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Comment by bischofs | Hacker News Reader

What does IBM even do anymore? Is it some bizarre set of buildings where they just play with computers and print money? What product do they sell? Whom do they sell it to?

I am genuinely curious...

I have a comp sci degree and worked in different industries relating to software and have never even seen or touched any IBM tech except for those old cash registers.

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I was working for a UN organisation last year and some of my work overlapped with another project that was being done by IBM. They were hired to make our web applications more secure by adding 2FA and user access control middleware, using their Websphere family of products (IIRC) and building custom integrations.

I didn't get involved much on the project, but from what I understand the developers sent to work with us were useless, the products were bad or at least poorly suited for us, and what they were going to build was a huge waste of money. (However the last point was more to do with deep organisational issues where I was working).

The main product IBM sold was 'mininising risk' which the director of our department loved - as it meant if the project failed he would have someone to take the blame other than himself. The old saying 'nobody got fired for choosing IBM' is still true.

You need to work in crusty old companies that only recently got into doing software. Anything that produces hardware would be a good start.

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