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Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

>The new company will have 90,000 employees and its leadership structure will be decided in a few months, Chief Financial Officer James Kavanaugh told Reuters.

>IBM, which currently has more than 352,000 workers, said it expects to record nearly $5 billion in expenses related to the separation and operational changes.

What does the rest of their business consist of that requires 250,000 employees? Or are layoffs in the mix here?

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I think people who haven't worked in/around IBM struggle to comprehend the sheer number of products and services it actively supports and only a portion of that are mainframe products. There are many products that have 100+ engineers on them but might never even make common conversation for how specialized they are. Additionally IBM has a high headcount for supporting those products, with 24/7/365 phone/hands-on support so that can sometimes be almost the similar number of people as the engineers actually developing the product. Since the products are so specialized there are specialized support groups per product. It's definitely easy to have 150+ people per product (especially from the heavy acquisition style they had been doing pre-Red Hat) so the numbers quickly adding up. Many of these groups have enough organization to transition to a standalone company's product team if they could replace the HR, accounting, and other company pieces.

There is certainly also consulting and other groups of people too, but they were not the majority.

They still make and maintain mainframes, apparently.

A lot of this 'cloud technology' we're using, including some that is still being developed, is functionality being ported from mainframe tooling.

I saw a teardown of an IBM cpu module from the early 90's the other day. There were tricks I still haven't seen show up in rackmount hardware.

Mainframes are shockingly legit. Don't get me wrong, - they're the least sexy possible technology, imo. But they do _work_ in a way that I've rarely seen.

There's a tradeoff between flexibility and stability - the mainframe is just hardcore stable. Sucks to work on a lot of the time, but _damn_ if there isn't a reason financial institutions still do mainframe batch processing.

I would gladly take a z15 or two or three [1]. Ability to spin up any number of instances almost instantly, blazing fast speed between them... just super expensive and there has to be a business need to justify the support costs. People often mistakenly think this is old tech, but that could not be further from the truth. One could have their own massive VPS region in a box with much faster deployment of code.

[1] - https://www.ibm.com/products/z15/details

I saw some old mainframes in a junkyard... considered buying them only to be told that someone that knew they were going to be sent there, purchased them before they even arrived...

I think it would be hell cool to have a mainframe at home :) Assuming it is not ludicrously expensive to keep it running...

Keep an eye out for a Multiprise 3000 from 1999. It's the smallest of them and runs on regular household electricity at 1300W. If you do find one, make sure it has the hard drives intact or it'll be a 400 lb. paperweight like mine :(

I recall for y2k IBM was selling replacement mainframes because the new one was faster and you would pay for it just on power bill savings in 2 years. That the old one would never get the updates to work after y2k was not really a factor in sales. The old mainframes were water cooled and very power hungry, newer chips (now 20 year old technology) were air cooled and used less power.

After all, the cloud is mostly a mainframe with a self service interface.

Could you share the video? That sounds quite interesting

Long shot, but I believe they're referring to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ3oJlt4GrI

Sure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ3oJlt4GrI

Nearly a square foot, and the water block is built into the module.

Imagine bending one of those pins as you're putting it in.

The video was fuzzy for me but I’m pretty sure it had around five bent pins when he flipped it over to show us.

It did, but it also was clearly never being used again.

as a services and solutions provider i imagine they employ a lot of technicians for on site work around the world, and will require much less of them in a cloud environment. just a thought though, anyone who knows better please correct me.

Consultants?

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