
A billion reasons never to buy IBM services - shelkie
https://foliovision.com/2018/03/why-not-buy-ibm
======
Naga
There's a dimension left out here on the Phoenix disaster: It wasn't really
IBM's fault at all.

The Canadian public service is really complex. There are multiple unions with
multiple overlapping collective bargaining agreements, where the public
service is allocated to different classes. These classes are paid specific
rates, with retroactive pay being common for changing classes. The majority of
the problems with Phoenix have been employees moving from their classes and
being paid the correct amount. It has also adversely affected non-unionized
positions.

My understanding is that the Harper government (Prime Minister until 2015),
who was responsible for the negotiation and for laying out the requirements,
was trying to save a money and not responibly create a pay system. Two major
factors that jump out at me:

1) Requirements did not call for training. The system was implemented and IBM
was not required to train any operators on how the system functions, which is
important because all new staff were hired to run the system and,

2) Due to the need for cost saving measures (the government was trying _really
hard_ to balance the budget, as the election was coming up), the previous
payroll staff were _terminated_ and a new payroll centre was opened in
Miramichi, which is a small town in the middle of nowhere.

So, on top of new software, the government lost all of its institutional
knowledge regarding payroll and how things are supposed to work. It's actually
hard to say how much of this is IBM's fault and how much is the governments,
because the government _doesn 't know_ how to fix it. No one knows how Phoenix
works and no one knows how it is supposed to work. It's just a big mess with
no end in sight.

Could IBM have done a better job? Probably, but garbage in, garbage out.

For further reading, the Auditor-General's report: [http://www.oag-
bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201711_01...](http://www.oag-
bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201711_01_e_42666.html)

~~~
danmaz74
> There's a dimension left out here on the Phoenix disaster: It wasn't really
> IBM's fault at all.

I respectfully disagree. IBM management either knew what they were contracting
was a recipe for disaster, or they were incompetent. In both cases, as they
were supposed to be the billion-dollar expert on the matter, they bear great
responsibility for this failure.

And at an industry level, companies that promise the impossible push out of
the market more honest ones, and they deserve all the bad PR IBM is getting on
this one.

~~~
mgkimsal
you're both right, but you're a bit more right. IBM should have been pointing
out that losing the institutional knowledge may cause problems. they possibly
assumed some of their milestones and deliverables would be while working with
existing staff. if the existing staff is let go, many of the assumptions in
the original estimate are just wrong at that point.

~~~
rgbrenner
The managers needed IBM to tell them about the concept of institutional
knowledge? They need to be told that people with experience have learned their
jobs? That new employees need training? This is like Management 101. Just how
incompetent are these managers?

~~~
itronitron
The competent managers likely had no say in the matter.

~~~
bobdole1234
That's a trick question, there are no competent managers in government service
for the most part. They either burn out from managing without the ability to
recruit competent staff, or they moved elsewhere to make drastically more
money.

I'm sitting with a 4x multiple on my old public service job.

------
alecco
12 years ago some guy had the courage to report this predatory activity in
Kuro5hin

"How IBM Conned My Execs Out Of Millions"
[http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2005_9_27_95759_4240.html](http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2005_9_27_95759_4240.html)
(cache)

I remember the guy was harassed by IBM lawyers and even lost his job.

~~~
protonfish
Yep - this is IBM's standard scam. I guess their branding is strong enough to
obscure their history of catastrophic failure, to the VP level exec, at least.

------
zafiro17
These stories of failure, but skew the reader simply because there are very
few companies that can bid on and attempt to manage projects of this scale.
This article could easily be written to focus on the failure of sweeping,
enormous, poorly-thought out projects that suffer changing visions and scope,
rotating project managers, and evolving systems ... that IBM happens to bid on
and execute poorly.

