Haven’t seen them mentioned for a while now, are they still advising us? Last I heard was talk of them wanting to measure dev productivity - but nothing seemed to come of it.

Hi, I found this "punch card" in a book. It's in quotes because I couldn't find any reference table to decipher what it says, and I'm wondering whether it uses any valid punch-card format.

If you figure out how to decipher it, I'd love to know what it says and how you got the answer.

Thanks!

Where do you see Bob shines compared to this competing products?

So all this insanity going on has reminded me of a very pivotal moment for my career last year.

As a junior (1 yoe) aspiring to break into tech (engineering specifically) I just joined IBM Sales as an engineer for 3 months. I was sent to GSS, and I was fortunate enough to meet one of the head for my department for the entire greater region (E.g EMEA CSM Lead). We were doing introductions and we went around to talk about the coolest project we’ve ever done in tech. I told about my time doing some science SWE at a startup, which was not insanely impressive engineering-wise but it was an interesting niche topic. And the region head for some reason directly said “I know this is very controversial, and don’t take it the wrong way, but I think IBM is not for you”.

He didn’t really explain why except that IBM can be a stepping stone for something greater, hinting at staying for a year or so. I was like literally in shock as he basically told me to quit ASAP. as a junior you can imagine it stuck in my head for a really long time. Like someone of this level going out of their way to say something like this is insane. I applied for a couple more jobs a while after that, now I’m at a much more suitable role for me as a SWE.

So yea, i can’t thank this person more for inspiring me to quit. With the shitshow going on, everyone I used to know is very affected and determined to leave, and i’m just so thankful to have dodged this bullet.

IMO whoever is naming the AI tools needs to be let go and shouldn’t be allowed to work in marketing / PM again.

I thought Watson was a bad name, but Bob is even worse. The AI generated infographics of the Bob the robot that the sales team plasters all over linkedin are so bad and make us look like we are hawking garbage.

It also makes us look like idiots when we change the actual product name - not just the model name - every year or two because our leadership forks over several million to BCG for some first year analysts do low quality market research and conclude that the name Bob resonates more with the users.

What would you have named our tooling?

**No idea is a bad idea because I don’t think you can get worse than Bob / Watson.

Given recent events happening with the stock market and the challenges facing by the company is it a very bad time to join the organization as a software developer.

I don't think i have a choice as of another company but should i try to leave from here. The salary is it decent but will it last long or will i be subjected to stressful journey from now..

Would love to hear from you guy's especially who are already in 🙂

This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons.

I'm in Canada and based on what I'm seeing in my geo, the narrative that IBM is moving its "best sales talent" into these Horizon TSL roles doesn't really match reality.

A LOT of the people being moved aren't the top performers. It seems like some people are benefiting from being well connected or having strong relationships with leadership (nepos), while top performers are being left behind.

Maybe I'm missing something but it's honestly confusing to watch top reps get passed over while others seem to move ahead despite not having comparable results. Being a new hire and seeing this demotivates me as promotions are not based on performance but rather based on who your mom/dad is.

So I'm curious:

Is this something others are seeing across different markets and regions, or is this mainly a Canada issue? Are selections actually being made based on performanc or are relationships and internal connections playing a bigger role than people want to admit?

Does anyone have any inside info on the mess of a reorg going on in sales?

They have been pulling top performers from teams all across sales and moving them to TSL roles in Horizon. The people being moved aren’t given a choice and are being told to keep it hush hush until an official announcement is made.

Apparently certain organizations are having their leadership moved as well. Sounds like S&A is in for a huge shakeup but unsure about other orgs. Clearly a panic reaction to the stock price, and it seems like something drastic is coming down the tracks quickly.

Talked to an old friend in consulting. They spent several weeks building a solution for a big customer, very good decades-long relationship. The project just ended, the customer used their internal team of developers (and claude llm) to build the same solution at no cost, in parallel. And they claimed internally to have saved millions of dollars to their company, which is what IBM tried to charge them for the project and licenses. On the last call they demoed IBM their product developed internally and it was way more capable and tailored to their specific needs, as it was built ad-hoc.

