IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older workers | Hacker News Reader

IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older workers

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300 pointsBender84 comments

Being an ex-IBMer let me say that the old timers are part of why IBM has stalled. But I don't mean that happens because of their age, but because of how long they are in the company and also how comfortable they are with all the non-sensical processes and red tape that company has (internally we called it IBM - International Bureaucracy Monster).

Being a "business operator" really has a value there and most of the leadership is made of old timers simply because of how they know how to navigate (and circumvent) all the millions of gates and layer-over-layer of non-value added processes.

Maybe if IBM worked to remove the "Old timers" from the leadership while, at the same time, bringing in older, experienced professionals, but without the vices that 15/20 years at IBM brings, it could be justified.

IBM has stalled because it stopped innovating, and instead pushing highly cumbersome, expensive, consulting-centric "products" that are nothing more than expensive services tied to proprietary technologies. Where IBM isn't proprietary, it rests heavily on open source offerings that it has acquired (RedHat). Ironically, it's IBM itself that is every much the sclerotic "dinobaby" that it seems to dislike. Simply hiring in a younger pool won't change that dynamic. If anything, that approach is deeply cynical, and only makes sense when you realize that IBM sees its growth in services and "solutions" offerings that depend on large numbers of lesser-paid, non-family bound "early professional hires" that they seem to desire.

IBM placed bets on highly speculative "moonshot" programs like IBM Watson (especially Watson Health) that failed, while simultaneously failing to effectively compete in the growing cloud-centric market. IBM could have been a realistic contender in the Enterprise against AWS, Google, and Microsoft cloud environments, but it instead opted for large-scale vendor lock-in style approaches.

Current employee here. They have identified and are focused on changing this. IBM is moving towards technology provider role (from consulting focus). This is also reflected by the new CEO who comes from research background and was the main person pushing towards buying of Redhat.

The forces of resistance to change and the pro-services culture at IBM are strong. Very strong. See how far the desire and will to change goes when placed up against the marketing and sales culture at IBM and pressures from the market.

> The forces of resistance to change and the pro-services culture at IBM are strong. Very strong.

Well yea, most of their headcount is consultants now, right? Corporate America might not be a democracy but neither can executives change the culture by edict.

Orly? Satya Nadella ended the Windows/Office duopoly at Microsoft. A lot (most?) of the OG senior leadership left.

No more proprietary OS lock-ins; Windows even can run Linux in a subsystem now (WSL). VSCode is open source.

I’d say he’s been fairly successful in changing the corporate culture.

Time will tell if Azure is any worse or better than the other cloud providers wrt lock-in.

I'd be very excited to see any such change come to pass, as an employee of a significantly larger, older, and even more bureaucratic organization.

The US Government?

Or AT&T.

That's the one.

yeah - we were accquired as part of their 'cloud services' shopping spree... so far, it seems like they're TRYING to drive off the very people they acqui-hired. Contracts seem more like a Tata level staff aug. then a 'professional services' play.

I think you two are looking at two sides of the same coin.

IBM has stalled due to poor business decisions. But those decisions are a symptom of bureaucratic system of IBM and those who know how to navigate it.

You can't divorce the actions of a company from the people who constitute the company.

It's true you can't disconnect the decisions of the business from the ones making those decisions. But you also can't hire your way out of current problems, especially hiring lower in the organization and hope for change. To completely reboot a company's decision-making culture by way of importing new people without a complete reboot of leadership is very difficult. And even if you could completely replace everyone in the organization from the very top to the very bottom (which is an impossibility), you're still left with the legacy of existing customers and technology as well as your brand and reputation and relationships. Simply put, changing people is not a solution to these problems. People and decision-making relate to each other, but as time goes on, the ability for one to impact the other without regard to the existing impedance in the organization and market is limited. This is part of the Innovator's Dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

They could flip the relationship with Red Hat and let them run the show

Totally agree. You have to replace the old school decision makers embedded throughout the company to have any hope of changing culture and direction.

Yes exactly. The symptoms are mainly causes by the posse of old timers in the leadership, which BTW remains after Whitehurst, the only hope of change, left. This was one of the motivators of me leaving as well, as I didn't see any chance of real change in the company.

IBM Cloud is pretty good to be honest, you're going too far with your dismissive analysis. Many IBM Cloud offerings are fast and reliable and come with great support in most cases...

Agree that there is a way to have a healthy company with motivated, engaged staff without targeting employees based on their age. IBM has been broken for so long. They'd be best off spinning RH back out and just selling everything until they're just a mainframe company.

This is the nature of large organizations. If you bring in fresh leadership, they will often stumble on the internal process. If you try to hire leadership/engineers who have been with the org for a while, they'll often struggle as they built skills dealing with large, entrenched organizations which don't translate to more nimble environments.

