are from the top of the fold of the Google search "quality of Indian tech workers."
1.) If at all possible, don't take a full time job in a technical org who's membership is greater than Dunbar's number (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)
2.) If at all possible, don't take a full time job in a technical org that is viewed as a cost center (e.g. the code you write/systems you maintain don't generate revenue).
These are no guarantee of job stability, but the violation of rule #1 (e.g. big honkin' tech == dumb decisions & middle mgmt morons) or rule #2 (e.g. you are a cost to be managed & cut) are far more likely to lead to job instability. Jut my personal experience & $0.02USD.
If an org can grow beyond the tribal size & still maintain trust & agility - please share! I've got a good theory about how Spotify operates (see https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-cult...) but I don't know if they've effectively crossed or exceeded this scope of personal trust & relationships.
And I would wager that 80% of all IT employment is done at companies where IT is not their main source of income. At that point, you're automatically a cost center. Your second rule is saying "never work anywhere that doesn't produce technology as their main business", which forces everyone to live in San Fransisco.
Besides, IT is not a cost center for IBM, it's part of their core business. And they still lay people off.
SF is hardly the only place on the planet where tech is their direct business.
That's a long stable career in IT in a department bigger than what he wants the entire company to be where IT is a cost center. If you're limiting yourself to tiny tech companies, you're missing out on a lot. Maybe company size and products sold aren't necessarily a good indicator of your career success...?
Your point #2 is idiotic. There are 300K employees at IBM. It's essentially like hundreds if not thousands of mini-companies within IBM. I work at IBM in a division that generates revenue, a lot of it.
I don't see why #2 is idiotic. Simply put, don't look like a cost to be cut & you're less likely to be.
Again, FWIW - these are my own personal and admittedly biased "rules" they've served me well. Your mileage may vary;)
Ex: You work on a project with ~20 people, 3 or 4 teams report to one manager.
Completely agree. Just don't take a full time job in an org that is viewed as a cost center, period.
Never going to happen. The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing they're above the simple garbage man or postal worker. After all they create such value. Admitting a union would help acknowledges they're not special.
IT workers could demand protection from the same abuses that custodians and delivery drivers fought for and earned decades ago. But then the industry might need to admit their collars aren't as white as they pretend.
But more to the point, if you desire a work/life balance you absolutely can find a programming job that will allow it. It'll pay less than the unpaid overtime job, but it exists, and will still pay more than most occupations.
You're fucking insane if you think the plight of the average programmer is anywhere near what custodians go through. I used to work for one of these IBM-like offshoring firms before I knew better and the quality of their work is simply garbage(there's some good people in there of course). For example, I was called in to troubleshoot a faulty URL - I asked them for it; they linked me to a localhost page. Other joys included network engineers who didn't know what port SSH runs on and Java programmers who literally copy-pasted straight from the web.
Because the union scandals of the 60s and 70s never happened, of course.
I assume you're referring to the current fascination with socialism? You know, that great political innovation that lead to a hundred million murders in the 20th century.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
You should look into the history of unions. You might be surprised at their non-progressive / non-egalitarian origins. You don't need a "right-wing opinion machine" to besmirch the name of unions; you simply have to look at the long history of state-union corruption.
Does your 100million lives include the many millions the USA has helped see to their deaths?
I couldn't resist.
Maybe a mix of Glass Door with Adhocracy or Liquid Feedback
The electricians all left at 5 PM. They belonged to the IBEW and had pension plans, job security with seniority etc. IT used to bitch about how they'd leave at 5 PM when we had to start doing some work. They would have stayed past 5 PM, but the super wealthy bank would have had to pay them (not us) overtime, and they almost never did that.
The other IT people would also moan about how stupid they were compared to us. How stupid are they? They leave at 5 PM, or get overtime if they do, they have job security, they don't have to work all hours or are paid well if they do any how, they had pensions and job security based on seniority. Who were the real fools?
If what you really believed was true there's no way that someone like Barbara Lee could be in office with such huge wins every two years when so many of her constituents are the same people that work in the area you think is so terrible. Why are you even posting on HN? This is a technical news site.
This idea that all of us are equal (we are not even factoring in luck) is really just a modern day PC version of the way the world is not.
