Random thoughts

When an esteemed colleague recently began his well-earned retirement after 40 years of service, I thought to myself: Wow, that's half a lifetime! I'm not quite there yet, but it's already been 35 years since I entered that building at the Donaukanal for the first time and started working for IBM, first as an intern, then as a part-time employee while at university, and at some point becoming a full-time employee.

To celebrate my anniversary, I took a day off today and recharged by batteries with a short run in the park enjoying the beautiful day.

A lot has changed over the years, not the least myself, other things have stayed the same:

• The IBM mainframe that accompanied me in the first few years is still alive and well, and the ISPF dialogs look sufficiently similar that I can still find my way around easily.
• Storage technology probably has evolved more than anything else. We all have storage capacity in our mobile devices that matches what we had available in a national data center at the time.
• Artificial intelligence was still in its infancy back then, and the elective subject in my computer science degree only included a few courses on neural networks and language comprehension.
• Mobile working, which made it possible to solve technical problems remotely without having to stay in the office with a sleeping bag (yes, I did that too!), was introduced at IBM early on, and continues to enable flexible and successful global collaboration despite some recent adjustments.
• Lastly, cybersecurity and data privacy, my long-term professional hobbies, became my primary job responsibility more than five years ago.

One thing that has not changed is that it is still the IBM people who are the most important reason to work here. Thank you to all wonderful people who I have had the pleasure to work with over so many years, and looking forward to more to come.

Labels: ibm, personal