Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Frankly I wouldn't trust IBM to tie my shoes. How they keep getting these large multi-million dollar contracts is beyond me.

Like, seriously, I'd go hire a small team of MIT grads (5-ish) and I bet they deliver a higher quality product than giving IBM four times as much and twice as long.

View on HN

People in big companies hire external services so that the contractor is culpable when things go wrong and they can’t be personally blamed. Most of the cost and value to them has nothing to do with the actual work. Nobody has ever been fired for trusting IBM. The same reason companies will pay big money for a commercial Linux distribution even if there is a free one that is better.

> The same reason companies will pay big money for a commercial Linux distribution

To companies like… IBM!

Haha, I was thinking about RedHat when I wrote that, not even realizing they were owned by IBM.

Most of the time, this isn't even the executive's choice but a requirement of their corporate liability insurance. It would be nice if we could just find responsible executives to fix these types of issues, but they're systemic.

It is not just 5 interns developing a product. It is also deploying it to how many hundreds or thousands of locations over reasonable timeframe. Sorting problems in each of them and customer support for all that.

And failing too many of those deployments get really expensive. Having your drive-trough down for multiple hours or days get franchisees really annoyed...

Because they are BIG and they understand how BIG works.

It’s very hard to be small and understand it.

I'm not convinced that's true any more.

Let me get this out of the way: McDonald's is BIG. I'm not going to argue against that.

That said, BIG in this case means about 63 million customers a day[0]. Yes, they come in bursts. No, you can't divide 63M by 86400 to address their traffic. That said, 63M requests to do something per day is no longer IBM-scale volume. At a prior job we'd designed a system to handle about 30M transactions per second at peak (think "it's the Super Bowl: guess whether the offense is going to kick or run the ball in the next play! 5... 4... 3..."). McD's requests are more complex than that, but so is the technology available to work on it today.

IBM knows BIG. I think the notion of what BIG means is a lot different now though. Lots of problems that were nearly intractable a couple decades ago genuinely are in the wheelhouse of clever startups today.

[0]https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/our-company/who-we-a...

There's usually some way to "cheat" to make things easier. In this case, orders don't need to ask go into a single globally accessible instantaneously updated database like BigTable. A McDonald's in San Francisco doesn't care what a McDonald's in Paris' customers have ordered right that second. Or even the one down the street. So the worst you could do is give each restaurant their own copy of the stack. And that stack meds to handle maybe 3 orders a minute? The busiest McDonald's still isn't going to be all that busy in orders per second, relative to a busy website. Everything you can do to optimize and use fewer resources per restaurant is an optimization and cost reduction problem, but the base problem is inherently tractable. Chick-fil-A runs an Edge Kubernetes cluster at each of their 2800 restaurants.

Definitely. And that's the kind of thing that could certainly be managed by a "small" (at least compared to IBM) sized team. While it's not quite as simple as "Terraform it and call it good", it's probably not radically different from that, at least in concept.

One thing about big is that they take forever to pay. Months to make the sale, months to cost the deal, months more to get paid. A tiny company may not have the resources to wait that long.

You're right, but there are two versions of how big works. One is you're buying something to solve a career need, the other is you're buying something to solve a business need.

Large companies only talk to large companies. So it is accenture, ibm and others. But it is amazing how their absolute garbage that they produce has no effect on their business going forward. They just keep racking in the millions upon millions.

Because their failures don’t really have an impact on their clients, who also keep racking in millions upon millions.

At that scale, thought and attention are proportionate to money moved. So even if 5 interns produced a better tool, the company wouldn't notice it. There's no skin in the game unless millions are involved.

Once the millions have moved to a contractor, it can hire 5 interns to deliver the same product. And it will be used because it cost millions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com