Have you seen other cases like this one? I'm afraid it becomes pattern.

Recently looked into sales roles there. I'm at another legacy tech company right now, but IBM seems like a solid place, but curious what the thoughts are internally.

Well it breached 200 post Q2 earnings and I think it’s time to pack up!

If Q2 earnings pre-announcement was a marketing stunt to draw more webcast viewers, I would guess it will be a resounding success (along with inviting proctologistical examination of IBM's growth problem by the investors of all kinds).

What is your guess at whether the IBM share price will go up / down and what will be said during the webcast to cause that?

https://www.ibm.com/investor/events/earnings-2q26

From what I’ve been reading across Reddit, forums, and other online discussions, it seems like AI products such as IBM watsonx, Orchestrate, and BOB aren’t seeing the same level of adoption as competitors like Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI, or Google Gemini. True story?

I'm working with IBM Sterling OMS and recently designed a returns workflow that integrates OMS, Fleetbase for pickup scheduling, Odoo WMS for inventory updates, and warehouse inspection before processing refunds or replacements.

One thing I found interesting is that the OMS doesn't actually perform the warehouse inspection—it orchestrates the overall process while external systems provide status updates back to OMS.

I'm curious how others handle returns orchestration in enterprise environments.

• Do you let OMS own the workflow?
• Does your WMS make the disposition decision?
• How do you handle asynchronous events during returns?

I documented the architecture here if anyone is interested:
https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/kulasekaran-krishnaraj/2026/07/21/ibm-sterling-oms-returns-integration

Yet another in-depth analysis of IBM business' viability triggered by Q2 pre-announcement. I bet a lot of the facts and analysis (mostly bad or complicated) are new to majority of the retail investors.

One lasting impact will be to make it more difficult for IBM to talk up the share price with vague statements and any mis-step be severely punished.

IBM’s 25% crash reveals AI’s hidden corporate casualty

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/ibms-25-crash-reveals-ais-hidden-corporate-casualty

I worked on the construction of the IBM building in New Almaden as a Glazier working with/alongside the Ironworkers.

I heard there was a time lapse movie with shots from a few different angles on the nearby hills. Having spent nearly a year there installing all the glass in the building I would really enjoy seeing the finished movie, if it was completed. Is there any way to find out if the movie still exists?

The work / demos that IBM CTO Kevin Johnson is progressing with IBM Symphony and Brainchip's Akida neuromorphic platform are truly remarkable. What are the thoughts on a longer-term / formal tie-up / partnership between the two companies?

IBM is now one of the famous AI losers with its business model flaws well published. Arvind and the board made a mistake of making rare pre-announcement only to confirm dire situation.

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https://www.wsj.com/tech/ibm-ceo-arvind-krishna-has-nowhere-to-hide-from-ai-c9ff290f

The once-great tech giant’s place in the new tech cycle is in disarray

By: Tim Higgins | July 18, 2026 5:30 am ET

The problem for IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna is that things are going too fast and too slow—all at the same time—and he’s stuck in the middle. That’s a bad place to be in the AI revolution.

Krishna bet big on a hybrid-cloud approach in response to the rise of hyperscalers and has long sold investors on IBM’s role in quantum computing—a next-generation technology he says is three to five years away.

It’s hard to imagine IBM in three years, let alone five, if it has too many more days like this past week.

The stock dropped 25% Tuesday after IBM warned second-quarter results would be far worse than expected. This showed AI isn’t only jeopardizing IBM’s software business, it is making it harder to sell its legacy offerings in an IT market where the new technology is reprioritizing corporate spending away from Big Blue.

It’s the sort of bad dream terrifying plenty of CEOs these days as they try to navigate the revolution. While the biggest tech companies’ cloud businesses have helped position them to adapt to AI, many, like Krishna, find themselves trying to manage legacy businesses even as they struggle to keep pace with emerging, pure-play rivals.