As an aside, I always leave the garbage man Gatorades because frankly the job looks like it sucks.
The guys that haul trash have got it exactly right. It's a hard job that no one wants to do so they know their worth and when they demand they get it. If I lose Facebook for an hour its a bummer. If the trash isn't hauled away its a health hazard.
> It's a hard job that no one wants to do so they know their worth
Well not exactly. They have a union in most cities and some of those jobs the pay is so good there is a waiting line to get the job actually. And since they can strike in many contracts they have quite a bit of leverage (what you are saying).
Link below is without overtime pay. In some cases with overtime the pay can easily be 6 figure. I can assure you that there are many takers for this job, although perhaps where you live that might not be the case of course.
Examples:
New York:
http://salarygenius.com/ny/new-york/salary/garbage-man-salar...
Cincinnati:
http://salarygenius.com/oh/cincinnati/salary/garbage-man-sal...
The issue is not whether one is special but special relative to someone who does that type of menial repetitive job.
And just that I think I have more capabilities than the average garbage man or postal worker. And I grew up in a time when it was ok to say something like that by the way.
But the HN Hivemind doesn't want to hear this, apparently.
It doesn't even matter whether you're right or not but you can't attack people's self-worth and expect to be rewarded for it.
Sort of like if I were to say that all company owners and management are fraudulent exploitative criminals.
Were you expecting upvotes ?
To self-nominate yourself as "more worthy" than others seems a road down a slippery and ugly path.
Then again, my worthy ancestors have fought on both sides of numerous bloody disagreements over this very concept.
More generally, and I mean this quite generally, I tend to find externally imposed tests far preferable to internally imposed ones. Human eugenics is internally imposed. The incestuous processes of party politics and academic mutual admiration societies strike me as similar. Likewise, to venture into more locally fraught, if less literally gut-spilling ground, defenses of Web or application layout and design which concern themselves with everything but what actual users actually need.
There's also the possibility that someday you'll find yourself less able, or perhaps just recognised and rewarded, than you are now. Will a deaf, or blinded, or crippled, or sick, or depressed, or senile you be less worthy than you are now? Be careful how you answer that, because the loads imposed should you find yourself there are all the more crushing.
Go out there. Do your fucking job, and do it well, for as long as you can.
But let others tell you you're a good person.
It's one of the better ways to be one.
Are you better in terms of intrinsic worth as a human being? No, they're just as human as you are.
Are you better in terms of physical strength or stamina, as mattwood asked? No.
Are you better morally than them? (Remember that "morally" includes not just overt acts like theft or murder. It also includes things like pride.)
Or is it merely, as you said in your reply to mattwood, that you think you're better mentally? (And perhaps in terms of achieving financial results.) But of all the possible axes of measurement, why did you pick that one to be the definition of "better"? (Cynically, I wonder if you didn't pick it because it's the one you win on...)
Yes. And I really don't see why you'd bring up pride, since if that's something that comes to your mind when you think about moral superiority, then you're barking up the wrong tree with the rest of 'em.
Demanding to the employer: "Either keep our jobs in this country or we're going to stop working!", seems like it would just accelerate the offshoring.
If every company is taxed heavily for outshoring work, it would be impossible for Joe's Call Center to employ 1,000 people and make enough profit for them to be competitive vs just hiring the workers directly.
Unless you forsee taxing all companies for all oversees work, I don't see how that can work.
And I'm not sure how you can effectively tax a company for all overseas labor, for example, a computer is made up of thousands of components with thousands of suppliers, how can you tax IBM for the low-paid subcontracted labor that mines the minerals that are sold to a manufacturer that makes the plastic that's sold to another manufacturer to create the dielectric for capacitors that's sold to another subcontractor that makes the capacitors that are sold to another subcontrator that glues them on the big tape reels that are sold to another subcontractor that loads them into the pick and place machines that are used by another contractor to build a board that's used by another subcontractor to build a computer for IBM.
How far down the chain do you plan on going with taxation? It's easy to look at the simple case and say "Tax overseas workers!" but it's actually quite complicated to come up with rules do actually do so since there's no clear line that divides employees and non-employees. And if you draw that line, the company will move its workers to the otherside of the line.
