[ivenkys]

Yes - he did cancel the Billion Dollar contract but not because I.T suddenly became a core competency. Non-front office facing I.T is being pushed to cheaper locations - primarily to Scotland and Southampton in the UK and is not considered a Core Competency , its outsourcing in a different form , its called IN-Sourcing.

The primary reason for the cancellation of the contract was the sheer amount of beauracracy IBM imposed. Their modus-operandi was - pick up staff who were working in "non-critical" areas and make them report to IBM managers. So now all-of a sudden if i need to get something from our DBA i can't walk upto him and ask him , i need to raise a request in a god-awful system which goes to his manager who would be sitting in a remote location in a different time-zone "managing" the work-load of the DBA who sits 5 feet away from me. In the majority of the cases for access to sysadmins and DBA's who were an integral part of your team before you now had to go through this route.

I will leave the readers to draw their own conclusions to this marvellous scheme.

[StuffMaster]

I conclude that the marvelous scheme was, in fact, slightly non-marvelous.

[jbooth]

Yeah, but it probably worked out pretty well for IBM, and lazy/mediocre managers could pretty easily abdicate responsibility for things while not getting fired for buying IBM.

[ntoshev]

Are there hedge funds or investment banks who treat quants/software engineers equally to the traders?

[ivenkys]

"Equally" is a loaded word but depending on the areas you work in, a software engineer can make a lot of money in Hedge Funds and IB's. The key differentiator is how "close" you are to the Front-Office.