IBM u-turning on "we only need AI" and tripling down on hiring US graduates
I was hoping Arvind Krishna would fall on his sword after this epic U-turn and that maybe Nadella would be next... One can dream right?
Edit: thinking about it... IBM have always been big on sacking senior devs and replacing them with graduates so this isn't really anything new....
Imagine you're a 10 person startup and instead of paying a few hundred $$ for an invoicing tool, and endpoint security tool, an expenses and time tracking tool you get your 6-8 developers to vibe code those from scratch too and maintain them forever costing thousands in Claude credits and 10s of thousands in salaries. That's definitely a great use of your investors' funds and totally not a good way to fudge your taxes, lose data, get hacked and end up being sued because the engineers, stretched way too thin, let Claude commit tax fraud on your behalf.
This was just such an unbelievably bad take from investors and people like Matt Stoller, the latter of whom might know monopoly enforcement but don't know software engineering (or the Gell Man Amnesia effect apparently)
If famed bag holder SoftBank are starting to raise their eyebrows when asked about future investments, the jig is definitely up
Weirdly the media are reporting that they have made a profit on their investments but when you actually read the articles, they are saying that the magical imaginary money that their OpenAI shares are worth has gone up
Hi fellow ex-ibmer! When I was there 15 years ago we were working on replacing COBOL applications written in the 1960s with modern trendy languages like java. Back then we had a deterministic COBOL to java transpiler but according to friends who are still there they have tripled down on it with genai. And.....guess what... No self-respectong CTO or CIO of a fortune 500 is going to migrate from battle tested for 50+ years, business logic to vibe coded slop if they want to remain employable.
Congratulations on getting out btw!