Start with the low-hanging fruit and target specific industries. Call center, direct marketing, etc. Perhaps a tax break for not tasking, directly or indirectly, an offshore company for any primary business need. (The law has the benefit of not being code - a judge can see through most avoidance schemes)
There's probably a nontrivial healthcare cost benefit in reducing the collective country's blood pressure from being able to talk to someone they can understand when they need help..
(Only sort of kidding about that last bit...)
The reason H1Bs are popular is it allows cheap workers whom can be managed in the US onsite. The management that uses H1Bs doesn't want to move the whole department overseas; if they did, they themselves wouldn't be needed. Executives grow their departments as big as possible as a political goal.
Someone could reverse engineer this, but they fired him too.
The process might be disrupted seriously. But - who would care?
Or they fly him in from overseas and say "Hey, see that stack of forms? You are your team have to figure out how they get entered into the computer so we can make more Widgets"
Here in Germany, Nokia was forced to either find alternative jobs for the employees of a plant they were closing down or to return to the local government all the subsidies that had gotten to built the plant.
I have worked for a few companies that have gone out of business. Looking for work afterwards is mostly a screening job, picking the work I want to do out of the various offers. Every time, I have been hired for more money than I was making before (it is common knowledge that changing jobs is the best way to get raises)
It isn't like I am some hotshot developer, either. I am not a networking type person, so all of my contacts are just people I have worked with at previous shops. The reason it is so easy to find work is because there are simply more jobs available than qualified workers.
I know this because I have been on the other side, too (trying to hire people). It is really hard to find quality developers, because they always have multiple offers.
Why would workers in this situation want or need to collectively bargain? Every place I have worked needs me more than I need them.
If this is actually true, in any situation where this happens, you are being underpaid, because it implies the employer is getting more out of your employment arrangement than you are.
I know what you meant, it is just the semantics of economics are precarious and a lot of people would fight tooth and nail to be in a position to bargain for more because of a situation where an employer values the worker much more than the worker values the employer. You want equilibrium where the worker gets as much from the employer as they can, which is when employer and work both get as much out as one another.
The only way an employee can be paid as much money as he brings in for the company is if he is self employed.
I know quite a few countries where being a IT person won't matter one tiny thing.
It is job hunting and begging like everyone else.
When the location doesn't matter, it is all about the price.
There is no shortage as such, what there is, are the conditions that many companies offer, where sometimes is better to not even have a job than working endless hours almost for free.
And if you want names for countries, in Portugal unless you are living in Porto or Lisbon there is a very thin possibility to land a developer job. And there aren't enough companies in those cities to employ everyone.
A large majority has been forced to go away to other countries.
Edit: And those that are above 40 have even a harder time finding something as a developer, because you are supposed to just be a manager.
Having been through two tech downturns, and unemployed at points in both of them, I can guarantee you the job environment you describe is temporary.
For now. We've had a good few years.
Every skilled craftsman in every generation in the history of civilization has made this claim. Why do you think your position of privilege is any more lasting than that of weavers or threshers?
At that point, I will need to learn a new skill (and/or retire).
Professionalization also helps in screening potential employees. Right now it's kind of a crapshoot unless you have some firm informal signal that the potential hire is quality. Usually that signal is past employment at well-known firm with high standards.
The ironic part is we have close to 10 million people out of work (not including those who have permanently fallen out of the workforce) - you think at least some of those people could fill those jobs?
Most of the applicants would provide negative value if hired.
Yes, some people get to buy new yachts when they stop buying labor from American workers. We could prevent them from buying labor from other workers, or we could do something about the yachts.
Let's try these first, see how it works.
We should celebrate when problems become cheaper to solve.
Personally, I'd rather see the wealthy fund more public goods. Few people are struggling, and we should support them. Other than that, let's pursue abundance together instead of trying to adjust relative wealth.
You have an interesting take on it; I'll respect that and leave it at that.
Not sure if this applies to your company but I have some prior experience as one of those SME/consultant/contractor guys.
For one particular multi-national company whom we did a lot of work, they had an entire dedicated team of (underutilized) engineers/technologists that should have been more than capable of doing the work we provided.
