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by kodablah 2788 days ago
> What will be different will be access to a company that has been running for over 100 years and evolved over that time, at all levels. Facilities all around the world. Access to some of the scientists that you may have only read their papers but now can chat with via slack.

I too was in similar shoes. While I agree with much of what you wrote, I disagree with this point. The size and compartmentalization of the company precludes cross-department access.
1 comments
ChuckMcM 2788 days ago
If you could, would you share a time when you tried to interact with a different department and were unable to?

I ask because it sounds like we had different experiences there. I found all IBMers to be very open to talking about what they were working on, as slack became more widely deployed it was even easier. (Sametime as an IM client was a bit clunky). People would post on their 'home' page what they were up to some times, I talked at length with an engineer working with the atomic force microscope (AFM) in San Jose.

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kodablah 2788 days ago
> If you could, would you share a time when you tried to interact with a different department and were unable to?

If this is what you meant, then my disagreement was misplaced as I never sought it out. By "access" I meant things like resource access on similar projects and the like. Watching 5 different cloud computing arms do the same siloed activities is what I meant. That open resource access is not fostered across the company by policy was my disagreement. Also, my experience predates Slack (but they did force us on Lotus email, ug).

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