How are you defining 'stalled'? They're still the single biggest recipient of patents in the world as of last year.

It's funny you see filing patents as evidence of innovation when I see it as precisely the opposite.

I'm not sure how else you can really define innovation in a concrete fashion. Patents aren't exciting, but they're the end product of employing thousands of researchers and and spending billions equipping them.

Researchers, or lawyers?

The patent thing is just another of the shenanigans of IBM, the company pays you a premium if you get a patent approved and people just patent away whatever shitty thing they invent to get that incentive. It is just a numbers game that they use to have some nice KPI to say at their earnings call, but investors are not taking that anymore. Just look at IBM market cap evolution and you'll see how little value those patents bring to the company.

> because of how long they are in the company and also how comfortable they are with all the non-sensical processes and red tape that company has

This seems the fate of every company. As a company grows, the stake for making a mistake becomes higher to some employees. So they install processes. They add red tapes. They slow down everything in the name of preventing disasters. In the meantime, a company can't innovate or grow all the time. Sometimes they get into a plateau. And behold, when there's no grow, those who are good at grabbing land will win, and they are the incumbents who do not care about or are not capable of innovation. The results? The company dies, its talents going to other companies, and a new generation of companies rises.

That's why it's so much important for people, at least for most, to chase growth. Growth begets real meaningful projects. Growth makes turf war less relevant (you can't get rid of it entirely). Growth sweeps most of the ugliness under the carpet until, well, the growth stops.

Who do you think has done this well ? It does seem after a certain size most companies succumb to this.

Apple. Of course they're not as nimble as a startup and they release a dog now and then, but by and large they continue to innovate at a remarkable pace for their size and age.

Apple was dying and it was only saved because Bill Gates could not afford for Microsoft to become a monopoly so he put the money. Apple lives out of it's duopoly with Google on mobile phones. Or is Apple TV so successful?

Apple may not be a bad company but it has survived out of pure luck.

Apple survived out of pure luck that one time. It's executed really well since then, though.

Apple and Microsoft? 3M too. Nokia used to invent itself multiple times too, but I guess not any more.

100% agree with your view. But it is sad to see it happening from inside specially all the politics and shenanigans related to it. As I said in another comment IBM has some good talent inside and it is a shame to see them wasting their time and talent there.

> how comfortable they are with all the non-sensical processes and red tape

That's a good way of putting it. There is this "managerial comfort zone" that goes straight up the org chart. I have observed managers evolve to optimize the environmental constraints, delivering the correct messaging, delays, and target zone realignments, just but knowing how to apply the correct templates. On the other side, this has caused top-down management to evolve to push back on these constraints, creating unreasonable landing-zones knowing they will not be hit. It is a crazy passive-aggressive arms race.

Maddening. It is these boondogglers who should be excised due to nepotism and failure to deliver, as well as their enabling upper management. However, the knives-out behavior of the early 90's has changed to "you pat my back..." as competition has vanished leading to monopolies who are free to stroke each other.

Sources: my experience at IBM, Intel, and Microsoft. Among other companies that weren't as large.

> But I don't mean that happens because of their age, but because of how long they are in the company and also how comfortable they are with all the non-sensical processes and red tape that company has (internally we called it IBM - International Bureaucracy Monster).

Blaming all the people that has been long in the company without individually evaluating their performane is bad and lazy management. To target people by age, as only older people can have been so long in the company, it's discrimination on a protected class.

Are you really justifying firing people indiscriminately based on age, or other proxy parameters like decades working for the company?

Sorry, maybe I was not clear enough. My point is that age is not the problem, but company tenure is (not for all, but for most). Specially on those who managed to survive the corporate darwinism (by operating the company's red tape and processes) and reached the leadership role.

I've met many older (40+) excellent technical people at IBM and usually their situation was that they were afraid of change and became used to IBM insanities, but gradually they are taking the leap of faith and jumping ship (AWS is taking them by the bucket). The feedback I get from those who left is that they can't believe they put up with IBM's crazyness for so long, as the other companies seem so lean and rational in comparison.

One thing IBM still has a talent for is training tech professionals as I met some truly great ones there.

They did this by proxy in the UK by ruining the dinobabies' (decent) pensions unless they quit - if they quit they get to keep the pension, if they stay they'd be throwing away significant sums in pension.

Only the older IBMers had these decent pensions, so there was a huge loss of older IBMers who understandly just quit rather than miss out on their gold-plated pension.

