Company: IBM
Date: 2018-11-05
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

IBM GBS UK
Pros: - Excellent flexible working arrangements, with the possibility to work at home depending on your project.
- Great colleagues to learn from.
- Good opportunities to work in different roles/industries.
Cons: - AMS / AD Projects are often undersold and under-resourced which leads to clients having unrealistic expectations of our abilities. From my 7 years here there were lots of projects where a small team of 2-3 technical people were doing the majority of the work, despite there being 15-20 people billing the client. 

- Pay and Bonus is below average. You will not get a significant pay rise unless you jump through the opaque hoops for a promotion, or you threaten to quit. 

- Senior Management is extremely myopic and metric driven. If you tell all your employees to focus on Utilisation (billing clients) for one quarter, you shouldn't be surprised when your Signings pipeline drys up.

- Senior Management generally don't care about people working on the ground. Recent redundancy rounds (offering the statutory minimum) have killed morale. This is getting better in certain divisions like iX, where they do really seem to care. 

- Delivery Managers unfortunately tend to promise something to the client before they ask the team whether it's feasible. This leads to teams doing dumb stuff ( typically creating poor solutions or working excessive hours) because the manager does not want to lose face. 

- The Bureaucracy is stifling. It can take months to get approvals and this inhibits our ability to move quickly for our clients. It is also incredibly difficult to get access to internal tools (blue mix, soft layer etc.) for free.