IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO

Comparing IBM to a VC funded startup doesn't make any sense to me. Big old tech companies (like IBM) in Silicon Valley mostly do turn a profit, some quite a bit more than IBM.

But there is a twist: most of the immigrants from South Asia are also highly educated and here legally.

That is quite a powerful combination in itself. Considering the large population of India, there are bound to be a ton of smart, driven people that immigrate to the US. And in a system that doesn’t actively discriminate against them based on their race, they do well.

I am not sure why this is surprising. South Asia has a LOT of people. Many of them are well versed in English because colonialism. A small (but still significant) number of them emigrate to the US and do very well.

I know a female software engineer friend of mine had read about that and got inspired and ended up asking for a serious raise when she got a new contract. I remember being both surprised and jealous the person said yes and took it as a life lesson.

I also remember tptacek on here always talking about the value in asking for more money as a software person, product, or consultancy because you're probably worth it.

So as the other commented mentioned the qualities of new immigrants might certainly select for this sort of thing, ie, people with high-motivation, bold life plans, taking advantage of their opportunity to really buy into the American dream, etc. That combined with a local-cultural confidence thing could certainly help explain it.

For example: I grew up in an environment where you're meant to resent your boss, complain about them, and see them as an adversary. They are not someone you try to become because bosses are bad.

How much harder do you think that makes it to climb corporate ladders if your internal narrative is that being the boss means you're a bad person?

On the other hand, it's very unsurprising that India's greatest export remains Human Labour. For those who don't realize this, India's balance of payments is actually positive inspite of the imports being about ~$150 billion more than exports (that is about 5% of nominal GDP). This comes about because of the amount of money that is being repatriated by Indians.

Perhaps it is for this reason that India maintains a linguistic apartheid, whereby only the English speakers have access to education, and higher wrungs of the state like the judiciary, civil services etc. It's also a testament to the nation's collective stupidity that it thinks exporting cheap labour over building skills within the country, is a justifiable strategy.

This is echoed, unsurprisingly, by 'body traders' like Infosys (c.f Nandan Nilekani), but is a common state doctrine after 'independence'. Unlike China, which emphasized mass education access, and local technological ability, India's schools specialize basically in serving Anglo-Saxon nations - most IITians etc. leave the country on graduation (esp. in CS).

Within a country like India, where each of the major languages have a speaking population of an average 6+ million (similar to S. Korea, Germany etc.), and where Hindi has a speaking population of 400+ million, you'd be hard pressed to find a single university of repute that can educate people in any of the native languages. Even the bombastic Tamils in the south or the Hindi pushers in the north have little to show after 70+ years of bitter politicking.

How a mob of uneducated rabble, neither interested in agriculture nor equipped for industry, will be beneficial for India is a puzzle that only Indians appear to be able to "bend" around.

For these reasons, those who compare India with China, have neither an awareness of India's history, its present British colony run by "Brown Sahibs", or even about its historic role as the "pivot for Asia", whereby it was used to colonize the whole of Asia. This is not surprising, since its own 'eminent' academics are often at a loss in doing anything that doesn't involve mimicking their long gone masters.

As a fellow Indian myself, let me assure you the biggest victims of this are the remaining other fellow Indian themselves.

Things like this are the biggest reason why I wish I had a chance to settle and work in the US.

https://www.reddit.com/r/redneckengineering/top/?t=all

For example, we're a fairly large company (10000+), but we still have an all company mailing list. And it is used by anyone to raise a concern, talk about an opportunity, etc. And that starts a conversation with anyone participating. I am on the Services side, but there is no barrier in place for me to reach out to anyone in the BU, Engineering, Marketing, whatever. I don't think I have ever had to pass a message up the chain of command for it to be passed down somewhere else, I'm just allowed to communicate when and how I need to.

The other way it comes out is that open-source has truly warped our way of thinking about things. For example, there's not a culture of restricting access to our own documents, team drives, etc. One of my peers was working on a new slide deck on a team drive, hadn't really shared it with anyone, then found out that one slide was copied into a presentation done by an EMEA team a day later. That kind of easy access and reuse is just _standard_. It applies to code, but also everything else we do.

I've worked with lots of clients through my job, and it is always eye opening when their employees are worried about "sticking out their neck" or otherwise rocking the boat. Or companies where a developer trying to talk to the business would be an incident with your manager giving you a talk. This is just completely foreign to anyone at Red Hat.

Translation?

As someone who was using them until recently, I think that they really bungled the Softlayer acquisition. They didn't invest in their product offerings for years while AWS pulled ahead - and while they have been investing pretty heavily more recently, they are so far behind it's a little sad.

This is true, strictly speaking. But (also strictly speaking) he was an engineer

> Nadella attended the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet[7] before receiving a bachelor's in electrical engineering[8] from the Manipal Institute of Technology (then part of Mangalore University) in Karnataka in 1988.[9][10] Nadella subsequently traveled to the U.S. to study for an M.S. in computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee,[11][12] receiving his degree in 1990.[13] Later, he received an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.[14]

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella)

And that's all GP said.

> Good to see an engineer taking helm of the company from the previous CEOs which were from sales.

I assumed the Chairman of the Board would fill that role?

President sounds to me like a step below CEO, but I know very little about corporate structuring...

Technology/engineering/Moore's law can paper over a lot of dumb institutional inefficiency.

Also, just to be clear. It's very hard to do much better, big groups are hard to keep nimble, honest, agile, etc.

Not true. Jim (and Red Hat under him) reported directly to Ginni. Red Hat was under IBM cloud for revenue reporting, though, but the distinction is material.