Here's some feedback: sentences like "getting feedback is essential toward driving change" are the reason nobody likes IBM.

"Change", as used here, is a noun based on the verb "to change". If your sentence calls for a verb, you can just go back to the original "to change".

Something isn't essential "toward" something else. It is essential "for" something else.

"is essential" is unnecessarily passive. Use active verbs.

"getting feedback" is slightly wrong, because what you need is the feedback, not the act of getting it.

"At the same time" is used here because it sounds smarter than "but". Don't do that.

Try this: "Change needs feedback".

Mostly good advice, except "Change needs feedback." No human talks like that. Change, as the subject of the sentence, "needs feedback?" What will happen when we take the feedback and give it to the change? What will the change do with the feedback? And what does the change need the feedback for?

Not all brevity is the soul of wit.

I do agree that something was lost.

How about "for change to happen, we need your feedback"? I think that conveys the message and request accurately and succinctly.

I loved your dissection of classic corporate-speak!

Ok Watson

I'm going to pile on to everything else you're receiving here:

> I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve.

This doesn't sound genuine. This type of delivery almost never sounds genuine. You wouldn't "love" to learn about those problems, and even if you would, virtually no one will believe you because the same corporate speak delivery is used by people who have no commitment to action.

I know you probably just said this unconsciously, but when you use phrases like "I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve", it reeks of a comment written and vetted by a team, including brand/social/marketing/PR/whatever the team is in your org that controls employee disclosures.

I've been on the inside of orgs and watched this PR spin sausage cooked up. Someone wants to respond to a controversy brewing on reddit, oh wait, better run it by the the #social channel and make sure everyone agrees this is our best foot forward...wonderful, now we've essentially guaranteed that people don't feel empathized with whatsoever.

Just solicit feedback like a human being. It's okay to "disclose" that you work at IBM (although: jeez, what a corporate-y way to go about it), but speak to people in a conversational tone that doesn't sound like a customer support Twitter account.

The reason I joined IBM in this role is that I do love hearing about customer problems. I was hired because I started programming when I was 8, spent 15 years in engineering and engineering management roles mostly at startups, and because I really like to talk to people about the problems they face.

I'm sure there are companies, and probably parts of IBM, that have to run their communication by legal, but I'm not part of that. It's just how I talk.

I can't guarantee change on any particular issue, and it would ludicrous for me to act as if I speak for the nearly 400,000 IBM employees, so I temper what I say out of a desire to be honest.

My purpose in this thread is to find people who want to share their experience and I assume, perhaps naively, that is part of the purpose of commenting online.

No matter, the discussion in this thread has already been very valuable and I do appreciate everyone's comments, even throwaways.

IBM has a huge problem with misrepresentation. It goes all the way to the top, with a CEO that promises major growth without a clear plan forward. The employees themselves seem to doubt whether they'll have a job in the near future, given the near-annual mass layoffs and the unclear market strategy.

Talking about market strategy, no one knows what IBM does anymore other than garner support contracts and land body-shop jobs. Everyone knows Watson because it's won Jeopardy and a few other games. But that's not because Watson is ground-breaking or anything, but because IBM hasn't done anything else new in 5-10 years. So Watson seems less like a crowning achievement, and more like debris from the Titanic. The company's treading water, and barely, at that.

Sales, however, swears that Watson can do everything from getting the best tax return to curing hair-loss and replacing 80% of the work force. But anyone who's not a fool knows that current AI still has to be tailored towards an industry to be useful. And that's still going to take a huge amount T&M investment. Which you can see from the well-known failed (and expensive) Watson projects.

Usually the only companies who fall for it are the ones where management is less about technical skills and more about kickbacks and favor trading. Or national/international-level contracts where the most important thing required is someone to blame or sue when things inevitably go wrong. Everyone else either understands the technology is more complicated than the presentation, or they have enough insight into IBM to discount the powerpoints.

I mean, IBM still isn't as bad as Oracle. But, if I had to pick a metaphor for IBM's reputation... I'd go with "IBM is as much an innovator as Steven Seagal is an action star."

My recommendation: Find another job.

Dishonesty is ESSENTIAL to IBM Watson marketing. Specifically, IBM has taken a whole lot of different technologies and rebranded them as "Watson", so as to pretend that the Jeopardy-playing system is actually a big practical deal.

IBM's reputation over the decades earns it the benefit of the doubt on bold technical initiatives ... for a while. But when IBM doesn't deliver, the benefit of the doubt runs out. And that's happened now with Watson.

I think before you ask for help from a community like this, you should either offer a reasonable promise that you can deliver better results, or offer to pay people for their time.

IBM's Watson, for me, has been so much marketing fluff that it's in the Oracle class of "only bought by people who don't know better". A profitable business line, but not a problem solving business line.

I can make a reasonable promise that any feedback I get will be put in front of the right people.

For starters, stop airing commercials on TV that show Watson whispering to the capacitors in a jet airliner, or the grapes in a vineyard.

I've provided this feedback to others at IBM with no apparent change, so let's see how this goes with you. First off, I work for a Fortune 200 firm who's executives are intrigued by the capabilities Watson can provide for our business. We've had three different Watson engagements for three different business units and three different usage scenarios - none of them came to fruition. The problem is IBM is unable to deliver a Watson project template. Project managers live by the 80/50 rule - when 50% of the project's funds are spent you'd better be 80% complete with your project's features. How do you know where you are with regards to the completion of a Watson project? How do you know you're on the right track? How do you know when to scrap what you have and start over?

