A lot of the successful projects at the original company are now dead.
It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to job hunt within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a month or so you are out. It's super weird.
This is standard operating procedure at most consulting/professional services firms.
GTRI locally hires a lot of non-students to work in its various labs. Its labs then pitch ideas to private companies and the DoD. Sometimes they're solicited directly if the lab is well-known and has a track record of delivering good research-oriented results. They research and build prototypes around various capabilities: robotics, avionics, even classified stuff.
They're always pitching, because contracts end or fall through, and that's the source of everyone's payroll. The labs can even be competitive with one another, and the individual researchers might spend time split between labs.
Academics as a service.
I've heard chatter from our engineering leadership that IBM is trying to push some silly initiatives, but we've been able to prioritize the right work so far.
I also get more equity (one time award + employee stock purchase plan) than I did previously, and with how IBM stock has been performing lately this has been a net positive for me.
FWIW I have heard that IBM used to force their management style on acquisitions in years past, so perhaps this is a fairly recent shift towards a less hands-on approach.
The stuff IBM is doing on Quantum Computing is serious cutting-edge science and engineering for instance. The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech. They are doing a bunch of progress on post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. They've fallen behind now, but they were also quite strong on pre-LLM NLP for a couple of decades, it was not all fluff.
Yes they have an awful enterprise culture and they are not focused on building excellent products. But what they offer fits the needs of many organizations, and a lot of the things they are doing on R&D are no joke.
That said the GP is spot on for this sort of acquisition we know what will happen and has nothing to do with 2nm research division.
> a lot of the things they are doing on R&D are no joke
Sounds a _lot_ like Microsoft too...
Dilbert’s company buys an “artsy” startup (represented by a chap with a goatee and a ponytail).
Dilbert comments something like “We get your energy and skill, and we provide … an endless supply of 3-ring binders.”
To which the chap replies “I hear that if your name goes into a binder, you lose your soul.”
> ...and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything
Yeesh. Which level of hell is that?
Some companies like Amazon buy companies and let them run almost independently - IMDB for example, Zappos, Twitch, Whole Foods, Zoox, Audible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His...
Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California, in October 2003 by Andy Rubin and Chris White
Google acquired the company in July of [2005] for at least $50 million
It was ad-supported of course, but it's definitely not similar to IBM acquisitions
It's a fact that a publicly traded company is beholden to Wall Street and any time such a company would use their earnings for R&D the P/E and margins go down (i.e. spending more money to earn the same) and this is considered a negative signal at Wall Street and the company gets punished in the market.
So the only way a company can spend their earnings is to pay dividends or buy assets such as other companies, which then must be squeezed for margins.
More here:
https://www.cringely.com/2015/06/03/autodesks-john-walker-ex...
They seem to primarily benefit from kickbacks in the form of both leasing and technical contracts for things like opening offices in a location for tax benefits or to promote local economy.
Then they see how far they can cut back their end of the contract after the first few months (e.g. Maybe we agreed to have 500 employees in an office, but since nobody is allowed in, we think we can get away with 100 employees.) Then this turns into trolling about how the contract never defines what in office means so can we offshore… Too much undefined confusion, so I guess we get to break the contract but keep what the mayor paid us… Then they just shut down the office and move on to the next location.
It seems like the local government must be in on these schemes for leasing. Otherwise this wouldn’t be going on for decades as it has been.
The other part of business, technical contracts, is similar except instead of leasing it’s providing some sort of infrastructure coverage for something big. It starts off with good faith fulfilling the contract. Then a few months later it’s like well we have a US military contract that demands US employees but US employees are too expensive. What if we offshore but all the traffic is technically going through a single US employee’s computer which is what the contract technically demands.
Then it turns into well we have offshore people working on this anyway, why not just give them direct access and we’ll have a US person overseeing them. Lay everyone else off.
Then they see how long they can get away with this until someone gets mad. Then they take one step back to see how close to the technical contract they can get while threatening to abandon the whole thing at the same time.
Along with this sort of atmosphere and attitude for the law, it seems we see them constantly doing everything possible to constantly fire old people or anyone else that has legally protected status. So you’ll get statistical analytics on ways to fire protected people based around the constant performance reviews with statistics being used to see how close groups of protected people can be removed without statistically breaking the law. Whatever that algorithm is.
That plays into just straight up cutting people, but it also goes into a lot of other subsystems of skirting the law, like if old people can’t relocate as easily then hopping offices and forcing people to relocate 5000 miles is a way they can be eliminated. Part of this might be moving people onto new teams and then saying that team has to be in office for some made up reason, and then firing them for not relocating or using some made up metric like badging timestamps to get them, or some other technicality like leaving for lunch 5 minutes early despite being a salaried employee which is reported as hourly because of tax trolling.
I don’t know how IBM still exists because from my perspective it’s pretty clear they’re breaking or at best on razor thin gray line on ice on just about every possible law you could break.
It was right before I left that we got our own Jira instance. This was all around the time of the Red Hat acquisition. I remember the announcement b/c we used SuSE for everything IIRC.
