Bonum Certa Men Certa

IBM Genies in the Bottle

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 10, 2026,
updated Jun 11, 2026

Bottles

Hype, hype, hype, hype...

The "quantum" hype bubble continues to deflate as IBM races back to where it came from. The shares of IBM lost about $60 in a week - IBM is now down to $275.38 (after hours) and people speak of how cheaters get ahead at IBM. Some hours ago someone said: "There are two types of people at IBM - Those who do the work and those who get credit for the work. The former are just here until they lose the RA lottery. The latter are almost like some sort of protected royalty class."

They fall upwards, like in Albany.

"I worked with a guy on an account that came to me for contact info for issue account wide east and west coasts and midwest," another comment had said.

"He said we'll bring up on the leadership call and first thing manager said kudos to him for supplying the information. From then on I didn't share info with him again," which makes sense.

Many of us have had colleagues like these. At IBM, it seems rather prevalent.

We're meanwhile seeing a lot of censorship against people who speak about IBM problems, whereas Internet trolls are what the above comment called "protected royalty class."

Someone explained how IBM can censor TheLayoff.com:

yes it is clear IBM is in here and CONSTANTLY contacting the site to have posts removed which greatly diminishes the value and veracity of this site:

Yes, companies can contact TheLayoff.com to request post removals, but the website is generally protective of its user discussions and sets its own standards for what gets taken down.

The platform typically handles these requests in the following ways:

Terms of Service Violations: The site's administrators are more likely to remove content if it violates their established Content Rules. Posts that contain profanity, personal insults, or identify private individuals are routinely removed.

Copyright Infringement: TheLayoff.com respects intellectual property and complies with legitimate Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests to remove posts.

Corporate Dislike: The site generally does not remove posts simply because a company or its executives find them unfavorable or speculative. However, the site's administrators do retain the right to moderate or delete threads at their discretion

It's a pretext.

Another thread speaks of the hype bubble, but it is been littered by trolling (pro-management trolling by one single actor). "No one is transforming anything with quantum," a commented said, "because it doesn't even exist. They're just lab experiments and won't have any commercial applications for at least another 20-30 years. You might as well say he's transforming IBM with fusion power. As for transforming IBM with AI, I guess true so long as by AI you mean Actually Indians. Because IBM certainly isn't competing with OpenAI/Anthropic/Google in the real AI market."

OpenAI/Anthropic are "making an exit" because there's no "real AI market." They're just losing trillions of dollars, so what kind of market is this?

IBM with "quantum" is also money down the drain, but it's good as a marketing stunt.

Meanwhile, for ordinary people working who are at IBM, it's not hard to see that IBM is floundering.

Today was my last day at IBM Research.

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