Company: IBM
Date: 2015-01-28
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Toxic
Pros: Some amazing technology and an over abundance of smart employees
Cons: The culiture is GBS is as toxic as it gets.  It is a competitive, soulless, brural place.   To survive there you have to focus only on yourself and nobody else.  Win at all costs.   As a so called Partner which is the over inflated name they give to what are essentially engagement directors with quotas, you will have a sales quota of between 10 and 20m typically, called a signings target.  You will also have a revenue target which requires you to be actively delivering an engagement.   You will also be given a personal utilization target of at least 35% at a bill rate that is quite high and a profit target.   You will be rated based on a formula of how you achieved against those metrics depending on how they are weighing each component that year and that can and does change every year.   If you do not make that number and all elements of your quota, you will be rated a 3 and be fired at the end of the year unless you are lucky enough to be part of the boys club and then they will try to manipulate the numbers enough to make you a 2.  No commissions of any sort are paid and you may not get a bonus if there is no funding in the profit sharing regardless of your rating.  Last year it is was funded at 30%.  

Partners are ranked against each other in their work group and then folded into larger groups.  They are rated on  total dollar volume not percentage of attainment so if you do small deals and somebody sells things that are large deals, they will always be ranked higher.  

There are no real rules for territories.  Anybody can sell on someone else's patch and there is no shared credit. If someone does a deal in your territory and refuses to team with you, tough luck.  And if you are teaming you will have to divide up the deal among all the mouths to feed including the APs.  There is a shortage of qualified deals so people glom on.  There is this team shadow credit but it is a joke and doesn't keep you from being fired   Partners can cut out other partners by bringing in APs that have the domain knowledge.  APs love that.   APs have to do almost all the work on Rfps and there is almost no presales and/or presentation development support.  

There is no good system to forecast resource needs on a deal.  You have to fill out a tedious and outdated excel spreadsheet that is then sent to Costa Rica to be re entered   

Methodology is hit or miss and there is no good knowledge sharing portal for methodology.  What there is is pretty poor and not used.  Many PMs make up stuff as they go along.   There are legions of staff people that have big dog jobs supposedly maintaining and developing methodology and produce nothing of real value.   The reason projects fail is usually due to lack of resources and/or methodolgy.  Just ask customers. 

There is a shortage of consultants in many areas as staffing and hiring is not undertaken until a SOW is signed.  So on many occasions there is no way to execute and ramp up quickly.   Retention is actually fairly good considering unless it is resource action time but there are still staffing issues galore.  

There is no money for team meetings so you never get much chance to meet your colleagues and since you are pitted against them in the rating system that is probably better.    

Teamwork is non existent and nobody bothers to answer emails or calls.  That bad habit is rampant.  Many of the senior people are the worst offenders.  I worked for a woman who would not even make eye contact with me in an elevator once.  It was like I didn't exist.  She was my boss's boss.   She rarely answered any emails I sent and I only sent her things on rare occasions.  One other partner I worked with would never and I mean never answer emails from almost everyone. 

Travel is heavy and the expense policy is typical but frugal.  The expense report system is great and some of the best software they have.  They have big data analytics to monitor every cent.  You have no discretionary budget.  You are not allows to spend money on entertainment unless you are part of the boys club and they trust you to spend to close a deal but even then there are strictl limits. 

Most customers in this industry are men and it is very hard for women partners to succeed.  The track record is terrible and women are given no help or accommodation for the challenges of being a woman in a male dominated industry.  None.   They bring in women and Fire them as a regular course.  The very senior women are the type that got there a while ago when it was a fad to have women in senior roles  and they are competitive and vicious and are some of the least supportive of other women.  They tend to surround themselves with the boys club to have someone to do the work.  

I could go on and on but I think you get the picture   If you are willing to risk your career and are ok with being fired or reduced to nothing in a culture that devalues humans