Small projects are better focused, cost less, are easier to understand, and
therefore succeed more frequently (or fail more silently). It's big projects,
frequently proposed and conceived by governments or enormous industrial
conglomerates that are poorly thought-out, improperly managed, and suffer the
worst of project management incompetence or hubris/excess. But who bids on
that kind of project? Big companies like IBM. Let's be fair, they don't just
bid on them, they also coax them into being, but my point stands: if you want
to fail big, you've got to dream big. This isn't a defense of IBM, who
deserves to own the shame of talking big but being unable to actually deliver.
But it is a reminder that the project designers get equal blame for these
sweeping, grandiose, visionary catastrophes.

~~~
lopmotr
Sure. It's both to blame. I know plenty of small companies in other industries
that refuse to do work that they expect to fail because they don't want to
hurt their reputations. Those guys all probably didn't bid or dropped out when
they saw it would fail.

------
kraig911
As someone who used to work in/on/underneath websphere. I can tell you I am
loathe to even consider anything IBM. I was almost recruited by them and then
I recalled how miserable I was on one particular project. The money was good
but I said no. I recommend everyone I mean to stay away from IBM and Oracle as
best I can. I just don't think the line between open source and enterprise is
crystal clear anymore.

~~~
blueside
As a general rule, if a work task lands on your desk that involves working
with a IBM/Oracle/SAP product, preemptively apologize to those regularly
around you for your miserable attitude in the near future.

~~~
user5994461
I'm not sure why Oracle is in the list. The databases are very expensive but
they work well.

~~~
marcosdumay
When The Daily WTF was still maintained it reserved an entire section of the
site for Oracle Database. It may rarely have catastrophic failures (although
it's the second one I've seen most catastrophic failures, just after MySQL),
but it is composed of one unreasonable choice after the other.

~~~
fphhotchips
What makes you say The Daily WTF isn't maintained?

~~~
marcosdumay
It is online, but it doesn't seem to get much more new content.

~~~
szatkus
I get new items on RSS everyday.

------
sg0
Well, this news that came out last year is somewhat relevant. MD Anderson
Cancer Center's IBM Watson project failed, with $62 million paid to IBM and
PwC for essentially no results. However, I don't blame IBM, I blame people who
dove in without clearly thinking it through.
[https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-
cancer-...](https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-cancer-
centers-ibm-watson-project-fails-journalism-related/)

~~~
ebiester
We have all seen a project go wonky with requirements. However, I haven't
heard of a successful product that IBM built/managed in the last decade.

On the other hand, talking with friends in the government and government
contracting, they argue that IBM and the major contractors have perfected the
art of exploiting government into maximizing billable hours at the expense of
results.

It's a bit like the metaphorical malicious genie interpreting your request. It
isn't possible to write specifications that can't be interpreted malevolently.

~~~
sm64
IBM is likely the single largest government contractor in North America. Most
governments at every level have contracted IBM for something, at some point.
You don't hear about the successes because that's not news. That's just a
government and contractor functioning as they should. Only large, expensive
failures make the news.

------
seemstoaddup
This is an interesting narrative. However it cannot be the only one. Let us
explore some alternatives and side notes.

Who was responsible for picking IBM? Are they still working for the CA gov?
Have they passed the hot potato to someone else? How were their technical
skills and soft skills evaluated? Did they receive any donations for the
contract? Where are the safety clauses in the contract? Is IBM the only
benefactor of this contract? Any political implications?

Remember that Gov. point person also bears a lot of the responsibility for
shopping for IT services in a magazine or trough their business network.

If IBM has been so ineffective at delivering services there would be more
cases like this and it would ultimately hurt their bottom line. If this was
wide spread practice across their business units. Maybe their business as a
whole is insulated by the other better performing parts of it's corporation.

It seems to me that these "Governments" should investigate anyone who touched
these contracts.

To the widespread corruption present in Eastern Europe. It does exist. However
this article goes to show that corruption is present at a larger scale in some
of the "most" developed nations on earth.

~~~
na85
Because government contracts have to be transparent, the award process tends
to be overly bureaucratic and algorithmic. There's no real mechanism with
which the Canadian government could bar IBM from bidding, and they're obliged
to take the best bid. Usually this is lowest cost per rated point, scored
against a large matrix of must-haves and nice-to-haves that are assigned
weights.

~~~
seemstoaddup
Sounds like the system is set up in such a way as to deliver a under-
performing product. Especially if it optimizes for "lowest cost per rated
point". Quality things require significant investment.

No wonder IBM has to go get developers outside of the US/CA/AU if they were
the lowest bid.

Now it all fits together. Whenever i go to my states web services and they
look odd. I now know why. That is changing though.