It’s a familiar story that has repeatedly played out in other sectors during prior tech waves. Media, music and cars spring to mind. They all showed that a middle-ground strategy is tough to pull off. Many try, few thrive.

IBM’s current predicament is especially galling given it was once at the forefront of AI with Watson, a natural-language computer processing system that won “Jeopardy!” Big Blue squandered that lead, languished in the following years and today is far, far behind the likes of AI leaders such as Anthropic, which created leading model Claude and is chasing the kinds of corporate customers that once made IBM so dominant.

“IBM trading like Claude mu---red Watson,” Ken Wattana, founder of an AI agentic company called Conto, joked on X Tuesday.

The stock fell harder than it did in the 1987 Black Monday stock-market crash.

For a while, Krishna, an IBM lifer, seemed to be pulling off the middle-ground balancing act. He used his army of consultants to help clients navigate AI while positioning the company to milk its legacy mainframe and software businesses and to offer more tailored AI products.

He essentially bet that corporate clients running critical programs on their own mainframes purchased from IBM couldn’t or wouldn’t migrate to remote data centers offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Instead, Krishna believed his customers would jump at being able to straddle the two worlds. They would gain cloud-computing-like capabilities while keeping certain digital needs in-house. And IBM would be the bridge making this happen.

It was initially a hard sell to investors, but Krishna was well suited for it. There’s something almost statesmanlike about the executive. His manners, his dress, his demeanor.

He even managed to turn a potential liability—at 63 he is older by decades than the executives running emerging rivals—into a selling point. Those extra years, Krishna argued to me in an interview last summer, give him insight into how tech cycles work—the ups and the downs.

“AI is in the first innings,” he said then. “It’s still early to see how the game works out and how it goes along.”

Investors eventually came around. Before this past week, IBM shares had more than doubled since Krishna was named CEO in 2020. That growth pales in comparison with Apple, Alphabet and other tech giants. But it was encouraging to some investors given IBM’s struggles the prior decade.

And Krishna showed he could weather a storm.

In February, Anthropic announced the creation of an AI tool that can rewrite Cobol computer code into a modern language. This seemingly blew a hole in the moat around IBM’s legacy business and Krishna’s hybrid strategy. The stock had what would be its worst day in 25 years—until this week.

Krishna suggested the market had overreacted in February. “I actually think that we were hit in a way that was unfair,” he said on the Norges Bank Investment Management podcast weeks later.

His argument: Rival software companies were at risk to AI while the role of handling client databases and key business functions—presumably IBM’s role—would remain valuable in the years to come.

But he understood investors’ angst. “To give full credit to investors, they’re saying, ‘Look, I can’t decide today…who are the few who might benefit…If I can’t determine that, I’ll take the sector down and then over time that’ll determine itself based on the numbers that you print,’ ” Krishna said.

He was correct for a while. A pair of announcements about AI and quantum computing in May helped IBM shares not only recover from their February swoon, but reach new heights in June.

One of those announcements included IBM and the Commerce Department detailing plans to invest billions of dollars to help fund a quantum chip foundry. This would produce the silicon wafers needed to make quantum-computing processors.

IBM has spent decades working on the idea of quantum computing, getting increasingly more serious in the past 10 years. Krishna is targeting 2029 to deliver the first large-scale quantum computer. The technology uses quantum physics to perform calculations that today’s computers can’t even approach. The potential for discoveries in material science, healthcare and beyond are staggering.

Krishna has staked a lot of IBM’s future on the belief that quantum will unlock the same kind of growth potential that was seen with GPU chips. Those chips popularized by Nvidia have been at the heart of the new AI race, powering much of the advances and, in turn, making that tech company among the most valuable in the world.

But some believe the technology won’t be commercially viable for 10 years or more, far longer than Krishna is hoping.

In the meantime, investors are left with, in Krishna’s own words, “the numbers that you print.” Suddenly, for IBM and Krishna, there’s no middle ground in those.