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Comment by rqtwteye | Hacker News Reader

I worked at IBM Research in 2003 for a year. There were a ton of extremely bright people there. It was pretty cool to go around a corner and see an office that belonged to Benoit Mandelbrot. Another office had the name tag of one of the "Design Patterns" guys.

But it felt like IBM Research was totally disconnected from the actual business of IBM. The switch away from pensions also seemed to make IBM way less attractive for new hires.

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I spent a couple of Summers in Yorktown Heights and even had lunch with Beniot a couple of times.

To have the second largest super computer down the hall, an electron tunneling microscope, and beauty of the Hudson Valley seems like a bygone era. The innovation, patents, and persona were not enough to move the needle vs Silicon Valley.

> The switch away from pensions also seemed to make IBM way less attractive for new hires.

Total comp is what matters. A meager DB pension is worth less than RSUs from a competing tech company earning tons more profit.

I vastly prefer 401k and mega backdoor Roth capabilities than any DB pension. But IBM’s problem was not just getting rid of DB pensions, it was not paying competitive total comp in the first place. And also not having offices where their target employees would want to work.

A lot of the researchers who worked at Yorktown and Hawthorne now work at google’s office in the city. They were mostly living in the city anyways, or wanted to live in the city, and the whole big tech campus in leafy WestChester county didn’t really appeal to them anyways.

Say, what are mega backdoor Roth capabilities? Asking for a friend.

Described here: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/mega-backdoor-r...

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