~~~
794CD01
If you don't have an objective metric like that, these bureaucrats don't
magically learn how to make good decisions. They just overpay their friends
instead. These bidding systems are a symptom of bad decision makers, not their
cause.

~~~
breatheoften
Governments used to build things in house as well ... I remember the first
time I applied for federal student aid — in 1999 — it was a long complicated
form but it was far more complex and functional than any web application I’d
interacted with up to that date.

Built on in-house knowledge rather than subcontracted out to incompetents with
zero stake in product quality or understanding of what they were trying to
build ... (aka the outsource everything mentality of the gop that spread
everywhere during bush era from which American government managed
infrastructure on all levels has never recovered — and probably will never
recover)

------
PeterStuer
I you think this is an 'IBM' only problem, you're in for a surprise. I've
worked on very large projects with other very large service companies, and the
experience is very much alike.

From day one the client company gets swamped by an army of vendor analysts,
the prime reason for this is to establish that it is the clients fault the
project will fail as they couldn't respond to requests for information fast
enough. Any information you manage to supply will be scrutinized for
'discovery' of 'change requests' to pad the meters and CYA.

Meanwhile, a 'technical specialist' room chock full of developers is installed
to (a) put on extra time pressure and (b) start the billing engine in top
gear. When you went into that room there were literally people sitting at
desks watching the vendor's equivalent of CS 101 video courses.

Also, a team of lawyers is already preparing the documents for the
'settlement' in case of the (very likely) project failure.

All status information to the project's steering committee gets 'green
shifted' until the supplier is ready to shift to litigation mode and then
overnight the project's near unrecoverable disaster gets revealed alongside a
proposed 'rescue' plan that is priced so ridiculously it makes the
'settlement' look cheap.

In the private sector these train-wrecks are often settled with non-publish
clauses as making the press would make both parties look bad. In our case the
supplier dropped a small percentage on the billing. The client was left with a
room (literally) full of boxes of A4 'analysis' documents and 25M€ out of
pocket. (this was in the financial industry, so it was basically pocket
change)

All involved, both supplier side and customer side seem to have not suffered
career wise from this disaster, moving swiftly to new clients and new
projects.

P.S. Am I the only one that finds the author's sweeping generalizations of
nationalities a bit in bad taste?

------
joncrane
Does anyone else remember the days when "No one ever got fired for buying IBM"
was true? You might pay a little extra, but it was never a total fail to use
IBM products.

I'm not sure when that changed, but I feel like these days, IBM is closer to
Oracle than AWS.

~~~
scottLobster
Clearly too many people remember. Shows the power of branding. IBM has largely
moved out of the consumer space, and occasionally their research labs come out
with some cool new tech (Watson and such). In the common consciousness they
were the Apple of their day who then ascended out of the market to bigger,
cooler things. As a result most people, including non-technical business execs
who make purchasing decisions, don't have a good current frame of reference.
IBM rode that facade for a while, it's only recently that their blunders have
started hurting their reputation within the industry.

~~~
blueside
> some cool new tech (Watson and such)

I'm afraid Watson is very far from a "cool new tech", many companies have
described their experience with Watson as a money gouging disaster.

~~~
gargravarr
Its appearance on Jeopardy! made it seem cool especially to non-technical
people, who are most likely to remember and be impressed by it.

------
jusonchan
Seems like a baseless article that is pulling fake facts out of thin air to
supplement a couple of real ones like the cost basis and failures of large
government projects.

It's not uncommon for large government projects to fail with all the
bureaucracy and politics that is in play. I am not saying IBM is great, but
this article is just not worth it.

~~~
Shoothe
I've used two services from IBM: Notes and node DB2 package. Both of them were
pretty low quality, the db2 package was so unstable that it constantly
segfaulted the entire node process. It's not fixed for years since the issue
was reported with reproducible code. Needless to say I wouldn't recommend IBM
even to my enemies.

Can anyone share a good IBM experience? I'm honestly interested.

