Company: IBM
Date: 2017-02-21
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Bloated company that doesn't know how software works there days
Pros: - Solid pay
- Awesome odd benefits like cheap rental cars, awesome for traveling
- Work from home allowed (though I hear they are ending this soon)
- There are smart people here who are great to work with
Cons: Working at IBM was the most confusing and horrifying experience of my professional life.  I joined after the start up I was working for was acquired by them.  At first I thought this would be an amazing opportunity and a place I could build my career at.  I honestly went into this thanking the universe for such an amazing turn of luck.  As time went on this feeling was replaced with more a sense of "it could be worse" to "At least I have golden hand cuffs" to "This place is insane and makes me hate my work life, IBM is making me lazy and stupid"

Some of the worst parts of the job center around how the company organizes itself and the general bloat in employees and management.  There are countless people working at the company that have a vested interest in nothing changing as their skills have stagnated over the last 10-20 years.  This place and their job are literally all they know.  A few examples of this:

- for a company that prides itself on technology it is embarrassing they still widely use Notes as the primary email client.  Some job duties have no other option but to use Notes as the tool even as email has shifted to a web client. The software is unstable, slow, and non-intuitive

- In my department we used a database that was initially written in 1968.  That's not a joke.  When the idea of men walking on the moon was science fiction IBM created the database that is widely used for ticketing in critical needs roles at IBM

- the interface for said DB is again a plugin for a notes client

- Efforts to create a new interface that was web based and levels easier to use were actively thwarted by management that didn't want to change the way things were.

- efforts to change the way we communicate to even just allow us to talk with our colleagues more easily were actively prevented.

The direct manager I had was also verbally abusive and took to screaming at me during a meeting while a colleague was in the room.  The event was so bad I had to involve several upper level managers to get him to stop screaming at me and mentioning my personal life outside the office in a negative context. He didn't understand the product we were on as he took over parts of the team after acquisition.  He would tell us completely wrong information and ban us from performing actions he felt were bad in his gut.  A key example of this was telling us not to suggest to customer to upgrade versions of their software because he felt it "Caused more problems than it solved".  This led to a lengthy talk about how the software we used was actually built using technology that is designed to be upgraded easily and often. I even confirmed this with the engineering lead and lead release engineer who had horrified looks on their face when I told them this.  

That same call also involved a 30 minute debate about whether agile or waterfall was the best way to build software today.  My manager wanted to go back to the way things were and just release software once a year when all the bugs were worked out.  I kept trying to calmly explain no one does that today. He countered with how frustrating it was to have a new release every 2 months.  I tried to tell him many companies have new releases several times a day.  IN any event it was a pointless conversation as I had no power to change the release cycle and neither did he.  The software was built and released as it was but he refused to support it that way. 

For an easy example during start up days the time to solve a Sev 1 support issue would be measures in hours to days at the most.  At IBM this was more like weeks to months.  By the time a fix ever came around the customer had usually forgotten about it or moved on to other projects or products.  

IBM is not innovative enough anymore to create new things itself in the software realm.  Instead they are acquiring companies to jusy buy the tech as they transition to a software model of business.  The problem is they are trying to force software start ups into their very old business model when they should be changing themselves to the new way of doing business.