Ironically many were rehired as freelance contractors (by their individual projects, not "centrally" if that makes sense) on significantly higher rates, so they got to keep their pension, keep their job (as a contractor) and get a pay rise too. The millennials meanwhile were kept on low salaries (it was the main reason I quit )

Companies after achieving huge success and growth become finance companies, in the sense that it isn't about technology or products and services anymore, it's just about balance sheets and stock prices and cash flows. Everything becomes money problems and money solutions, like buying smaller players, selling non-core business units, hiring cheaper workers, firing expensive workers, paying more dividends, buying back stocks, etc.

How many times has IBM been caught discriminating against older workers? Can they be declared a habitual offender and put under court supervision until whatever culture inside the company keeps spawning these incidents gets extinguished? This goes back at least to the late 80s and maybe even further back than that.

Interesting, as they went through this before, in 2006, with a memo calling experienced workers "oldheads".

https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a...

Seems like you need to run a herd of McKinsey suits through your paper trail once a decade or so to really get away with this.

I don't know anything about that case, but "oldheads" is typically a term of endearment

IBM should be on everyone's "never work here" list along with companies like Amazon and Oracle.

In my opinion, IBM only cares about patents, not actually solving any problems or accomplishing anything.

they make a lot of money

they pay pretty well

there are worse companies to work for

They have been earning less and less profit for the past 10 years, a time during which almost everyone else experienced explosive growth. That is going to make for poor quality of life at work.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/net-income

IBM has done very well during the downturn. Probably has to do with the nice dividend.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-ibm-is-one-of-few-tech...

According to a coworker that had worked at IBM for a couple decades it was a great place to work until sometime in the mid 2000s. It was like they suddenly noticed how shitty Oracle was and decided that was the business model they needed to follow. Labeling older employees as "dinobabies" is a perfect example.

I visited IBM Austin a few times circa 2009-2011 to collaborate with an IBM employee on a project. Huge campus, absolutely completely dead at all times. I would come in through the main entrance, go past the security guard, and see nobody at all until I arrived in the lab space. The lab itself was a large workspace with all sorts of desks and project space, but the only employee in there was the guy I had come to see. Absolutely bizarre and an incredibly depressing place to be.

Exact same thing in their Boulder, CO office. Dead. Middle of the day on a weekday.

Remote working was quite common in IBM when I worked there, ten-ish years ago. I stepped foot in an office only a handful of times.

I used to work at IBM in the UK in the mid 2000s and this was fairly accurate at the UK offices too.

We'd joke that IBM stood for I'm By Myself as people would work from home 90% of the time - many would be mysteriously uncontactable/AFK during that time due to "unforseen circumstances" (theat seemed to happen all the time) ... it was very hard to get hold of people when they were WFH.

No regrets - it was a great start for me, but I am glad I left.

On the flip side, I had fun just walking around the giant empty buildings during my coop. But yeah, very bleak.

I co-oped at IBM Austin from 1986-1987, there were some pretty vacant spots then, too. One time a fellow co-op and I followed some full times around to explore and got stuck getting snacks in a break room because our keycards didn't unlock the door to the rest of the floor (kind of a fire issue there in hindsight) and we had to wait 10 minutes for someone to let us out.

This is because IBM had huge layoffs in the early 90s but kept the buildings. One upside is that everyone even co-ops got their own office. It was just as bureaucratic and political back then.

That's when they went all-in on professional services as their primary go-to-market, chasing high buzzword quotient stuff that was meant to capture services revenue and lock into proprietary software. Remember WebSphere?

I knew researchers at IBM Almaden. They would avoid going in or duck out when the bean counters were around. The idea was to not draw attention to one's self and one's project for fear of being cut.

At the time, IBM also had a very strong focus on either hiring from east Asia or outsourcing / rerouting work to such.

I had a professor in the mid-2000s who always had to get a jab in at IBM because he had worked there in the 90s (somewhere in Florida) and hated it

Plus the whole Nazi / holocaust thing

Consider adding a link [1] as many people may not know what you are referring to.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Oracle pays great and has great benefits.

agree, those are good ones, I would add facebook as well to that list.

I did a coop there during college. They took a month to get me a laptop. Then gave me 0 direction or tasks. At graduation they offered me a full-time position. Yeah, nah.

How was the pay?

This was about 10 years ago now, I think they offered around 65k.

The patents that they showcased when I was there were so funny. Truly quantity over quality.

My favorite was a patent for a mobile phone password input box. The innovation was that as you type your password, your phone's rotation (I think it was just 4 possible rotations) was recorded per-character as you typed. So hunter2 might be encoded as "h-0° u-90° n-270°..." etc.

I love imagining Apple starting to develop this for iPhones until one of their lawyers delivers the bad news.

