I really have to retire before 50 because it doesn't look good.
My personal opinion (having worked there 10 years with a lot of extremely talented people) is that the scale and types of customers IBM sells to distorts the engineering incentives. They don’t (because they can’t) build the simple MVP and iterate on it. Instead they have to bolt on “enterprise magic” like security integration, support for three different databases (db2, sqlserver, Oracle) from day one, and generally gold plate it. In addition deep pocket customers have massive pull and can distort product schedules because 90% of the revenue is concentrated in a few massive deals. That means “do what’s right for the user” becomes “id like this icon in cornflower Blue”.
The price of massive success is perverse engineering incentives up and down the stack. It’s hard to appreciate from the outside, it’s just what end state enterprise story looks like when your deals are $20M and up.
WebSphere is also a bloated piece of crap so maybe not the best example..
Which is especially ironic that older workers are targetted.
I'll make a killing as an old fashioned java developer at that age, probably.
My sister went to a shit college in India and was hired at one of the shit firms (I want to say Wipro, could've been Infosys). An entire batch of young, just graduated kids were trained on COBOL/batch processing for about 3 months. All of them were then placed to work with IBM, which in turn does that work offshore for US companies.
My sister left after the training, but she says a vast majority of her friends from the training still work at IBM doing COBOL. Each of that is probably 1/10th or so of an old COBOL dev's job gone.
You can't compare the first to the other two. Amazon and Google don't make business products. Sure, they sell "cloud services", but these aren't business products, these are IT services.
Amazon and Google sell phones that somebody else makes. They write software that somebody else retrofits. They sell advertising. They sell inexpensive consumer goods, like a voice-activated interface to their search engines, or a stick to stream video to your TV. Outside of cloud computing, they maintain almost exclusively consumer-oriented services and applications.
IBM makes mainframes that sit in someone's bank and last decades. They make tools that you buy and install and run your entire business with. They are the one-stop shop for a business that needs technology and can't or won't make it themselves from scratch.
It's like comparing apples to quinoa. It's like comparing IKEA to a building contractor.
You're kinda right but the tech world is changing. My experience
1) First job had an expensive IBM powerpc based AIX box. We now have cheap x86 with free Linux. 2) 10 years ago my project had an expensive DB2 database. Current job has a lot of files and open source noSQL applications. (some Oracle is still around but we hate it) 3) My current job is first to use cloud hosts. No need for mainframes any more. 4) I used to have IBM HDD, but they no longer make anything like that
I'll note Google's New York office has a healthy smattering of ex-IBM Grayglers (Greyglers?).
You may want to reformulate. Neither Amazon or Google are competitors to IBM because they don't target B2B. Besides, IBM has products in many market segments where these companies aren't.