Leaving IBM. Is Anybody Safe Anymore?

I worked at IBM Almaden for over 7.5 years, until February, 2005. In my last 5 years there, I worked as a researcher in search and information retrieval, as the lead architect for the Webfountain indexer and the OmniFind (Enterprise Search) product. Life at IBM Almaden was pretty good. The salary was comfortable, the work environment was great (window offices), the people are great, the work was interesting. But with a large company like IBM come disadvantages of being at a large company like a massive beaurocracy that gets in the way of getting things done, difficulty in bringing research to market, way too many meetings due to way too many people being on a project, and a somewhat unexciting direction. IBM seems to be morphing into a services company. It's shedding its core technology businesses that made it great. No more PCs, no more Thinkpads, those divisons are sold to Lenovo. Likewise, IBM, the inventor of the hard drive, shed its hard drive division to Hitachi. Previous technology divestitures include selling its global network to AT&T, spinning off its printer division to Lexmark and selling its Network Hardware Division to Cisco.

And then there are layoffs. During my time at IBM, there was an across-the-board layoff of 10% of its U.S. workforce, potentially no one was safe. I guess it's the reality of doing business in a competitive world. Although I was not directly affected, I knew people who were, and it sent a strong message from IBM management that you were a commodity that could be outsourced.

IBM also has made the philosphical decision of avoiding consumer-facing markets. This leads to projects and research that are well, boring, or less satisfying (at least for me) to work on. I'd much rather work on something that people I know can actually use. All this set the stage for my departure...