Company: IBM
Date: 2014-01-21
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Profit at all costs company.
Pros: Large market share in the out sourcing and business consulting arenas. I have been a fulltime employee for 15 years as Senior IT specialist. Initial they gave us great raises, and very affordable benefits. And because of the large market share, it was easy to move to new assignments when contracts ended. But as the saying goes, all good things come to an end
Cons: Things started getting bad about 6 years ago. Raises for long term employees mostly disappeared. some of my colleagues have not had a raise in 7 - 8 years. My cost for insurance for my family went from $180 per month in 2004 to $724 per month in 2013, 289% increase If you are IBM US your days are numbered. A few years ago IBM implemented its plan to reduce US employee head count by 60%. Moving everything  to IBM India. I believe they are in year 3 of the 5 year plan. They can get 2 - 3 employees in India, with little to no experience, for the price of one US employee, that had many years of experience. And the work product delivered shows a drastic  decline. At one point I actually had to tell an offshore resource who had not added error trapping/handling to a project "because the customer did not ask for it" the it is up to us as professional developers to add it because it is part of industry best practices. Every year when they announce the resource actions (sometimes 2 per year) I hold my breath. I know my days are numbered, because I have 15 years now. Maybe I can get one more year.

Just my 2 cents.