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Comment by ScottAS | Hacker News Reader

IBM is an embarrassing company. They are not culling based on age, they are culling based on severe lack of skills and dated values. IBM is saturated with tech people who threw in their technical chops 20 years ago to become a salesperson.

Everything they do, from their blockchain efforts to Watson, is so embarrassingly driven by oldschool sales/marketing people that they can't be taken seriously by technical decision makers at their customer companies. They no longer have the ability to lead their customers in technical decisions.

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Well, they let go of a lot of people with actual skills and knowledge because they made too much money. People with the know-how (my Dad being one of them) saw the writing on the wall decades ago and hit the door even before being pushed out due to age.

They're absolutely embarrassing now. They've lost too many good people and everybody knows what IBM's about now. They can focus on hiring Millenials all they want, but which early-stage workers would really want to go to IBM? They know what it'll be like. Lots of outsourcing, bureaucracy and bad decisions. Not many would choose IBM over another offer.

Screwing over the workforce has consequences.

IBM also created a lot of voluntary RIF (reduction in force) programs in the 1990's. The goal was to get rid of managers and deadwood.

Of course, the technical people were always the first to jump at the opportunity to take cash and leave. Often, they walked back in to IBM the next Monday as a contractor.

IBM upper management eventually figured out that the managers weren't going to move--even an extra year at a manager salary dwarfed the program payout--and the deadwood wasn't going to move--they knew they had no other options-- and killed the programs.

> everybody knows what IBM's about now

I don't work for, nor have I applied to work for, IBM so maybe I'm more dense than my question illustrates... but what is IBM about these days as you mention? Please help me get rid of the rock over my head on this topic.

but what is IBM about these days as you mention?

Since they sold off their consumer hardware businesses, it's all about their Global Services consulting and a little bit of big iron (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer).

Well, that's pretty much my point. There was a time when they dominated everything. Now they've sunk to such irrelevance that I don't know what to say, either. They don't have anything I care about.

They're about bad decisions. A cautionary tale to tell young CEOs about mistreating the workforce.

> They can focus on hiring Millenials all they want,

Millenials would be 40 in just couple of yrs.

Does anyone else think that the IBM commercial where they talk about tracking a tomato with a blockchain is laughable? Or is it just me?

One of the few companies [0] in the space that I find interesting is doing exactly that.

Tracking the authenticity or safety of physical products changing many hands is a perfect application of distributed, tamper-proof databases.

[0] https://www.provenance.org

But what good is tracking e.g. a tomato with a tamper proof database when the label on the tomato is easily tampered with?

Supply chain is an interesting case for blockchain. It doesn't eliminate the possibility of incorrect information being entered at some point in the chain. But there are probably still advantages to having transactions being immutable once they've been executed on a chain that's not under the control of any single party. Also smart contracts are potentially interesting.

But how do you stop someone from putting incorrect information, or outright lying in the first place?

That is the third time this week here I've seen the word "provenance."

I had never encountered it before. Why is everyone now using it constantly on this site?

Perhaps the frequency illusion bias?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...

I know that's a thing, but am here for years and never encountered it. When I don't know a word I look it up so can't say I've never seen it even if I don't remember its meaning.

It's just the bias at work. That word's been used around here plenty ;)

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=provenance&sort=byDate&prefix&...

I first came upon 'provenance' in "Programming Pearls', Jon Bentley, 1986. The word has been traveling around hacker circles for some time.

It's complete crap. The saddest part is that they do have some amazing technical minds behind the scenes. They give their stage to sleazy marketing and salespeople who have no idea what they're talking about way too often.

Sounds an awful lot like Microsoft.

I think Microsoft has turned the corner.

Yes - Azure is genuinely good

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