Company: IBM
Date: 2020-08-16
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

There is no future for this organization, bad financial management and even worse leadership.
Pros: I met several amazing inspirational leaders and peers. A lot of the tech companies were founded by former IBMers, so it has a legacy.
Cons: It is a financial engineering organization, it used to have monopoly for Systems, but this market is moving to cloud. 

As result, Board of Directors and Leadership are always inventing new ways to milk the money from stakeholders and clients.

1) Look at the Board of Directors: All of them from the old world of the traditional business and very few related to real tech business.

2) CEO and SVPs: Lou, Sam, Ginni and Arvind seem to be more concerned about their golden parachute. 

3 )Financial Engineering, the company sells services via GTS (Global Technology Services) - old tech and categorizes them as new tech - Cloud. I am concerned about SEC technical credibility and capability.

4) New initiatives: AI, Blockchain and other cutting edge product - when clients buy a large agreement (all you can eat buffet deal), IBM will add on a lot of cutting edge products. But in fact, these products do not work. They are a proof of concept for several years and goes nowhere. As result in the long run, IBM stream revenue only falls and many of the client's sponsors get fired for embracing the new.

5) Company only for white people: The only few colored people in leadership roles are to fulfill a quota. You will not see colored people at VP, GM or SVP roles managing large team and be responsible for key initiatives. Also, I had few cases of white women on leadership harassing myself and my teams for no reason, other than blaming the execution staff for poor performance - we quarterly overachieved our quota and had the top NPS scores in the region. These leaders stay in 2 years in a role, do a mess and than move on to the next role.