this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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I worked at IBM.
The people that run that place are the biggest corporate brain-rot dumbasses in the world. The only way to climb into their ranks is to be enough of a waste of oxygen that you aren’t threatening.
I was doing a chemistry project. One aspiring corporate idiot couldn’t believe why my group didn’t want to “incorporate blockchain” into our project. He’s a VP now.
If they ever do anything right, it’s only because they’ve run out of dumb shit things to do first. I assume those poor young people they’ll be hiring will be laid off at the first whiff of the next corporate fad.
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.
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.
That's fucking hilarious given that SQL was actually invented by IBM
I had a boss once come to me with an article he had just read about how APIs were the next big thing in programming. He told me I should incorporate some APIs in our software and I told him I would research it. This was in 2010.
Did he have pointy hair?
my current one did the same talking about microservices like it was the new thing
Reminds me of the peter principle. You'll get promoted until you're no longer doing a good enough job to justify another promotion. This leads to having incompetent people in higher positions.
Under the peter principle you only get one level above your competency, that guy sounds high as a kite.
@Railcar8095 Showing people who stopped at "mildly complex MS Excel formulas" something done with SQL always leads to that kind of thing...
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.
I guess that is why consultancy is such a big thing?
Fun fact: I searched DDG for "brown ring of quality" and it returned Lucent Technology. Do with that what you will.
Lol I found the only less competent people than the managers were the consultants they hired.
With one hilarious exception: at my first real programming gig I was left alone and I had created the sort of vastly overcomplicated, unmaintainable mess that newbie programmers always manage to create. My company brought in a highly-paid consultant who correctly identified the problem: me. Since I was a rock star, my managers laughed and sent the consultant packing and I was allowed to keep fucking things up for another year or so.
It's not better in consultancy, actually. I know a few good people who couldn't find work in any other companies in their field, and consultancy firms pay well but overwork their employees to the bone.
None of them could last more than a few months before deciding they'd had enough of companies and their illogical corporate strategies. Especially when it comes to companies that don't want to change their carbon footprint.
Honestly I can understand their rage. Seeing people who think they're right and refuse to change pains me too
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.
Blockchain in chemistry ? WTF ‽
Imagine oxygen NFTs bro
you could secure the next molecules via Blockchained AI of course
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?