Sometimes a team unilaterally decide to change the process, info is sent to a random number of mailbox/managers who may fail to pass the info. Some entire teams just put themselves in away status 24/7 and do not respond to direct messages.
So yes I can believe his story. Sometimes in these kind of companies you just don't know who and how to ask for something and you just hope someone knows someone who might know.
So if they somehow can get past initial device deployment/user account logon, and get other resources IE; slack....well that speaks to how difficult/pointless it would be to get proper VPN/Jira access.
Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools? They have a mature PowerPC (Power9+? now?)setup, lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work and lots of existing investment in datacenters and getting GPU-intense workloads going.
I don't disagree that this acquisition is good strategy, I'm just fascinated (Schadenfreude?) to witness the demise of confluent now. I think economists should study this, it might help avert larger problems.
Edit: you also seem to be giving too much credence to Watson. Watson was actually mostly a marketing tool designed to win in Jeopardy and nothing else. It was constructed specifically to compete in that use-case and was nowhere near to the architecture of a general transformer which is capable of figuring out meta-patterns within language and structurally understanding language. You can read about Watson's design and architecture here if you're curious: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...
Well, in Confluent's case I'm not so sure that's true given that their CEO is also the company founder as well as one of the original authors of Apache Kafka.
IBM has a ton of Enterprise software, backed by a bunch of consultants hiding in boring businesses/governments.
They also do a ton of outsourcing work where they will be big enterprise IT support desk and various other functions. In fact, that side has gotten so big, IBM now has more employees in India in then any other country.
I do. I remember going to a chat once where they wanted to get people on-board in using it. It was 90 minutes of hot air. They "showed" how Watson worked and how to implement things, and I think every single person in the room knew they were full of it. Imagine we were all engineers and there were no questions at the end.
Comparing Watson to LLMs is like comparing a rock to an AIM-9 Sidewinder.
I'll believe that when I see it. They had a decade headstart with all of this, and yeah, could have been at the forefront. But they're not, and because of the organization itself, they're unlikely to have a shot at even getting close to there. Seems they know this themselves too, as they're targeting the lower end of the market now with their Granite models, rather than shooting for the stars and missing, like they've done countless of times before.
Same thing happened with their cloud offering. They laughed at AWS, then tried to catch up, then missed and pivoted to “hybrid” (cloud and local).
Leadership in IBM also thought that Watson was like what what OAI/Anthropic/Google are doing now. It wasn't. Watson was essentially a ML pipeline over-optimized on Jeopardy, which is why it failed in literally every other domain.
Outside of Jeopardy, Watson was just a brand.
Athough i think they just di/dont know how to adapt these to market that isnt a enterprise behemoth , rather than develop/price it so more devs can take a hold and experiment.
It really is probably that strangest company in tech which you think could be mysterious and intriguing. But no one cares. It’s like no one wants to look behind the boring suit and see wtf. From my low point on that bell curve I can’t see how they are even solvent.
For Red Hat, there's no longer an official "public" distribution of RHEL, but apart from that they seemingly have been left alone and able to continue to develop their own products. But that's only my POV as a user of OSS Red Hat products at home and of RHEL and OpenShift at work.
HashiCorp also changed their licenses to non-open-source licenses, but again I think this was technically pre-acquisition (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit).
A common conspiracy theory, but not true.
An "exit" from the public market?
Hopefully mitchellh will write a book about Hashicorp some time. Would be fascinating to read the inside take.
The culture makes the company. Everyone on the lower rungs of the org chart knows this, because it's what they live and breathe every day. A positive, supportive workplace culture with clear goals and relative autonomy is a thing of beauty. You routinely find people doing more work than they really have to because they believe in the mission, or their peers, or the work is just fun. People join the company (and stay) because they WANT to not because they have to.
Past a certain company size, upper management NEVER sees this. They are always looking outward: strategy, customers, marketing, competition. Never in. They've been trained to give great motivational speeches that instill a sense of company pride and motivation for about 30 seconds. After that, employee morale is HR's job.
I have worked in a company that got acquired while it was profitable. The culture change was slow but dramatic. We went from a fun, dynamic culture with lots of teamwork and supportive management, to one step or two above Office Space. As far as the acquiring company was concerned, everything we were doing didn't matter, even if it worked. We had to conform to their systems and processes, or find new jobs. Most of us eventually did the latter.
Somehow Red Hat seems to be a notable exception. Although IBM owns Red Hat, they seem to have mostly left it alone instead of absorbing it. The name "IBM" doesn't even appear on redhat.com. Because I'm an outsider, I can't say whether IBM meddled in Red Hat's HR or management, but I would guess not.
https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/
And Fedora is still the upstream of RHEL, nothing changed there.
Yes, two decades: https://adtmag.com/articles/2003/08/04/solaris-gets-a-gnome-...
Slow and boring is a pretty nice place to be.
GTK is still alive. It seems like Cosmic desktop with GTK apps will be a reasonable path forward. Of course there's KDE and QT, but I mean as an alternative to those.
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent...
I don't understand how this acquisition is relevant for AI.