~~~
blakesterz
They bought SoftLayer a few years ago and haven't ruined it. Not sure if that
really counts or not, but I was really worried. I've been there for quite a
few years, and nothing went downhill after they got bought.

------
AzzieElbab
IBM is a horrible vendor, but the author is obviously clueless about the
levels of incompetence, irresponsibility and indecisiveness of the
stakeholders on client side for this kind of projects. All governmens should
simply always pick the cheapest vendor because 90% of their projects fail
regardless of who the implementers are

~~~
RobLach
They did pick the cheapest. IBM was the only bidder.

------
thaumaturgy
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494387)
(327 comments)

------
throw7
I'm hesitant to just blame IBM and call it the day. What about the U.S.
healthcare.gov website? Do we also blame CGI Federal and Accenture?

There's probably blame on both sides, but it seems nowadays that "it needs to
be a roaring dumpster fire until we do things the right way". Unfortunately,
either no one _in_ government seems competent to know that right way or be
empowered enough to fight for it (maybe they've all left).

~~~
empath75
All things considered, healthcare.gov wasn’t that bad. Having to scale to the
size of the entire country on day one is a hard-to-impossible task and the
managed to recover impressively quickly.

~~~
SyneRyder
Didn't they recover by hiring a completely different team to rebuild the
entire site from scratch?

 _" Here is the tl;dr version of their story: Marketplace Lite, or “MPL” as
they came to be known, devoted months to rewriting Healthcare.gov functions in
full, working as a startup within the government and replacing contractor-made
apps with ones costing one-fiftieth of the price."_

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-s...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-
secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/)

------
bartread
It's not just IBM: any of the larger enterprise consultancies should, at best,
be regarded with suspicion. I well remember the EDS/UK Inland Revenue fiasco
of the late nineties/early noughties, and there are plenty of other examples
involving other big players.

~~~
zokier
If you think that all big consultancies fail so equally, then doesn't that
hint strongly that maybe, just maybe, the issues are on the other side?

~~~
bartread
Well, I'd be lying if I suggested I had an overabundance of respect for large
consultancies, but actually I don't think it's so simple in either direction.

Consultancies mis-sell and misrepresent their services, whilst public
service/government scopes the project poorly and is more than happy to buy
into the fantasy. Every project is different so this is still an
oversimplification.

Nevertheless, when an enterprise IT service provider is involved in a project
it's often a red flag on successful delivery. Whether that's correlation or
causation is up for debate.

------
linkmotif
I really didn't understand this piece. Did anyone else struggle to follow it
from sentence to sentence?

Did this article really compare FreshBooks to the payroll needs of the
Government of Canada? Whatt??

~~~
foliovision
Freshbooks has built from scratch two SAAS which have handled over $60 billion
worth of invoices and expenses for over 10 million users.

I'm suggesting that Mike McDerment could build and lead a team who would
successfully build a payroll system for the Government of Canada for far less
than a billion dollars.

IBM has not built a working payroll system (despite starting with Oracle's
Peoplesoft for that money). I suspect my company (or some of our best
competitors) could build a working payroll system for about $50 million based
on our success on smaller projects. Our specialty however is in publishing
systems and online video. I'm specifically recommending Freshbooks as
McDerment has a background in creating accounting and billing systems and
scaling them.

Additionally, as a Canadian, McDerment is already familiar with many of the
variables to do with Canadian tax and employment legislation and geography.
Any foreigner would need three to six months to assimilate Canada specific
information.