Aside from the hour or two of daily PM work, the entire staff would disappear for the rest of their shift and reappear just in time to check out. To this day, I still have no clue where everybody would go. I'm not talking about an isolated incident, I saw the same pattern take place over the course of months.
Why was this allowed? Why was the company willing to pay us a premium to do work that could have been handled internally?
It was a non-union shop. The company had established a very firm and well defined scope of work. Adding additional responsibilities could screw up the balance and put the company and it's daily operations at risk. In the bigger picture of things, paying contractors/consultants a premium + expenses to do the extra work is an order of magnitude less expensive than the possibility of unionization. Just the cost savings on HR overhead (ex managing disgruntled workers, hiring new people) alone probably made up for what we charged.
You should've seen the amount of hell raised when the coffee provided was downgraded from Starbucks to a cheaper blend.
The whole work environment felt a lot like some sort of bizarre Mexican standoff between worker and company interests. The company would have a very difficult time maintaining operations and hiring replacements if their workers were pissed off enough to leave. Meanwhile, as much as their workers liked to complain, they had been working under such limited responsibilities for so many years that -- in terms of engineering and/or raw technical skills -- most of them would be useless elsewhere.
This may in part explain why many large corporations show a strong preference for H1-B workers. Not only are they incapable of unionization but they keep the senior staff motivated by fear of their jobs being replaced/outsourced. Whatever the overhead cost/complexity, it pales in comparison to disrupting operations and/or being bent over a barrel on union/compensation negotiations.
It also explains the preference for hiring millenials. Millenials have been screwed since day one. Starting from ridiculous education loans/costs. Extending to being forced to work unpaid/underpaid internships to make up for lack of unrealistic industry experience requirements. The idea of a company/union providing any form of protection is so far from our reality that we don't even consider it as an option.
Tired of being screwed by your company? Pack up and move on to another company. Resume shows lots of movement? Too much ambition is bad for business. Can't deal with the stress/complexity of regularly changing jobs? Better learn to enjoy being screwed.
Engineering for many industries is a cost center and hell hath no fury like a team of bored senior engineers with an over-inflated sense of entitlement.
Outsourcing can be used to reduce risk, avoid management complications, and shift CapEx (ie permanent employees) to OpEx (ie disposable contractors). Offshoring sucks but there's virtually no legal risk involved with firing overseas workers en masse. H1-Bs cost the same as local workers but have so many legal limitations that they're essentially the modern equivalent of indentured servants.
I feel bad for anyone losing their job but if your company does not make anything and is this large what hope is there?
I agree with you in general though - IBM is all about the lock-in. zSystem, for example, is basically a product for mainframe users (i.e. banks) who are petrified of updating their software and will pay whatever it takes to get an incrementally faster replacement. It literally lets you run your System/360 programs that you wrote 50 years ago, and System/360 was designed to directly replace physical tabulator machines. So your program logic may be the best part of a century old. It's basically the IBM-est product.
What have they bought that is fairly recent and is highly popular? Lotus notes and rational are older applications. Who the heck uses DB2 instead of Oracle/MySQL/Postgres? When was the last time you heard of a company becoming a new customer of DB2? Of choosing DB2 over the other database products on the market?
Maybe they do make stuff but I have not heard of them buying anything relatively new on the market that is popular. Oracle is always buying new companies and adding them to their offerings (Workday, BigMachines to name a few). What is new that IBM bought that is GROWING? Lotus Notes, Rational and DB2 are not GROWING.
Berkshire Hathaway buys companies that are growing. Name a company that IBM bought that is adding new customers.
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Don't do it guys, really don't....
Also, I've seen a LOT of companies to do this and it never ends well. This is usually a harbinger of metrics slipping, profit goals missed and shaky investors getting out. Which in turn means the company is in a slide. Moving their stuff overseas is a way to show investors they're trying to cut costs.
It never works. I can name a half-dozen companies off the top of my head that did this and it actually made the situation worse not better. Some of those companies are still struggling to make it back.