AI is just the lastest buzzword. Everyone has it, because they have to. Don't look behind the curtain.
/s
RedPanda was a huge win for us. Confluent never made sense to us since we were always so cost conscious but the complexity/risk of managing a critical part of our infra was always something I worried about. RedPanda was able to handle both for us - cheaper than Kafka hosting vendors with significantly better performance. We were pretty early customers but was a huge win for us.
I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise. It isn't Kafka though, it's a proprietary C++ rewrite that aims for 100% compatibility. This hasn't been an issue in the 2+ years since we migrated prod, but YMMV.
But yeah, for a lot of implementations you don't need streaming. But for pull based apps you design your architecture differently, some things are a lot easier than it is with DB, some things are harder.
Have a table level seqno as monotonically increasing number stamped for every mutation. When a subscriber connects it asks for rows > Subscriber's seqno-last-handled.
The second you approach any kind of scale, this falls apart and/or you end up with a more expensive and worse version of Kafka.
I was surprised how far sqlite goes with some sharding on modern SSDs for those in-between scale services/saas
Kafka already solves this problem and gives me message durability, near infinite scale out, sharding, delivery guarantees, etc out of the box. I do not care to develop, reshard databases or production-alize this myself.
Not everything needs to be big and complicated.
(SELECT * from EVENTS where TIMESTAMP > LAST_TS LIMIT 50) for example
anyone have an idea on how streamnative is doing? we're considering them for managed pulsar and unfortunately nobody else is in the game
Some redundant departments (HR, finance, accounting and the like) will be downsized after the acquisition.
Engineering and product will be unaffected in the short term, but in a year or two the IBM culture will start to seep in, and that would be a good time for tenured employees to start planning their exits. That's also when lock-up agreements will expire and the existing leadership of Confluent will depart and be replaced by IBM execs.
IBM is a really big and diverse company, in a way fundamentally different from most other big tech. In a sense, it is completely incoherent to refer to them as a singular entity.
My opinions are my own. I worked at IBM like a decade ago in a role where I could see the radically different motivations of divisions.
IBM will likely give Confluent employees a large pay package, and then let them go after the merger.
edit: btw, it's typical for any acquisition/merger
Confluent stock soars 29% as IBM announces $11B acquisition deal
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/ibm-confluent-deal-data.html
Since when is streaming event logs AI? Am I taking crazy pills?
I'll start.
Sigh.
Not a drop in replacement, but worth looking at.
I used ZMQ to connect nodes and the worker nodes would connect to an indexer/coordinator node that effectively did a `SELECT FROM ORDER BY ASC`.
It's easier than you may think and the bits here ended up with probably < 1000 SLOC all told.
- Coordinator node ingests from a SQL table
- There is a discriminator key for each row in the table for ordering by stacking into an in-memory list-of-lists
- Worker nodes are started with _n_ threads
- Each thread sends a "ready" message to the coordinator and coordinator replies with a "work" message
- On each cycle, the coordinator advances the pointer on the list, locks the list, and marks the first item in the child list as "pending"
- When worker thread finishes, it sends a "completed" message to the coordinator and coordinator replies with another "work" message
- Coordinator unlocks the list the work item originated from and dequeues the finished item.
- When it reaches the end of the list, it cycles to the beginning of the list and starts over, skipping over any child lists marked as locked (has a pending work item)
Dead simple design, extremely robust, very high throughput, very easy to scale workers both horizontally (more nodes) and vertically (more threads). ZMQ made it easy to connect the remote threads to the centralized coordinator. It was effectively "self balancing" because the workers would only re-queue their thread once it finished work. Very easy to manage, but did not have hot failovers since we kept the materialized, "2D" work queue in memory. Though very rarely did we have issues with this.
Kind of like how people use docker for evrything, when what you really should be doing is learn how to package software.
Agree on the Kafka thing though. I've seen so many devs trip over Kafka topics, partitions and offsets when their throughput is low enough that RabbitMQ would do fine.
The people distributing software should shut them damn up about how the rest of the system it runs in is configured. (But not you, your job is packaging full systems.)
That said, it seems to me that this is becoming less of a problem.
So you are stuck with some really terrible tradeoffs- Go with Confluent Cloud, pay a fortune, and still likely have some issues to deal with. Or you could go with Confluent Platform, still have to pay people to operate it, while Confluent the company focuses most of their attention on Cloud and still charges you a fortune. Or you could just go completely OS and forgo anything Confluent and risk being really up the river when something inevitably breaks, or you have to learn the hard way that librdkafka has poor support for a lot of the shiny features discussed in the release notes.
Redpanda has surpassed them from a technical quality perspective, but Kafka has them beat on the ecosystem and the sheer inertia of moving from one platform to another. Kafka for example was built in a time of spinning rust hard disks, and expects to be run on general purpose compute nodes, where Redpanda will actually look at your hardware and optimize the number of threads its spawns for the box it is on- assuming it is going to be the only real app running there, which is true for anything but a toy deployment.
This is my experience from running platform teams and being head of messaging at multiple companies.