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Comment by zoeysaurusrex | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy to be harsh because I've had years and years of experience dealing with IBM.

Their tools are trash for the cost they want. The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting.

They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath.

We ended up getting stuck with the IBM version of work item management, called Jazz Team Concert. From the "source control" to the actual setup and configuration, the product was a nightmare. The worst part was when we looked at license renewal. They wanted three quarters of a million dollars for something that was essentially dog shit wrapped in cat shit.

In case you thought I might be on the fence with IBM, I'll add one final clarifying point:

Fuck IBM.

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Hey man, you're not alone, even internal teams at IBM using Jazz Team Concert have been calling it "dog shit wrapped in cat shit" for years now.

Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner. Not all of them have the power to influence other products and often times end up stuck with it and cannot move on to other tools (i.e git).

More often than not, customers have higher priority on bugs than other teams dog-fooding the product. Its insane.

> Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner.

I think you mean don't be so harsh on the people on the ground at IBM. If the issue is IBM's internal structure is fractured and disorganized then I think it's perfectly fair to blame the company.

> Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner. Not all of them have the power to influence other products and often times end up stuck with it and cannot move on to other tools (i.e git).

The do this so different divisions can lean on each other and benefit from the IBM brand name. If they want the benefits of this shared branding then the deserve the downsides from it too.

I've noticed many companies recently thinking they can have it both ways (samsung and sony come to mind). Live by the brand, die by the brand!

Yeah, IBM (and Oracle, and SAP and ...) have always been like this.

My own anecdote -- we had a need for a GIS/charting/mapping system. IBM responded to the RFP as did many others.

IBM proposed an entire office automation system with a minor charting system hanging off the side somewhere. Most of the components were unfamiliar to everyone. Though maybe there was Wordperfect or Lotus Notes in there. I remember meetings with IBM always had whole bunch of shiny suits whereas more focussed proposals just had one or two people visit.

After one or two rounds of pointless meetings our fairly technical director told them to go fuck off and never come back.

My first dev job was with a civil engineering consultancy that also built a suite of tools for hydraulic modelling, geo-spatioal and logging and telemetry use cases. We used the IBM ILOG JViews framework for a lot of our software and honestly it was a pain to use and clunky as hell.

The worst thing though that was despite paying an inordinate amount of money to license this software each year and receive support for it they would not fix a bug we found in their mapping modules.

Specifically it was their use of float for X and Y coordinates in the IlvPoint object that you pretty much had to use to make a map work with their tech. In certain parts of the world there is an extra digit on the Y coordinate (projections) and the float they insisted on using couldn't store the whole value, meaning they would just round it up or down causing inconsistencies between our representation of a client's dataand the client's representation. That was an absolute no-go for us and the workarounds IBM suggested to us were absurd and bordering on insulting honestly.

We had a lot of trouble with our affected clients because of this and all we could tell them was that it was an IBM issue.

The absolutely refused to fix their product and eventually sold it to Rogue Wave, washing their hands of it. By that point though we had already decided on a few alternatives lest we start to lose customers (who were essentially massive utility companies from around the globe).

Fuck IBM.

What perplexes me is that none of these seem to affect their services business. 39 billion in services revenues is nothing to scoff at. I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services ? Do these units operate like two separate entities.

> I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services

Wasn't there a saying that no one got fired for buying IBM.

It's used in real life in a non joking manner.

I've seen it many times.

Yeah, in like 1975.

Or 2017. Things may change, but not as fast as some people hope.

if i ran a company, and the manager/*EO level personnel purchased IBM, i would've fired them.

but you didn't, right?

Traditionnaly at that scale, the people buying the product and the ones ending up using it are completely insulated by layers of bureaucracy. As long as the product can somewhat work, there won't be much repercussions for making shitty choices: the feedback won't go up enough or be ignored (as it is inconvenient)

> insulated by layers of bureaucracy

Misinterpretation is a recursive problem. The best description - by far - of this process is "How a plan becomes policy" (aka, "How Shit Happens").

https://funnyshit.com.au/the_plan.html

IBM are not alone in getting away with this. Buyers of big brand products need to shape up and talk with their engineers. It's a farce.

> I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services ?

