Comment by jlg23
7 years ago
> most people's experience with IBM isn't positive.
That does not reflect my or my friends experience. Once one gets beyond the local representatives, service for me always was exceptional.
7 years ago
> most people's experience with IBM isn't positive.
That does not reflect my or my friends experience. Once one gets beyond the local representatives, service for me always was exceptional.
Maybe for hardware. There are pretty good about hardware support. At two companies I worked at we got people sent to us for on-site repair.
Their software support is something else. I haven't had to use IBM tooling in a while, but back when I did, everything they sold was absolutely fucking terrible (DB2, RAD, WebSphere, Clear Case, Tivoli) compared to many open source equivalents.
The only reason people buy this rubbish is because they're in an old company (bank, insurance, etc.) that has relied on it for ages and don't care about the inefficiency or cost.
> Their software support is something else. I haven't had to use IBM tooling in a while, but back when I did, everything they sold was absolutely fucking terrible (DB2, RAD, WebSphere, Clear Case, Tivoli) compared to many open source equivalents.
Over 20 years in contracting that's been my experience too, utterly lazy, awful software - awful UI, continuous license issues, buggy, juggernauts of bloat. WSAD (Eclipse + Websphere plugins) was easily my worst experience with an IDE, ClearCase easily my worst experience with a SCCS etc. I pity people that have to work with any of it 9-5.
The banks and insurance companies I've worked at had support contracts, but they were useless - you more often than not just had to suck it up.
yup- Onsite repair technicians are no problem when you company is paying $500K a year to support it.
He's talking about IBM global services. If you had an exceptional experience with an IT department outsourced to IGS you'd be the first.
To be fair, there are AAA teams even in global services. I believe I worked with some guys from the Hong Kong team that were !@#$ing amazing? But they were supporting a major bank.
IBM in general seems fairly aware of who their best teams are, and you're probably not going to get one of those teams. (Unless you're a huge account and/or the project is in dire straits)