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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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...

Oracle pays great and has great benefits.

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

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

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

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