I also don't suggest that IBM could not have built this payroll system
satisfactorily. Based on failed projects in Canada, Australia, Pennsylvania
and Slovenia, big promises, poor delivery, unlimited billing and zero
liability on government projects appears to be strategic policy (links to each
of those projects appear in a new preface to my article). Such behaviour has
made Big Blue billions.

~~~
linkmotif
> Freshbooks has built from scratch two SAAS which have handled over $60
> billion worth of invoices and expenses for over 10 million users.

Right but those transactions have all been more or less the same type of
vanilla invoicing. Unless something has really changed in Freshbooks, that’s
an app that handles very specific relatively simple needs. The government of
Canada is a giant entity that is most seriously orders of mangnitude different
and complex than any usecase for FreshBooks, and that’s just the reality.

> I'm suggesting that Mike McDerment could build and lead a team who would
> successfully build a payroll system for the Government of Canada for far
> less than a billion dollars.

Maybe, but probably not. The real problem is probably that the business needs
of the government of Canada are not well defined and the bureaucrats cannot
define them. The comparison to FreshBooks is just so off because it’s totally
upside down. FreshBooks was built and provides certain functionality. Building
a payroll system for The government of Canada is an exercise in reverse
engineering the Government of Canada. It’s an exercise in squaring hundreds of
not thousands of different circles and making them fit into a box.

------
xab9
Wife worked for them as sales something, sometimes I saw the tools she had
been using, couple of presentations - real nightmare fuel.

I remember once talking about how they (big blue) see Atlassian as a
competitor and how they have to try harder to convince companies to use IBM
products... the very moment someone replaced Jira with some IBM shit or Gmail
Business or even Outlook with Lotus Notes I would quit.

~~~
kumarvvr
Not trying to defend IBM here, but as a one time Lotus Notes dev, I can assure
you that LN is not just an email program, but a whole platform that enables
you to build workflow apps very very quickly. Not unlike sharepoint, but the
catch being that it worked best from the LN client rather than the browser.

When I worked for IBM Global Business Service div as a dev, most of our
payroll, billing, travel approvals and what not were done on LN. IIRC email
was just another app on the platform.

------
geogra4
All of the big consultancy firms are bodyshops in some sense. But in my
experience IBM is truly one of the worst. And people still keep falling for
it.

------
mcv
It's not just IBM. Dutch government IT projects also have a tendency to fail
big, and those are handled by other companies. It seems governments are easy
marks for mediocre IT companies.

~~~
maxxxxx
From my experience it's mainly that governments don't have a lot of experts on
staff so a lot of decision making gets outsourced too. I worked on a gov
contract a long time ago and it was pretty obvious that there were several
higher ups in government who added their own conflicting requirements to the
list. Everybody in the trenches saw that they made things incredibly complex
for no good reason but nobody pushed back. The main contractor was happy to
sell many, many more hours and inside government there was nobody who had the
ability to screen requirements for consistency and feasibility before giving
them to the contractor.

It's like dealing with any other service business like contracts, lawyers,
wedding photographers or others. If you don't give them clear guidance the
result will most likely be an expensive disaster.

~~~
mcv
Another problem with governments is that they're made up of dozens or hundreds
of different organisations, and they all make these mistakes on their own.
Even if one organisation gets it right, other parts of the government don't
benefit from that expertise.

I think governments should have a special organisation that just maintains the
expertise for handling these sort of big projects all across the government.

~~~
empath75
You’d think so but then you just have one more organization that doesn’t share
anything with anyone else.

~~~
mcv
That organisation would have as its only job to make sure all other government
organisations get this right. It should be able to work when that's their only
responsibility.

------
tootie
I get why IT contracts can balloon in some cases, but I can't even fathom $1B
for setting up PeopleSoft.

~~~
gargravarr
Then again, it's Oracle. I'm sure their licensing department is attempting to
track how many neurons in the brain are actively engaged when using their
products and billing the customer accordingly.

------
devit
Can anyone explain what's so complex about a "payroll system"?

Presumably you just have a table with people with salary, and every month you
wire the money and record information about the wire or otherwise have a way
to record when the person has taken cash.

You might want to have more complex rules for determining schedule and amount
of salaries, and support for contractors, unpaid leave, taxes, etc. but that
doesn't seem particulary complex either.

How can this possibly take more than 100 person-years (i.e. < $30 million) to
make even a truly extravagant version of?

Not to mention that presumably such software already exists and could be used
instead of writing a new one.

[obviously my explanation would be corruption, but I wonder if I miss
something]

~~~
gerbilly
Remembering and tracking all the agreements made with workers and unions going
back decades _and_ handling the cases where workers change jobs and union
designations (or even move from one union to another).

