Watsonx: IBM's code assistant for turning COBOL into Java

I know of a retail company that hired IBM to get rid of its huge Clipper code base (around 1.5MM LOC). IBM told them that they would get rid of all Clipper in 2 years.

5 years later, IBM has a few containers (physical containers) in this company's parking lot, adapted as offices, full of engineers doing maintenance and new features on the Clipper code base.

During my time at the company we never once talked about what the customer actually needed or wanted. Your story confirms my suspicion that this type of sales-driven development is just how IBM operates anywhere.

The truth is, IBM has been bean counted to death. Their turnover rates are incredibly high, employees have to deal with utilization targets that they can't meaningfully do anything about and lines of communication are incredibly dysfunctional. Their global headcount has been quietly but steadily declining since the dawn of the 2000s and their whole EMEA business is riding on having good ties to the right people in the public sector.

The result is that IBM's customers are increasingly unhappy. I do not see how this company is going to survive in its current form.

And the R&D guys at IBM are 1) brilliant and 2) smart enough to stay well away from IBM proper as much as they can, at least when I partnered with some, some years ago

The best engineer that I know worked a long time for IBM. Until he couldn't bear with it anymore.

I haven't checked, but I would not be surprised if the engineers I'm talking about have left too at this point. I worked on a homomorphic encryption system for some insurance companies to be able to query each others claim data with them, fun project!