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Comment by edem | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on that? I worked for IBM for a little more than a year and it was deeply disturbing, but I don't really understand what's happening under the hood.

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Large companies allocate some percentage of their budget to "modernization" or "IT improvements" IBM tries to grab as much of that budget as possible and then to spend a little money as possible internally delivering results. So they end up selling "Watson AI" or implement a "24/7 Cyber Security Operation Center". They don't give a shit how useful or long term successful those products or services are. They only care about how big the contract is and how high their margins are on the contracts.

Why is IBM's stock soaring? This is the sign of a dead company barely walking.

Furthermore, IBM has been in this state since the 90s, right? How are they still lumbering around? Why do companies fall for their sales pitch?

IBM stock is performing terribly compared to other technology companies from 15 years ago GOOG,AMZN,APPL.

They deliver a good story to other inefficient companies. Those companies can tell their board that the "new Watson AI will optimize their operations in Q4"

IBM's stock is down 30% since 2013 and is only up 10% from its post-dotcom crash 2000 number. They pay decent dividends so it's been an okay place to park some money, but it's the opposite of soaring.

There is a ton of inefficiencies in big businesses and governments and IBM and other service companies are preying on that. It's a viable business model, if a little scummy.

Can you elaborate on what was deeply disturbing about your experience? Your comment has me curious.

They bought the company I was working for. They turned everything upside down. Tried to force us to sign contrats that would make them the owner of our public contributions which lead to an outrage so they backed down. Later they did "patent minig" sessions where they tried to extract good ideas from people for free. They also shut down all projects and pushed their Watson shit on us. They didn't give a shit about company culture, and people in general so 90% of the employees who had even a tiny bit of ambition left for a startup that was created by people who left IBM after the acquisition.

That pretty much sums up my experience with IBM when they bought our company as well. I had a colleague who quit immediately finding out they bought us out because he had worked for them before. I gave them the benefit of the doubt but he was right and I left once they started to integrate us into the borg. Just about everyone ended up leaving not to long after either.

Don’t you have golden cuffs? Aren’t you heavily incentivized to stay, at risk of not getting the money you’ve worked on for years?

When I was hired the company wasn't offering options and I negotiated a fair market price for my work so I was able to "just" leave.

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