u/AppropriateWay4358

Heard a team of sellers talk and worry at the end of a meeting, lots of concern, panic. And it is not about quotas, this time is about irrelevance. Their customers and accounts refuse to join calls to hear ibm talk about generative AI or cloud. It is a waste of their time. They have gone through so many failed demos, broken promises and disappointing deployments that are beyond frustrated. Many see ibm as irrelevant, a pain in the butt. What's your experience? Is this widespread?

It is happening across the board. Managers are forced to layoff senior personnel and asked to promote "cross pollinating" within the team, basically make sure everyone is replaceable and interchangeable.

You will train your replacement thinking you finally got the help you deserved. Then you will be put on pip regardless of performance, stories will be made up. Finally, you are laid off and a newby takes over, the business degrades further, execs get their fat bonuses, you get cobra.

It is funny how it works, when you see your teammates being laid off you feel bad for them, think of their future, the hard times they will go through , their families and the stress, and how lucky you are it was not you.

Then, years pass and you see them in LinkedIn, they pop up here and there, often at better companies, with much higher compensations. That junior employee you trained for years before they were laid off now works at Meta or Nvidia, making three or four times your salary. They were very fortunate they were laid off, it gave them the opportunity to realize their value and freedom them from the constant worry and mediocrity around here.

My colleague was told by his manager to look outside for better opportunities. They have a very close relationship, he was talking as a friend.

If your own manager suggests you should be leaving for greener pastures... Not a good sign. I wonder if another round of layoffs is brewing. Have you heard?

Heard about cuts in Yorktown office. Some related to llm research efforts, granite. I was very surprised since I thought it was a successful initiative. Can anybody confirm?

Because of talent exodus and difficulties attracting external talent many unqualified internals get promoted to high levels. Im the last months I saw quite mediocre engineers becoming l6 and l7 roles. People of this caliber would have never been promoted that high five years ago. I see level inflation, am I making this up?

Yesterday my 2014 Accord lx stalled in highway.After stopping I accelerate and nothing happens, no sound. Dashboard looks fine, no obvious electrical issues.

I thought it would be fuel pump, however shop says it is a total transmission failure, to my surprise. The car is 155k miles. Do the symptoms align with the diagnostic from the shop?

Btw. It would cost me 3.5k to replace transmission with used one. Is it worth it?

Yesterday my 2014 Accord lx stalled in highway.After stopping I accelerate and nothing happens, no sound. Dashboard looks fine, no obvious electrical issues.

I thought it would be fuel pump, however shop says it is a total transmission failure, to my surprise. The car is 155k miles. Do the symptoms align with the diagnostic from the shop?

Btw. It would cost me 3.5k to replace transmission with used one. Is it worth it?

We talk a lot about layoffs, but maybe not enough about the talent bleed. Most people I learned to admire over the years at this company are now gone. Left for better pastures. People who cared, the hard working ones who also knew how to do things the right way. Interestingly the toxic leaders and the do-nothing ones, the ones always casting blame, seem to never leave. Many have also grown immune to layoffs, they have evolved to survive by projecting failure into others, by faking accomplishments and redefining success.

Last week I saw that a person I was 100% sure would be laid off because their blatant incompetence, inability to do actual work and complete sense of empathy had instead been promoted, now leading a very large team.

Something needs to change.

I believe the strategy is taking shape. In house AI divestment and workforce reduction enabled by third party coding tools. Amazon gave up on Building its own AGI, the signal is clear.

I worry massive layoffs are around the corner. In multiple waves for a safer play.

Where do you see Bob shines compared to this competing products?

Some people in this forum say that. My point of view is that granite has its pros, but it is true that there are much better open source solutions. And cheaper to run since inference is more optimized. But ibm pitches granite as "rock solid, Enterprise grade", is the message resonating?

I know there has been lots of excitement and internal communications on their strategy and goals. But what is the net of it? There are research papers, not sure if good or bad, but product impact? Can you say?

Talked to an old friend in consulting. They spent several weeks building a solution for a big customer, very good decades-long relationship. The project just ended, the customer used their internal team of developers (and claude llm) to build the same solution at no cost, in parallel. And they claimed internally to have saved millions of dollars to their company, which is what IBM tried to charge them for the project and licenses. On the last call they demoed IBM their product developed internally and it was way more capable and tailored to their specific needs, as it was built ad-hoc.

Have you seen other cases like this one? I'm afraid it becomes pattern.

Stay tuned, planned date is end of the summer. Expectations are not met, products not gaining traction in the market. Competition is strong. The consulting side looks worse than ever, companies ibm used to sell their sw solutions to are now using ai agents to develop themselves and cutting costs. That money goes to infra to run more AI.

Orgs need to be consolidated into fewer teams, entire lines of products need to be cut since there is no market for the products they build.

This one is going to be big, multiple thousands, the goal is to cut costs substantially, read personnel, to make the balance sheet look decent in the fourth quarter.

Do you have an idea of how much it costs currently? We are thinking of a 1500 sqft house, not looking for high end.

Is Westchester special? Are we on a different stage within the cycle? I personally know some people who are doing very well financially and still stretching themselves very much to buy a new property because is "an investment". With taxes so high I wonder if this is going to end well.

I listen to our leaders talk about our AI strategy, even the technical gurus we have within the company, and I think they do not understand where we are and where the competition is or what we need. Some talk like we are still leaders and just need to close some gaps. I use AI extensively, in and out of work and I'm well aware we are easily three or four years behind the competition and the gap is clearly growing. Our leaders seem to think the opposite is true. I'm very worried but what do I know compared to our leaders?

Short term Amazon is ok but in a few years the situation could change dramatically if we do not acknowledge and reset the strategy.