IBM is optimized in enterprise (including government) sales. Product is not quite irrelevant, but it's a specialized enough market that often mediocre substantive quality does quite well, because the only competition that matters are the others that are optimized for that market.

They sell products to people who will never personally use them. The executive signing cheques on the golf course has a PA to deal with its day to day use...

c'mon they aren't the IT's crown jewel but you're doing a disservice to them. while products have accrued years of shit, as every old product does, it is extremely frustrating for very large enterprises and governments to talk with system integrators or even startup - most often than not their product is totally not ready to cope with the audit requirements, security requirements, they often don't even have a clue of what enterprises need on that front neither how to handle all the red tape around security certifications, legal requirements, disclosures requests that those clients usually have.

Reminds me of https://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Click that link from inside HN...

I knew what happens :)

They optimized for the thing which is currently important: Convince decision-makers that your product is the way to go - by any means necessary. This is as much a reflection on the tech peoples inability to actually influence companies buying decisions as it is on IBM. If companies started to value sound technology IBM (and Oracle and SAP ..) would shift its priorities.

It is actually a cycle. Managers in an enterprise are judged based on their ability to deliver low cost solutions ie "savings". IBM(or any service business) is very good at selling these low cost solutions to managers.

We are starting a project and even with FTE's within the company, "consultant" has convinced management to hire IBM resources because of cost. The high sounding reason within the presentation twisted it to - FTE's are not expert in this tech so they won't be able to do an efficient job.

But it is always that the end resources from IBM are even more incompetent. They end up delivering a product which is terrible. Even the final handovers and KTs are done terribly.

In the end, management has no option but to continue hiring IBM (or any service business) to support the shoddily done project.

This doesn't mean all implementations from a services business is terrible. It all comes down to cost and ability to spend. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys - this is aptly true.

To answer your last question - Yes there are different entities within IBM. There is GBS which takes up most of the consulting and up-selling IBM products and services. Development for example Watson is done by IBM Labs. A list can be found here: http://www-07.ibm.com/in/careers/businessunits.html

So OK , you can do this cycle for some time, for a few people.

But doesn't the word get around ? does nobody in most enterprizes think long-term when investing ?

No one at this level thinks further than their next annual bonus. If the wheels come off after who cares, they've moved on to do the same thing to the next company...

No, because if you think for the long term you can find that you are not around after a short term.

> But it is always that the end resources from IBM are even more incompetent. They end up delivering a product which is terrible. Even the final handovers and KTs are done terribly.

At an old employer who I'm no longer with, I asked why there's a part of the application in Java (the rest has always been in .net). They told me that an army of IBM consultants made that decision and now there's a part of the code in Java and it sticks out like a sore thumb.

A lot of that is consulting on and reselling of SAP products. There are many companies in the world that want to move to SAP and haven't been burned by IBM yet.

>> Do these units operate like two separate entities.

Broadly, yes, IBM is run as various different divisions, and the divisions start very high up the organisation, only a couple of levels from the top. They rarely interact in my experience (as a software guy there for some years in the past)

IBM GS also specializes in complexity. They sell their services to management, but then they come in and make the most complicated system they can sustain, which is too complicated for the full time staff to want to deal with.

As the staff back away slowly from the creep, that just makes more space for IBM, and they sell progressively more service hours. It's pretty much their MO.

Vendor lock-in.

This sounds no different than my experience with some Oracle and SAP products that we had the unfortunate pleasure of supporting.

Oracle's Responsys is definetly dog shit wrapped in cat shit. I hope you'll never had to deal with that dumpster fire.

Even just trying to install Oracle 11g correctly was hard.

I think it expected to be installed in /usr/local and company procedures demanded that it was installed in /opt (or the other way around).

For this it would consequently misplace some permissions on some of the files causing a later stage in the installer to fail and bork the installation.

Back in about 1999, I was working for a big corporate and one of our Oracle admins lost her shit and had a meltdown, think it was around 8i era. She just got up and walked out shouting "fuck this fucking shit, I quit". This was on a freshly delivered HP N-Class HPUX box and they just couldn't get it to run after a month of going back and forth between HP and Oracle.

I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London and she was still angry about it 17 years later!

And that's what Oracle does to your soul :)

Edit: that N class and Oracle NEVER got deployed in the end. It just sat there unused, licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity and it got chucked in a skip after 5 years. About £200k of expenditure down the pan.

licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity [...] About £200k of expenditure down the pan.

