Company: IBM
Date: 2015-02-03
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Rats from a sinking ship.
Pros: Large resource base of internal training, information, and subject matter experts. Relatively cutting-edge development tools and practices.
Cons: Leadership is solely focused on Earnings Per Share, and not on customers or employees. There are undisclosed yearly layoffs ("workforce rebalancing") of around 10% per year, and stacked (forced-distribution) ranking, which is used to justify cuts where the earnings are not performing as desired, and to shift the workforce to cheaper labor by off-shoring jobs and hiring new grads. This is resulting in plummeting employee morale, engagement, and loyalty. The drive to increase speed and cost savings removes any pride in the quality of work you do, or the feeling of empowerment to be able to do a good job. Leadership responds to any negative feedback by blaming employees with a "beatings will continue until morale improves" philosophy. If you want a good sense of what employees are really thinking, go to the IBM Alliance web site, which is the only place to get any sense of the yearly bloodshed. There is a general consensus that IBM engages in age-discrimination by "resource actioning" a disproportionate number of employees over 50. However, the company has changed it's reporting process so that it is impossible to prove this in court (after having been successfully sued in the past for this practice).