I have extensive experience with IBM products, and I can say their products, these days, are garbage. My last experience (with PDTX) was so bad, I literally removed all mentions of IBM products from my resume. It's been almost a decade and I still get recruiters with old copies of my resume hitting me with stuff for management of IBM stuff, and I immediately delete those communications. Never again.

I have a few friends working (or having worked) at amazon and quite happy (especially at AWS). I don't think they're in the same bucket as IBM and Oracle.

Having worked there, I disagree.

Even if it's only to learn what it's like to work at a big place like that, it is highly instructive. Let alone the number of connections you can make that will pay dividends down the line.

They also do a lot of research, which remained a mainstay of the company years ago when I was there and I don't see that having changed. I think people underestimate how much that contributes to the perceived slowness and stuffiness of the company. When you have an entire research division working on the edge of physics, that means a lot of academics, and your company by necessity doesn't fit the mold of other tech companies. Indeed, most of the newcomers seem to have tried to copy this model.

IBM "only cares" about its investors. Patents are a means to an end there for sure but while I was there they claimed the patent portfolio that was primarily aimed at being defensive. Whether this is true or not I have no idea but I don't see a ton of IBM in the news as the plaintiff in patent lawsuits.

As a company they have a lot of captive clients and are deep into some areas other companies just can't get into reliably, so you sometimes get work opportunities you wouldn't elsewhere.

The red tape and bureaucracy is awful and the way they tighten the belt every time they underperform for a quarter left a bad taste in my mouth; definitely felt run more by accountants and business people than engineers.

I'm super happy at IBM Cloud, the whole public cloud area is modern, fun and innovative

They should extend protections to younger workers too. IBM has a lot of dirty tactics that wouldn't be legal if the workers were slightly older.

Also for middle aged workers. They are quite vulnerable lately.

Age discrimination laws in the US only apply for older people. A company can legally discriminate against someone for being young and they can do nothing about it.

I think that's exactly why the parent commenter would like those protections extended to other age groups.

Define "slightly older". The US Equal Opportunity Employment considers you part of the protected class against age discrimination if you're over 40 (see https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination). Let's be honest, 40 is pretty much considered the entry point into "middle age".

That’s more difficult, practically speaking, because youth often correlates with inexperience.

There are real business reasons not to invest in younger and older employees, why should we just protect one group? (we should protect both! Or better yet, everyone, no need to have some ever-narrowing gap around like 35 of unprotected people).

I'm not saying you shouldn't. I'm saying that you might not be able to practically do so. Anyone who doesn't want young employees will just `s/young/inexperienced/g` and thwart your law.

Has IBM changed? My cohort of graduates in the 90's found them stuffy, extremely cautious and change-resistant. One fellow in my graduating class was chastised for wearing a shirt that wasn't IBM blue - "I understand you're trying to make a statement," (he wasn't) "but you won't fit in around here unless you make an effort."

He was told when he quit to join a startup "You know you will never work at IBM again?"

What a dinosaur.

Has it changed? You're talking about the 90's. That's 30 years ago. Of course it's changed.

As an ex-ibmer it always felt the stalls were due to short sighted management decisions. That and the rampant nepotism. Age was never an issue, far less so than working in SV afterwards.

Yeah, in my time there it was clear that everything was about quarterly targets set by some unseen person with a spreadsheet.

> contains emails that discuss the effort taken by IBM to increase the number of 'millennial' employees.

This could be OK if your workforce is fewer millennials than you'd expect. I know the federal government has issues with this for tech workers because pay is lower than industry and its policy on cannabis.

If IBM have done what every other major business seems to have done when GDPR came into effect, they will have burned anything and everything.

This will be interesting.

I have a hunch though that IBM employs more old people than any other big tech company (i.e apple, facebook, google etc). At some point the old generation should step aside to make space for the new or the company itself will die just like its employees.

It's no secret that after a certain age you stop chasing big dreams and just want to do more of the old things/job which is not a competitive strategy for a company.

> after a certain age you stop chasing big dreams

I have "certain age" and must strongly disagree here. Those who stop never were big dreamers in the first place, or had their morale crushed by eternal bad management. "Age" itself is not a factor. If anything, age gives confidence, wisdom, focus and autonomy to pursue one's goals.

Age also means you also realize that you're gonna die one day (soon) and that you'd better get your shit together if you're gonna have any kind of meaningful impact within the short timeframe you're alloted on this ball of mud.

I'm an old fart and I embrace new ideas assuming they have been well thought through, allowed for documented feedback from old stodgy curmudgeons like me and are not putting the company, customers or investors at risk.

That said I can understand why you are saying that. Some organizations do permit people with high tenure to paralyze a companies innovation and I do not know how to fix that short of creating competition and importing the good employees at the new competition.

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