IBM sends out a team for each of the engagements to work with the business unit leaders to educate them on the capabilities of Watson and how to train Watson. It was all pie-in-the-sky stuff. Since we're an engineering-oriented company our business executives tend to have a strong engineering background (we tend to promote from within) and the whole thing smelled fishy to them, sounded too good to be true. When they asked us IT guys about it we presented the problems mentioned in the first paragraph. They concurred.

So we've never taken the bait. That's the problem you're having with Watson.

I hate to say it but this comment is a lot of problem. It reads like it was generated from Watson, then approved by HR and Legal with minor edits.

I don't want to say that's your fault. I get it, I have a job too.

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Honestly I wonder what IBM does these days.

Watson is a professional service Machine Learning thing, which can't be profitable. Onsite engineers enguaging one customer rarely is.

Power8/9 has flopped. Nvidia only appears to be on board to kick sand in Intel's eyes.

Then there's... Mainframes?

I know IBM has a cloud now, but honestly it's prices are far high then AWS or Azure.

This reply all but confirms the parent's comment.

Not sure what part of IBM you're in, but I can speak as someone in an i Series shop.

The problem isn't the message. Everyone already drank the kool-aid. A lot of the problem is just the shoddy product, but really it boils down to the culture.

Put out comprehensive documentation _on the indexable Internet_ and not in PDFs, because for christsake if I have to open another Red Book PDF I think I might kill myself.

Make things that are open source -- and I don't mean Open Source™. Let me learn the platform. Let me hack away at an i Series or whatever on my own time.

Everything is so buried behind licensing and paywalls and PDFs and just general bullshit that I can _never_ invest in _anything_ IBM on a personal level. The vendor lock-in is so heavy that I resist even wasting time learning IBM products because in the back of my mind I'm always thinking "I'll never be able to take this with me to a new job."

The garden walls are too high.

nulagrithom, I sent your feedback to the product team that owns that documentation. Their response is below. Could you please let me know more details about the issue you are running into?

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> Put out comprehensive documentation _on the indexable Internet_ and not in PDFs

But IBM does do exactly this--and more than a lot of companies!

For example, IBM Knowledge Center [1] houses the documentation for over 3000 IBM products and services, and offers up more than 13M english pages--without a sign-in even, and we translate our official content into over 30 languages.

IBM KC is very well indexed by Google, too (we take pains to make that happen).

We also offer custom search and links to more freely available IBM documentation. Our Cloud development docs--Bluemix docs, are also quite public, though some, it's true, are behind a cloud product sign-in.

Redbooks, too, are available in HTML, not just PDF. They can be found on the web and are indexed by Google too, as are articles from developerWorks and Technotes from Support.

So I really don't understand the complaint about our documentation. Almost none of it is behind a sign-in, let alone a for pay firewall, and almost all of it is freely available to anyone, not just our customers.

Hope this helps!

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[1] ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter

Thanks for the comment. I'm not very familiar with the Power team, but I'll find the right folks and forward your note.

Unless you are a master of corporate-fu: You're going to be so popular! :)

My life is too important to me to sacrifice my purpose for the sake of popularity.

>i Series

i has always been a garden wall and I don't think it's realistic to expect that platform to open up at this stage. That's why Linux on Power exists - tell your boss he/she would have better luck retaining/attracting people if they'd spin up some Linux lpars.

The older IT generations like i just the way it is.

Surely a parody

How about you save the money for the developer advocacy division and invest it into producing software that people do not hate? Literally every piece of IBM software I had to use was utter crap.

Better messaging? Clearly you guys are not getting it.

What makes you think I am trying to solve?

In the jobs I've held, getting asked by the CEO to look into a technology means there is some underlying problem or opportunity.

Sorry abtinf.

My comment was literally the response from the Eliza chatbot when fed your comment. It was an admittedly oblique attempt at humour. My apologies.

Agreed. But the community of problem solvers does not frequently overlap with the community of people willing to listen to salesmen.

Yes, there are opportunities. No, I do not believe IBM could solve mine, because of the overpromise, underdeliver. I would only speak with a sales team, or a PM, if my boss ordered me to.

I'm not in sales, nor is my performance measured on any sales-related metric.

I have zero dog in this fight from a professional standpoint, but you should reflect on why your behavior is frustrating so many people here. A bunch of smart, technical people are venting and saying "IBM says a bunch of shit and doesn't deliver." You then come in and say, "I'm from IBM, tell me your concerns and they will be put in front of the right eyes. Change needs feedback." It completely lacks concreteness, humanity, or even basic detail. It's the same sort of pseudo-sales-y cantrip that most of the people here are complaining about in the first place.

You know who got this right? Fucking Dominos, of all companies. They took a hard look at themselves and said, yeah, we've been making a shit product. We don't want to do that any more. So here's what we're doing.

If you want to get a community like this to respond, you need to put the onus on yourself first. Don't go "hey, explain to us what's wrong." You need to figure that out on your own! At least pitch some possibilities. Show some evidence that you've put in the work before crowdsourcing your five year plan. Otherwise you just look lazy and like you want the community to fix your business. And that isn't their job.

From my perspective (not having a dog in this fight either), it's exactly the other way around. People are hurling undifferentiated abuse at IBM. IBM employee shows up, offering to engage. People are hurling personal abuse at them, refuse to offer specific criticism of the product.

Not exactly a display of maturity from this community.

> You need to figure that out on your own

Even IF an employee has a pretty clear idea themselves what needs to be improved, having a citable CUSTOMER opinion to that effect is going to vastly improve the chances of management listening.