I guess you could easily lost even more money. Good thing they stopped it at £200k.

Yeah a big chunk of that was consultancy, support, Oracle licenses. TCO was going to be around £500k for 5 years.

The whole platform got replaced with SQL Server on a clone PC server in the end which cost less than £10k. No fan of Microsoft but there was no competition. And the tooling was far better!

When I get issues were vendors point fingers at each other I three way call them, tell them what's up, hit mute, go get a coffee, and let them figure it out.

We did that. They were still finger pointing two hours later.

Legal guys said it wasn't worth suing them because we'd have to pay up then or lose the support contract.

Oof. You should bill them for your time. I sent HP or Dell (can't recall) an invoice for $800 in my early 20s for my time wasted on a support call where a "support tech" had asked me to reinstall Windows as a way to fix a disk that failed in a RAID array. OS was AIX.

Hilariously Oracle database can't run on Oracle Linux OOTB...

While I'm not a fan of Oracle, I have to correct you: Oracle DB runs just fine on Oracle Linux. It installs exactly the same way that it does on RHEL, same checklist.

Just as long as you follow the defaults without changing anything I guess :-)

That's kinda my point - why do they ship a Linux distribution without the prerequisites for their flagship product preinstalled?

Probably because they don't want to deal with the overhead of maintaining patches to RHEL source.

Then they fully deserve the ridicule. It's like Ford selling you a car but you have to bring your own tyres if you want to drive it away

See it wasn't that hard. Stupid company procedures made it hard-er and even then iff you know what you are doing it is still trivially easy. It is so easy even sysadmins can do it. Next next finish have a cookie back in your gimp cave now easy.

I work for IBM as a Developer Advocate, though my opinions here are my own. One of my goals as a Developer Advocate is to represent the shift in buying power from "non-technical management" (as you described it) to individual developers and other technical staff. If those who have to use or have to integrate with the software are a part of the decision making process, then I believe that this will result in better quality software. IBM is a very large company, with many different offerings. However, I think you'll see this shift towards a developer-focused mindset happening more-and-more within IBM over the next few years.

Non-technicals for most corporations will always make the buying decisions because it's about $$$. There is IBM's fundamental problem, "next few years" which means we're guessing today and guessing tomorrow.

This message has just as little substance as the other IBM employee's comment. Care to share any real examples of what

> However, I think you'll see this shift towards a developer-focused mindset happening more-and-more within IBM over the next few years.

means? In a discussion about not trusting IBM's marketing, you can't simply say "I hear you and it will get better, trust me."

What exactly do you expect him to say? Gimme a break.

I don't work in the same role so I only know things from a 10,000 ft view. But a lot of orgs that IBM works with have inane bureaucratic structures with their in house devs pretty much at the bottom of the food chain, or in an "IT department". All decisions on using tech tools are made by "higher ups" a lot of whom have 0 technical background. We're trying to change this culture to one where devs get to make those decisions AFAIK.

Disclosure: IBM dev, but not a Developer Advocate.

Nothing, it's a corporate identity problem. IBM has alot of organizations and many have good people who advocate developer tools and build products. Then you have the dark side with marketing and global services, where promises are never met and costs are beyond. Someone at the top made the decision the choose IBM, right or wrong, technical or not, they chose. I've been on both sides, and yeah 6 years in IBM global services watching the wheels spin. I've had technical decisions yanked from under me because my CTO was convinced by IBM marketing it was wrong after they failed proof of concepts. Companies have too many choices to build tech and as a developer, advocate or whatever you know there is always a better path. Especially without an IBM product.

IBM was always unique, could sell you sfw, hdw, hosting, resources, and finance the whole thing. Some business as leaders never really adapt to change because management is stupid (blockbuster, radio shack, blackberry, etc.). IBM had so many chances to compete with Amazon and they failed. Watson is no more than a deflection in the marketplace that masks the real problems from within.

> What exactly do you expect him to say? Gimme a break.

If you can't provide any useful comments, then nothing. What they're saying contributes absolutely nothing to the conversation. Maybe say you'll stop selling non-existent features to executives for starters? I don't appreciate HN becoming an advertising ground to name-drop IBM without any real talking points, please provide some sort of real discussion.