Here are some off the top of my head:
1 - IBM
2 - Honeywell
3 - Cargill
4 - Thomson Reuters
5 - Best Buy
6 - Wells Fargo
I'm actually somewhat surprised by this move by IBM. Most companies I know of wised up to the fact that the total cost of ownership of the system goes up with outsourcing and you get a sub par product and as a result stopped outsourcing any kind of core development en masse.
I myself have seen a few of the outsourced projects fail as well with a couple of exceptions where the core team was not outsourced but some of the "busy work" type development - CRUD etc - was outsourced and then integrated into the core product. Still was painful logistically and savings weren't all that great at the end of the day.
[1]: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/reversing-t...
he promises things he knows he can not deliver, but that fit the needs of the people that would vote for him. they can't risk that he might actually be able to deliver and no one else is making those promises, and so they take a chance.
like buying lottery tickets with your last dollar.
It's amazing that those who are near the bottom of the ladder will spend more time making sure those that are underneath them stay there rather than look above them.
Life is good in the country and I wish more companies would consider setting up development offices where low cost housing was very nearby office space. Save money and still be in convenient time zones.
I have what is probably an unpopular opinion, but I can't really blame corporations for using foreign development centers. However, I would like to see them penalized via slightly higher tax rates.
Between that and Softlayer / Bluemix / Compose / Cloudant they have a serious cloud offering if they do some consolidation.
Truly a race to the bottom.
And totally agree that most of it is garbage.
To make matters worse, the CEO/board can justify higher levels of compensation if they greatly expand the size/scope of the company. Whether or not the growth matches the market trends. Just look to all the comments of employees complaining how their job is to warm a seat and/or maintain excess/unnecessary administration overhead.
The exception are companies like Facebook that refuse to cede decision making to the board. It pisses off investors when the company fails to extract value at a rate matching investor expectations but I bet FB will fare much better in the long-term. Unlike companies like Yahoo/IBM that morphed into pump-and-dump chop shops of underutilized talent.
In theory, it's a great idea. Who wouldn't love to be an early employee of the 'next Microsoft' and win the successful business lottery?
In practice there are some very serious caveats:
1. Non-preferred stock may be rendered worthless after multiple rounds of seed funding.
2. Some stock come with additional restrictions. Such as requiring the person to maintain employment for an extended period of time.
3. Many can't afford the tax costs that come with exercising their options when they get the chance.
4. In some cases you may end up with a net negative of stock earnings after paying the taxes.
5. Exercising early can help avoid some of the tax pain but then you're essentially betting on the future success of a company with a high risk of failure.
Basically, working for a startup at significantly below market salary is joining the game of high stakes poker for the rich. Except, unlike poker the game comes with a minefield of additional risks.
If the employees were 'true' stakeholders working as a partnership then everybody wins. Unfortunately, that very rarely happens and sometimes relationships go sour during the death march to potential success.
When money is involved, the only thing that guaranteed is that people will play fucky fuck games for an advantage if they think they can get away with it.
Do you think you could you persuade IBM's board (a proxy for their shareholders) that as a US worker you really deserve >10x the pay of an 'equivalent' worker in some other countries?
History will continue to repeat itself across corporate behemoths. The process is just too compelling with a short-term profit motive in a globalized economy.
Xenophobia is a common reaction to this. It misses the point. There are great people amongst your 'replacements' who are hired. There will also be terrible people. The same would happen if the process was entirely contained within one country. Imagine trying to hire the bulk of a skilled companies' workforce in one go. It's a disaster.
The kicker is that just like acquisition, outsourcing is rarely successful. The upfront financial benefits are clear. The true costs are from a change a workforce - lost knowledge, skills, quality and ethos (The things that really power a company to success). By the time they realize their mistake - it's too late, and a new management who haven't learnt the lessons will have already been rotated in.
Companies die of old age. Big blue is playing chess with the reaper.
Just like in the movie Brazil - they ruin that guys life because a bug got in the type-machine which was putting out the papers for whom to go after, and it made the machine spell the wrong name.
However, if you have not seen this documentary, I highly recommend you watch it, called "Human Resources": http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/human-resources/
EDIT: What they SHOULD use watson for is to determine of those being laid off from the current position, how suitable they would be to internally apply for the one of 25,000 openings.
