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by alephnerd·3y ago·view on hn ↗
Based on my interactions with specific IBM teams:

They are a major systems integrator in the financial and govt world, they have a massive professional services team ensuring everything from AIX to RHEL7.2 is running and not breaking for customers, they have very smart HPC and Quantum Chemistry people working on building Quatumn Computing algorithms, they are building features in IBM Cloud for our EU banking counterparts (too big to fail French banks seem to have converged on IBM cloud as their platform of choice), managing a major Docker Hub competitor (Quay), building out and managing the primary on-prem Kubernetes orchestrator (OpenShift), and are managing the primary incident response platform used by enterprises.

There are a lot of issues and gripes to have about IBM, but they are a very critical player in the industry. Tech Bros on HN just don't have the visibility and remain in their weird HN echo chamber.

And IBM 100% does still have a middle management problem - no way I'd ever work there unless I was at least a VP.

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>Tech Bros on HN just don't have the visibility and remain in their weird HN echo chamber

As someone who has worked in consulting on the Enterprise side for 25 years, the HN attitudes towards IBM, SAP, Oracle, and even SaaS companies like SF/SNOW/Adobe is baffling. Corporate America would literally cease to function if these companies disappeared one night, but would hardly bat an eye over the disappearance of Facebook, Apple, or even Google.

Hacker news has always been an outgrowth of the startup world, and has never had much respect for "serious business". I guess because of the slow pace and paper pushing, which is a valid complaint about working at these kinds of organizations. It's something you eventually come to understand, but as a young person fresh from a CS program I understand how it can feel.

This is likely to become less extreme over time as our experiment with low to negative interest rate policy comes to a close.

Even the startup conversations on here are completely detached from reality to be honest. There's a lack of understanding among commentators about how VC works, Category Creation, Pricing Strategy, GTM, Sales, etc. Most YC startup founders have their own private board at this point that they discuss stuff on now.

HN has devolved into burned out Gen X or elder Millenial FAANG engineers bitching about their gilded cage existence.