> We're trying to change this culture to one where devs get to make those decisions AFAIK.

Ok, but again how? Or I guess in other words, I don't believe you.

It's not really up to IBM whether or not this shift towards more developer influence happens. IBM can either embrace this shift and benefit from it, or it can reject it and pretend it's not happening. Personally, I hope that IBM continues to accept and embrace this shift (which I am seeing many indications of). I hope that IBM continues to become more-and-more relevant to developers, but the proof is in the pudding.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"

Please, let this quote be ironic.

No, it's historic.

No, it's current at many places.

It's a prevailing attitude in buying non-cheap ("enterprise") systems. If you buy one of the big names and it fails you can always say "they are a market leader, it was the best decision with the information we had available" - if you take a leap of faith for a not so well known name and the project fails it will probably cost you your job. People behave accordingly.

And IBM often tried to get people fired for not buying IBM – a former colleague was once the CIO of the only Fortune 100 company that didn't have a corporate IBM mainframe (one or two of their subsidiaries did, but the conglomerate mother ship did not, only Univac). IBM had quite a few golfing conversations with the CEO trying to get him fired. [This was back in the '70s].

In the late 90s, the startup I worked for made a marketing deal with IBM. We were mostly running Sun hardware, I was in charge of IT purchasing. After I made it clear we would not be migrating to IBM hardware, they went after my job.

The tradition was still going at that point.

Maybe, but then again you can't buy IBM if you're forbidden from buying it in the first place.

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-...

I'm so glad people are getting enough of IBM bullshit

They get laid off for being making their department a black hole for money, though.

Canada's Federal Government payroll division would probably agree with you.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-pay-system-psac...

> The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting.

What do you mean by 'over engineered' in this context? The usual way I've seen that term used would imply 'reliable but more expensive than necessary' rather than 'unreliable'.

In software it sometimes means overcomplicated for the scope that delivers little value but high cost in usage due to the complexity.

Think J2EE and their xml config files.

Or using hadoop and kubernetes when a sqllite db on digital ocean will do

>They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath.

I have seen middle management say very clearly that no one was ever fired for choosing IBM.

I remember hearing a lot of great things about Cloudant, which happens to be from IBM, on HN and elsewhere.

Is that just a notable exception or are there better alternatives out there these days for hosted CouchDB?

Didn't IBM buy Cloudant? And wasn't it based off of an Apache application?

Not saying it's not good (I've never used it), but IBM can't really get any credit for this. They just happen to have bought a decent product and now they sell it.

Right, my intention by pointing out Cloudant wasn't to offer it as a counter-example (I personally have 0 experience with it), but rather to see if anyone might have some red flags to share, as I'm considering using Cloudant instead of hosting my own CouchDB instances for a new project I'm speccing out, and especially since nobody has mentioned it as a counter-example in this thread so far.

Disclaimer: this is a throwaway account, and I used to work for IBM.

I like Cloudant .. it is not too bad. In a recent project (after I left IBM), I needed to get a data tier up quickly and I actually used it for the initial POC. And yes, it was an acquisition by IBM. I was a bit worried that bluewashing would have made Cloudant crap but looks like they have managed to avoid it. The caveat I'd suggest is look closely at the pricing model. If you want QoS and scale, be careful of the pricing model. For small projects and projects that need fast completion (what project today doesn't?), it is actually very nice. You asked for caveats .. I think some of the language bindings were a bit out of date .. but since it uses REST calls, it wasn't too hard to bypass.

I've been using Cloudant for several years and it's been extremely reliable. Support is good and they have contributed a ton of open source code and docs back to the community. The communication has been transparent throughout the IBM acquisition process so I feel confident in continuing to start new projects on the platform.

It's really easy (largely thanks to Cloudant) to host your own Couch instance but it's also really affordable to let them do it.

I get to use a transmogrified version of Jazz called IBM Control Desk. Literally dog shit.

At least it's not further wrapped in cat shit, I guess?

Now it is wrapped in "SmartCloud" instead. I am not sure if that is an improvement.

Hey Willie I'm feeling some negative customer feedback here.

Thank you for your feedback. I work for IBM and would like to share the details with our product team so that we can improve. What were your issues with Jazz Team Concert and how do you think we can do better next time?

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