IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI
IBM felt to me like the last holdout of the shiny shoed salesmen when I briefly worked for them. Before the internet and big tech companies with leaders who were theoretically technical there were the companies dominated by salesmen because selling was the critical part.<p>I imagine that getting a board to spend a lot of money on some project is hard and you need the support of the kind of people that can influence board members.<p>So to get your project past a lot of people who basically don&#x27;t respect or believe in nerds you had to hire a company with non-nerdy salesmen to back you up.<p>i.e. the entire thing is social.   And just because the nerds (us) have trounced  them for the last N years, it doesn&#x27;t mean that the world has converted into 100% nerd.  Shiny shoed salesmen are probably still quite necessary.<p>I joined as part of an acquisition. I am probably biased but they spent a year making the product multilingual and not fixing anything. Everyone knows the name of the Open Source knock-off of that product but not the name of the product anymore. It&#x27;s probably still there taking almost no investment of effort.<p>So I got the impression that IBM is a company where software goes to live out its old age and die.   I think of Redhat (perhaps unfairly) with their super complicated Linux distribution which must be a nightmare to maintain because it does so many things and needs to keep long compatibility guarantees. I&#x27;m not expecting any innovation whatsoever from them. Perhaps this is very unfair and ignorant of me. I&#x27;m happy to be corrected.