I had IBM as a client. A very high level executive was over the moon when we showed a sql query, a basic select-agg-groupby thing. He loved our "natural language data extraction technology". The meeting wasnt about that, he just asumed we had invented sql queries.

His staff was furious but couldnt correct him live in front of a large audience.

We signed a multi million contract based on this persons lack of understanding, we didnt even have to lie, he just fooled himself.

This has become the culture at many if not most large companies. Only the people who are willing to totally debase themselves and incessantly parrot the company line rise to the top, and that has an inverse relationship with talent.

Blockchain in chemistry ? WTF ‽

I interned at IBM in the late '80s at the TJ Watson research facility. I have no idea if that's still around or if it's still what it used to be, but at the time it was a pretty amazing place, filled with brilliant people doing stuff that may or may not have been directly related to the corporate bottom line. Benoit Mandelbrot (the chaos theory guy) had an office there. There was an unused scanning electron microscope parked in the hallway outside of our lab because there was nowhere else to put it. I learned to use CADCAM on enormous monitors; it was a blast to design something, send it electronically to the machine shop for fabrication and have it delivered on a cart the next day (sometimes the same day). I worked on a project repurposing these miniature electric punches that had been designed for ceramic green sheets (the way they built their mainframe cores back then) and then got to experiment creating a new hole-punching technique using pressurized fluids. They let you do whatever you felt like doing even if you were just an intern. There were no corporate idiots anywhere in sight there.

As far as I can tell, that part of IBM (the actual innovation) is gone.

I worked there too during that time you mentioned. I only made it a year before finding another job, so that I didn't have to give my signing bonus back, the place is poorly managed.

Blockchain. XD

@becausechemistry were you working with polymers by any chance?

...or as one might say innovating in the hardwareless zero-trust self-validating blockchain field?

2025: IBM lays off 16-20k tenured employees.
Early 2026: "IBM emerges as a global leader (in asshole-tier cost savings), championing early career development by tripling their number of hired entry-level employees."

Fuck you, IBM.

Ultately, it was aplan to fire expensive old timers and hire Gen Z replacements at 1/3rd the sallary.

I was just coming to share this. Their feel-good recruitment number is a small drop in the bucket for how much layoffs there have been in the past two years.

A whopping 3% of their workforce.

Until this reversal that the rest of us all saw coming knowing AI fucking sucks? Apparently they still made a lot of poor decisions.

All juniors are hourly and under 30 hours a week

So they're doubling down and ignoring the root of the problems that they've found? Classic.

To be fair to the LLM. On any given moment in time, it is very likely that I am thinking of penis.