There are thousands of byzantine rules in the contracts and agreements, some
mutually contradictory.

The old code likely contained a lot of business logic that represented an
institutional memory of how to handle all these corner cases.

Anyone wishing to reimplement a system like that will have to rediscover these
corner cases one at a time in production, while thousands of people complain
that their paycheque is short.

Then there are also pensions to keep track of etc...

~~~
Chyzwar
That why you should start small but cover most common cases first. Then
gradually work on policies to simplify byzantine rules. Retrain some people
and keep internal dev team.

IBM promised a big bang that would be finished before the election. What could
possibly go wrong?

I think that there is a positive aspect. Other governments will learn from
mistakes when ordering expensive projects like this.

------
jimjimjim
If you've never worked for a team responding to RFPs/RFIs for large projects
then it's difficult to know what's mismanagement and what's "normal".

Generally you respond with a proposal that on the surface ticks ALL the boxes.
Later you show the proposed product and state that all the missing parts will
be implemented or altered during implementation.

You get a bunch of senior people or architects to estimate the work +/\- 1000%
(mostly for the time estimates). The difference between what is charged to the
customer and the actual cost of the work is swallowed by the bidder with the
idea that it will be gouged back during additional work that wasn't in the
initial scope.

Then you present your proposal and if you win the bid you then try everything
to make it profitable from that point on.

ps. None of this is compatible with agile.

------
sundvor
Oh, but the con-census is that they did such a brilliant job in Australia!

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-
over-$30m-i...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-in-
compensation-for-census-fail/8057240)

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-
and...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and-on-could-
have-prevented-census-outage/7963916)

~~~
SyneRyder
Indeed, some Australian states actually have a ban on government agencies
contracting out to IBM:

[https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-
on-...](https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-420969)

The quote from Queensland's Premier at the time of the ban:

“I don’t want companies that have this sort of culture doing work for the
people of this state.”

------
webninja
“IBM instead sold the Canadian government someone else's software (Oracle's
Peoplesoft) on a sweetheart contract which did not require delivery of a
working solution. Then IBM failed to successfully implement while taking
payment all the way along.”

So they outsourced the work to Oracle which is known to churn out garbage.
Also just a lot of blame shifting between garbage-quality companies.

------
expertentipp
Global American consultancies are paying 25-40k USD annually in post-Communist
EU countries. The teams are run as little dictatures by the "directors" who
are facing the outside world. What are you expecting to extract from such
arrangement? BTW There is no place for IBM in Germany, they have their own
three-letter named IT moloch.

------
sidcool
It's sad that a lot of blame comes to the low skilled programmers in India. It
may be true, but it's sad.

------
Lazare
> IBM instead sold the Canadian government someone else's software (Oracle's
> Peoplesoft) on a sweetheart contract which did not require delivery of a
> working solution.

Okay, so Canada signed a bad contract and didn't make IBM promise to delivery
the goods.

> In cases like this in the past, the Canadian Government would just be able
> to tell IBM to deliver the goods as promised or IBM would be banned from
> doing business in Canada - effectively frozen.

But you just got done telling us that IBM _didn 't_ promise to deliver the
goods.

> Under NAFTA and similar trade pacts, governments have lost all leverage and
> these sweetheart deals continue to be pushed through.

NAFTA and similar trade agreements neither require governments to sign
contracts that don't require delivery of working solutions, not require
governments to not sue to enforce contract terms once signed. If IBM broke the
contract terms, Canada can sue. But if Canada signed a really dumb contract,
there's a number of remedies here, but violating the contract terms and just
demanding other parties do things they have no obligation to do to make up for
your mistake doesn't seem like a good choice. You know, "rule of law" and all
that?

