I have been working in a mildly successful IBM product for the last 12 years. Some years ago my boss at the time warned me about something I am now experiencing first hand: Well connected higher ups work on the flashy IBM fad that almost always fail (block chain, cp4d, Watson health, Watsonx….) then a layoff happens, the base workers and the first line take most of the blow, and these professional bosses are parachuted into a more established product. It’s been 8 months since a big layoff impacted my team, the layoff came with new bosses, all of them from failed products. They know nothing about my product (and are not willing to learn), but keep making decisions that they are not (remotely) capable of understanding their consequences , they all came with big attitude and egos; always ready to hoard the travel opportunities and post in LinkedIn at every turn. They will surely sink the product and jump to the next one. Have you seen this as well?
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@j4 LOL. He did an AMA around this time last summer, and one of the first things out of his mouth was that he didn’t believe politics or political maneuvering happened at Albany. You could practically feel the collective shock in the room. It was palpable. This was coming from someone who had just been transferred to take over a department he had little to no experience with or background in. To many people, the move looked like a textbook example of politics and favoritism.
The irony only got worse later into the year when his department’s individual team’s employee survey scores each ended up among the lowest in all of IBM, dipping to around -30% in many categories. Yet, as usual, HR seemed content to sit on its hands while everyone else watched the fallout.
@ck
Are you talking about JS? He’s so full of it. The politics surrounding him and the political games he plays are unreal. He’s always preaching about being “data-driven”… right up until the data and facts don’t support the narrative he’s trying to sell. Then suddenly the rules change.
It’s honestly amazing he’s managed to survive this long. Every team or project he touches seems to either slowly die on the vine or crash and burn outright. I genuinely don’t understand how senior leadership hasn’t connected the dots yet. At this point, you almost have to wonder if he’s their designated executioner. They send him in whenever they want to quietly ki-l something while pretending it was just “business decisions.”
@OP - Have you ever thought how IBM is able to sell such products to the clients? Clients also have similar mo--ns who know nothing about the product or how the product they are spending millions for is going to solve their business need, but they are in the position to make such purchasing decisions and that is what keeps IBM in business.
The moment engineers like you and I and several others who have what it takes to build a product get into these positions, the professional landscape is going to look a lot different. IBM knows it and so does other fortune 500 companies, and they would never want us in these decision making positions.
@ag every project that senior manage touches ends up in the graveyard
@b8 LOL. Kinda the same system they use to move around child-molesting priests.
Ah, you've discovered chaalaki.
Basically chaalaki is the Grindset Mindset as applied to a deeply broken, unethical culture. To wit: chaalaki means that looking like you're hard working or successful is more important than actually doing hard work or being successful.
They show up in your project, shout some useless advice (so they can claim ownership of your success), then post on LinkedIn like a roided up gym bro about how awesome they are with [hashtag buzzword soup]. Much chaalaki, much izzat.
If your project fails, their cousin in HR or above them will move them to a different project, because to let them get fired would harm their family's izzat and they're probably getting kickbacks.
(BTW, the big attitude and egos are them thinking you respect their bugman caste system. You're supposed to be in awe at their mere presence.)
@as Ditto. I've seen it happen more than once. Lots of effort put into those ppt slides, little to none put into the actual product.
Well put, @ad+1kw “: they decide to push the proof of concept with some shiny power point slides as a finished product”
MRAM guys?
@ad They are called consultants and IBM Consulting is full of these people who need to be sent packing. Unfortunately they can get away with mu---r while you will be put on a PIP and shown the door with 2 weeks severance, if you are lucky.
you are talking about the bosses who want you to work on the product that was sourced as an acquisition and then got ba----dized to integrate into hundreds of useless non working products under IBM umbrella, and have all the features ready in time for what they promised to the customer by a certain date, and when you ask them for the budget to fund the development, they disappear after directing you to finance, then to please the customer, they decide to push the proof of concept with some shiny power point slides as a finished product, tell you to mark a certain percentage of people in your department as low performers, meanwhile cybersecurity is doing an audit and comes with a charter of obviously missing guardrails, and when things fail, you get yelled and and take the blame - yes, seen them and they sound like sales and finance guys who never built a product or even wrote a single line of code, yet are so fluent at bullsh-tting and selling cr-p for millions of dollars that doesn't work and are rewarded by the management for doing so.