Company: IBM
Date: 2016-09-28
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Wouldn't advise anyone to take a job here
Pros: Initial compensation can seem generous
Opportunities to work with down-to-earth people, some people willing to give credit where it is due
Comparatively good health benefits
Cons: IBM has no clear strategy and constantly reinvents itself in shallow ways every few months. In particular, there is absolutely no strategy to the Consulting by Degrees program, although they are trying to reinvent it now. As it stands now, there is a lot of lip service paid to development and training but nothing is done in those regards.

Management communicates that they do not care about employees, beginning from before they even begin. Many consultants have had their start dates delayed last minute and promotions delayed but then management would claim that they weren't delayed (despite evidence to the contrary). Health care premiums get more expensive every year and professional development events are often held at home offices on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, when most consultants are on the road. There is a lot of lip service paid to employee value and professional development, but nothing more than that.

The performance system, despite being "reinvented," still rates you based on your utilization which, in turn, impacts your raises at promotion. If you join in Q4, you will likely hit the bench for the rest of the year and Q1 of the next, which will keep your utilization rate and, accordingly, your PBC low. In the existing system, it is way too easy to be punished at raise time for joining during a slow business time even if it is not your job to sign work.

For a technology company peddling its advanced cognitive and analytics abilities, IBM does not outfit its consultants with modern technology. It does not look good to clients when we drag out clunky laptops that experience constant operational problems to try and sell them on our technical products. Employees are usually only eligible to upgrade computers and phones every 3-4 years, which is far too infrequent. 

IBM Sales & Delivery are incentivized differently and often butt heads when trying to sell work. Sales often result in impossible projects, with greatly reduced staffing plans and impractical timelines and, in turn, the client is upset when the promises made by Sales cannot be realized. This gap needs to be resolved in order to preserve client relationships.

Although improving in recent months, corporate communications remain abysmal. Strategy is rarely communicated to first line managers before it is announced company-wide, key questions about massive organizational changes are not answered by leadership until months after the fact, and there is no single source of truth for basic administrative questions. There is no reason that five different managers should provide five different codes for vacation time.

Your professional opportunities are very hit or miss. The Consulting by Degrees participants, in particular, are often put on testing or project management assistant roles that last up to a year and provide no room for professional growth. There can be some cool work to do on sales bids but usually that work is not billable (so you will be punished for it come review time) and sales work is not for everyone.

IBM leadership always gives the spiel that you can "go anywhere you want in the organization," given that there is someone willing to take you in the new group and someone willing to let you go in your current group. However, even when these conditions are satisfied, leadership will arbitrarily put "transfer freezes" on entire segments of the business for months on end or put down some other red tape. Unfortunately, it is incredibly rare to be able to actually move between groups, even if it is the best move for all parties concerned.

Finally, there are far too many incompetent people that manage to hang on through all of the layoffs. This is due, in large part, to the continuing over reliance on utilization rate to determine an employee's value to the company. An employee can be doing virtually nothing on a project with no capped hours (can bill as many hours as they want) while someone contributes to a $100 million sale with no billable code and their utilization code tanks. By logic, the person who contributed to a large sale is far more valuable than the employee who bills a lot but does nothing. However, in this scenario, the person who contributed to the sale would be laid off before the other. I have encountered far too many Band 8 and 9 consultants who have no people skills, weak management skills and basic gaps in knowledge about Microsoft Excel or Powerpoint.