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Comment by dakial1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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'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?

That's the one.

Or AT&T.

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...

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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