> Why should the Canadian taxpayer foot the bills for corrupt contracts with
> devious suppliers? The

They shouldn't. But, well, _was_ it corrupt? Prove it in court, and the
contract can be voided. NAFTA won't stop that either. If you can't prove it in
court, they maybe it was just dumb (and not bribery), in which case yes, the
taxpayers should foot the bill. If they don't like it, they can vote in a
better government. That's democracy.

------
RachelF
There are very similar stories from Australia, with IBM being sued for being
late on major (billion dollar) government projects and releasing products that
just don't work.

IBM produced a $1.2 billion payroll project for Queensland heath that just
never worked.

~~~
guidedlight
This is mentioned in the article.

NZ also had a disastrous police database project fail that was managed by IBM.

------
hkmurakami
With the recent demise of their stock, I wonder if we've finally reached an
era where "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" will no longer be true.

------
Paperweight
"Nobody who could ever get fired would buy IBM."

------
bastawhiz
If you're struggling to read the text like I am, setting the `font-weight` to
400 (instead of 300) makes the page infinitely more readable.

~~~
foliovision
Thanks for the input. Personally my own bugbear in terms of web readability is
contrast ratios in "modern" web design. I didn't realise that font-weight
could give people such issues. I'll think about changing font-weight soon as
good design is about making information more readable and not less.

------
wooshy
I'd imagine this is common with all large IT consultancy services. I had bad
experiences with IBM as well as TCS.

------
jorblumesea
If even 50% of this article is true, I feel less concerned about job security.

------
oh_sigh
Is there a breakdown of where the $780M went? As in, how much to engineer
salaries, how much for hardware, operational support, etc?

I have a really hard time wrapping my mind around a project that expensive

------
mcguire
Shhhh!

Many of us work in these kinds of industries.

------
zeristor
IBM: I've Been Mugged

------
tptacek
_Historically Slovakia gets lumped with Eastern Europe in popular perception -
Slovakia is nothing like Romania, the Ukraine, Albania or even Poland in
turning out petty criminals or promiscuous online fraudsters. Not to forget
Western Europe, France has a far more unhealthy work culture and fraud at work
and as a way of living is far more acceptable than in Slovakia. Germany and
Austria tend to value probity far more highly than the Mediterranean
countries. Hundreds of years of late Roman Empire corruption left an undying
footprint._

This attitude is shot through the whole piece (essentializing not just
Europeans but also Indians), and it's weird and creepy.

~~~
alexk
Thanks for calling this out.

I think we should do more of it on HN (and everywhere else). People should try
harder to decouple their biases from facts especially in their public writing.

~~~
Mizza
I'll play devil's advocate here: I actually greatly prefer when people expose
their biases early on rather than try to hide them through weaselly or bland
language. I think immediate total aversion to nationally biased language is a
specifically American trait (and left-coast American at that) - as the result
of contemporary cultural conditioning and general lack of exposure to
international identities. Europeans are more comfortable with it as it happens
more there, there is much more international exchange, and as a result, people
can be given the benefit of the doubt by default, in the sense that "oh, I
know that when the author says Slovakian culture, he obviously doesn't mean
every single individual Slovakian person, but rather his perception of the
traits of their culture as a whole."

~~~
danso
If Europeans are more exposed than Americans to folks of different
nationalities, wouldn't they be _less_ inclined to broadly generalize them?

No one would accuse the author of meaning to judge "every single individual
Slovakian person". It's ironic that you state your dislike of "weaselly or
bland language", and then go on to describe the author as having a _"
perception of the traits of their culture as a whole"_. Most people would
describe that as simply having _stereotypes_.

~~~
Mizza
> If Europeans are more exposed than Americans to folks of different
> nationalities, wouldn't they be less inclined to broadly generalize them?

Why would it? It's just more data to pattern-match on, and that can mean
confirming bias and prejudice as well. It might also shock you to find out
that people who work in retail or food service also develop prejudices as
well. It's not a good thing but it happens.