They should limit Watson to tell them who should be RA'd to a new job - not who should be let go. Obviously those NOT scored to stay by watson are in the set of pink-slips implicitly.
While clearly lazy / incompetent people who deserve to be laid off exist, I think one should stay humble and realize that a lot of how one's life works out is pure luck (or a lack of it), after all.
Imagine if Watson was an app. What would you do with it? As I understand it, it takes an oblique textual reference of some kind and turns it into a concrete, explicit reference. You talk about something and it figures out what you're talking about. That's great! It's a hard problem and it's extremely impressive that it's been solved.
But in practical value terms, that's just a toy. And when would it be more useful than Google Search, or Wikipedia, or Siri? Can Watson do anything, book a trip, set a timer? Well, that capability would have to be plugged in, along with voice recognition and speech synthesis. But can it reliably determine what I want it to do? Or even whether I want it to do anything? Can it follow a conversation? Is it even stateful? What, if any, role does the core Watson functionality play in the systems which eventually do these things?
And how does Watson generalise to other areas? IBM was looking at applying it to healthcare. How would this work? Presumably, here your "oblique textual reference" is a collection of data (symptoms and measurements) collected from a patient, and the end result is a diagnosis, like "What is rubella?". Now, firstly, how useful is that? Is that the hard part of being a doctor? What about carrying out the tests, what about prescribing treatment or choosing further tests? What about missing hints, e.g. can Watson handle visual data from simply looking at a patient? Or does the doctor have to inform Watson that the patient is leaning slightly to her right when she sits, and has trouble getting onto the bed? So does Watson's single trick actually help, does it even slightly alleviate the workload of a medical professional?
And secondly, how readily does Watson adapt from the world of general knowledge quiz answers to the world of medical diagnoses? Are these worlds even remotely structurally similar? Can they be modelled and correlated using the same basic structures? Is there some heavy modification and serious domain knowledge needed to alter Watson to do this? Or are the two problems basically on different planets, such that an entirely different machine needs to be built?
The same goes for applying Watson to business analytics, for example. In my mind, Watson is a machine which, as it currently exists, best case scenario, can look at all of your financial graphs and go "Ding! You're in a recession." And then nothing else. This may be of some use, but I doubt it.
All of this is ignoring the backend, which is that Watson in reality is this monumental pile of expensive, high-performance hardware and IBM Research code - and we all know how much research code ever resembles a working, saleable product. All of that to handle one real-time quiz game. You're going to shrink that until it fits in one office? Or you're going to have a server farm full of them serving requests at great expense?
I feel like people perceive Watson as a hair's breadth from strong AI, and IBM doesn't want to disabuse anybody of that notion. But I think the really valuable stuff in Watson - advances in computing techniques which I don't really know anything about but I'm certain must be there - is far less tangible, and is going to be very difficult to extricate from Watson itself, let alone monetize.
Just off the top of my head. Unsourced hunches.
I don't have anything against overseas labor and I've worked at companies where the overseas dev teams are first class citizens and produce work that's comparable to the work produced here, but IBM is not one of those companies.
Shipping jobs overseas sucks. I live in the Midwest where most cities were hit by manufacturing going overseas, and my own family was impacted hard by it, like most people's were. I work in IT, so of course I know how much offshoring sucks. And I know what I'm about to say is going to be controversial. I'm not saying it to be glib or to downplay the pain that losing your job inflicts upon the whole family. What I'm saying is a warning.
Because this kind of stuff isn't new. It's not like this is the first time anyone has ever heard of sending jobs to other countries. And in terms of layoffs in general, IBM has 500,000 employees and is constantly restructuring itself to stay competitive in the ever-changing tech market. When mainframe and storage had a big layoff last year, my response as an IBMer was "we still have mainframe and storage people?" We spun off (or spun down) those parts of the business a long time ago, you had to have realized that your days were numbered.
I work for a hot part of IBM. A part of IBM that makes the company a lot of money. My job is fairly secure. But I know it won't be like that forever. Hell, it won't be like that for more than a handful of years. Because things change constantly. Right now I'm working on a project that will automate quite a bit of my work. And I'm hoping to take the skills from I've learned from that and using them to launch into the next hot thing.
