Company: IBM
Date: 2009-08-06
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current

A poor place only for those who are uncompetitive
Pros: - (Not a pro specifically, I work in Berry Street at North Sydney as a customer-facing senior server support)
- Good for those who are uncompetitive
- Good money if you know how to "drag hours" (please see cons below)
- Brand name for those who does not know the working condition
- You can come here to get the brand and then move on to other companies
Cons: *** Please vote for me if you like my review. People should know this before they even consider this company ***

Too much contractors which dilutes the know-how of the company knowledge

A dis-functioning company overall, with poor office supports like lack of computer equipments (still with a 15" CRT and a XP-capable laptop), cleaning ladies (my desk was not cleaned once in a year), no stationary and no meeting facilities so far. You dont get the key for the drawer for the desk you working on, unless you chase and cry for days.

No projects/budgets for staff to play with IT “toys” or for future growth (bit like having a meeting room without the meeting facilities, everything "back to basic") so everything was "break and fix". No future growth whatsoever.

Poor software being used (like Lotus Notes (a mail client similar to Outlook) which consumes more than twice the memory Outlook should in my laptop, does not handle mail properly, poor interface, cannot copy and paste in some case), staffs' productivity seriously discounted by using poor software like this. Again the “Same Time” (an instant messaging like Office Communicator/Live messenger) was poorly designed which consumes 150MB of memory. 150MB for instant messaging.

Most staff across the teams shows a lack of IT proficiency, customers get angry because we lost customers' data/couldn't fix simple problems. This is far, far, far behind Microsoft's supporting standards. Problems are always fixed after the last minute.

In one  instance, the network team claims a *faulty cable* caused the network traffic to drop to unacceptably slow *IN ONE DIRECTION*; this was indeed caused by route-accounting turned on in one direction (router high CPU). The customer was affected for months, we spent tens of people from different teams, dragging the poor MS guy who focused on “this is not OS problem” and countless billable hours before I handled the case. Within two days the problem was fixed by the network team. Please give me a cable which affects traffic in one direction.

Due to cost cutting, no 24-hr intermediate team/staff who provide initial problem isolation before the senior guys get it, we get 4 – 8 calls per night to support simple things like false alarm, disk full/disk failed alerts. This is a wield and a whole team is missing in the picture! No central management software deployed in the data center to prevent problems, rather, we fix it as it comes. Or, you get the worst problems which takes days to fix (if you are fast) because no preventive measures were taken.

Good if you call this easy (or hard) money for 4 – 8 calls per night, bad if you have a wife/family living together (you are given a pager). I have a colleague who sleeps separately with his wife if he is assigned on-call for the week. This colleague happens to like the money, but his wife complains on the dropping living quality.

Intranet documents/procedures show that AU is FAR BEHIND the standards set by US (IBM US still have staff/researchers writing state-of-the-art "Redbooks", building new products or super computers). I describe the IBM AU staff as "struggling".