I'm not saying that stereotypes are good (or I suppose, that they are always
bad), I'm just saying I don't need to clutch my pearls about it every time I
see it. I can just read it and think "Okay, this guy is obviously using
stereotypes about other countries here" and then keep reading without it
necessarily immediately invalidating else that's been written. This is
particularly so when Europeans talk about other European countries, as in this
particular case. It is, I think, actually a form of comradery. (We might hate
the Germans, but they're _our_ Germans, and we won't have any yanks slagging
them off!)

I am sharing my perspective here as a European who immigrated to the United
States who has observed the response to this in both cultures.

~~~
danso
OK I won't get into an argument of whether stereotypes or prejudices are
good/bad and I'm sorry if I implied that. I can't speak for the GP (u/alexk),
but I interpreted his assertion of _" People should try harder to decouple
their biases from facts especially in their public writing"_ as saying that
using stereotypes as factual evidence leads to weak writing.

For example, this graf:

> _Yet if these people or their friends were the only ones who had contact
> with your data, no issues at all. Slovaks, particularly in the service
> industry, are astonishingly honesty._

> _[the next section is about how technical work is outsourced from Slovakia]_

The author apparently thinks IBM's off-shoring would be fine (indeed, _" no
issues at all"_) if the work outsourced to Slovakia stayed in Slovakia (rather
than be outsourced to India), and his supporting argument is that "Slovaks are
astonishingly honest". Take away the stereotype, and we see how flimsy the
author's assertion is. It's not the stereotype that's wrong, necessarily, it's
how the author uses it as evidence.

Yes, I suppose I agree with you that people being explicit about their biases
makes it easier to identify weak essays. But it's also worth arguing that no
matter your biases, your writing is stronger when you rely on empirical
evidence, rather than using generalizations/stereotypes that you assume the
audience will agree are true.

~~~
Mizza
> The author apparently thinks IBM's off-shoring would be fine (indeed, "no
> issues at all") if the work outsourced to Slovakia stayed in Slovakia
> (rather than be outsourced to India)

Yeah. It's a blog post from a Slovakian offshoring company. Of course he does.

I don't expect that this Slovakian blog post about why Slovakian offerings are
better than Indian offerings will be free of bias, and in fact I think it's
unreasonable to ask for that.

Mostly, I find it a bit annoying that people (almost always Californians -
stereotype!) are tripping over themselves trying to point out - "Hey! This guy
might be biased! Let me tell everybody, and congratulate everybody else on
that awesome 'call out!' We need more of that here!" \- with total contextual
and cultural blindness.

I think, no, we need more critical thinking, more benefit of the doubt and
less US-centrism.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Well, Identifying the bias behind a viewpoint is thinking critically about it.

------
matte_black
Is there any proof that the technical work for IBM is sent out to Indian
boiler rooms with very high turnover? Or is this just based on some belief
that any software in India must automatically be shitty?

~~~
aluhut
I work for a global US company with offices throughout the world. They
outsourced IT to IBM recently. Haven't had contact to anyone not from India.

They were forced to put some IT guys in our office. Those are 2 kids working
as cheap freelancers for a local subcontractor hired by IBM.

Service is horrible. Tickets stacking up and being deleted regularly. Project
relevant IT not working, people leaving because of it. It's a mess.

------
reaperducer
The article criticizes the quality of some Indian coders. Expect to be
downvoted into oblivion.

~~~
frostburg
The footer about Slovakia / France / Germany is a lot more disturbing. Low-
rent Indian coding shops being bad isn't news or racist.

~~~
danso
Yeah, I don't know much about Slovakia but the author's broad, unsupported
generalizations of the country ( _Slovaks are very talented at mid-level
service jobs: responsible and polite if not particularly fast-moving...
Slovaks, particularly in the service industry, are astonishingly honest_ )
don't inspire a lot of confidence. I was also surprised to see the author's
use of " _the Ukraine_ ". I still remember someone at my college newspaper
using that archaic phrase in an otherwise innocuous article and getting a very
angry letter-to-the-editor about the history/politics of Russia and Ukraine,
and that was more than a decade ago.

~~~
frostburg
Given the current situation re: Russia that's practically a dogwhistle.