Yes, when it's my turn to be laid off I will complain so loudly that they will hear me in whatever offshore country happens to take my job. But to be honest, by then I will be working somewhere else, doing something else. Because this isn't a new thing. Everyone knows that companies offshore and outsource and lay off employees they don't need anymore. And if you read the article, it seems like these people knew it was coming, but stayed until the end anyway.
Layoffs suck. Offshoring sucks. But have you seen IBM stock lately? I've never gotten a bonus and I've never gotten a raise, because those two things only happen when we're making money. There is no way in any universe that you could look at your job at IBM and think "yeah, this will hold me until retirement". That's not a reality in today's job market. My grandpa worked at the same factory his whole life from the day he graduated high school to the day the factory moved to Mexico. Between that and the five more years he worked until he retired, he had five different jobs. That's the reality of today's job market.
It sucks, but you have to just accept it. Two years, maybe three. If you're still at the same job after that, you're probably cheating yourself.
If I am Associate Middleware Software Engineer at Company X for four years, IMO, that's a little too long.
It's interesting that we all, or so many of us, think 'you just have to accept it', as if it's a law of nature.
Today, I had a revelation: Trying to grasp the revolt of working class Americans against both the Democratic and Republican parties, it suddenly struck me: Why should that group 'just accept' globalization? (Or immigration or deregulation or the free market pricing of everything from health care to college ...)
So far all the benefits have been accrued by a very narrow subset of society, while working class life has become harder and well-paying jobs and social mobility more scarce. Probably not coincidentally, the people benefitting are those who had a seat at the table when the rules were written. Everyone else, per both parties, would see the benefits magically 'trickle down' - but of course they haven't, and it's been decades.
So why should working class voters take that deal?
Instead of fighting forces of nature, we should use them. E.g. reducing corporate tax.
I strongly disagree. Protectionists have been elected many times in many countries. In the UK, there's a good chance they will with draw from the EU. Worldwide, progress for the WTO is dead. In the US, Trump and Sanders generally are against globalization, and even Clinton has rejected the TPP (on the campaign trail; we'll see what happens if she gets elected).
Provide some evidence that globalization, especially in its current form, is irresistable.
> Instead of fighting forces of nature, we should use them. E.g. reducing corporate tax.
But that hasn't helped the working class, so why should they want to do that? So even more wealth can accrue to the wealthy few?
> If standard of living is imbalanced, it will eventually find its level.
And in the long run, we are all dead.
I'm not saying it's impossible to punch a hurricane.
I'm saying you can only harm yourself. Like the U.S. did with tariffs to turn a sudden recession in the 1920 into the Great Depression (aided by subsequent massive government spending crowding out industry investment).
) IBM has a number of low profit IT services. Cutting the services completely out of their portfolio, for one reason or another, at this point in time -- was not an option
My conjecture is the above are the reasons, and will continue to be reasons for layoffs specifically in US or other high-cost locations
Another prediction: If you look at the list in [1]. And see an IT company with large generic IT services portfolio, and shrinking product portfolio (software or hardware does not matter) -- they will do similar layoffs until they become 'leaders' again, or declare bankruptcy or get a bailout.
[1] http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/05/corporate-pensions-most-und...
(this list is from 2013, but my search for more recent data indicates not much has changed)
"Yoox Net-a-Porter turns to IBM to propel its luxury e-commerce experience"
http://digiday.com/brands/yoox-net-porter-turns-ibm-propel-l...
I notice he has an article on IBM on the top and his books is pretty good. I'm not sure I agree about Intel systems, but he at least reasons it out.
Is it the case the HNers generally view programming as a fairly low paid blue collar position?
IBM rule #2: See IBM rule #1.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c...
to
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c...
and doesn't work on refresh.
But, if you remove the "#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews" fragment, the url works fine...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c...
Nonetheless, he's probably having second thoughts. In the past he's admitted he didn't invest in technology companies because he couldn't understand them. Foolishly he violated his own guidelines here.
A number of years ago I owned Burlington Northern stock as it was being acquired by Berkshire. The merger terms allowed choosing cash vs Berkshire stock vs some combination. I chose cash, because I was uncomfortable with owning the giant conglomerate which Berkshire now is.