Company: IBM
Date: 2016-03-23
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

The ship is sinking
Pros: IBM has a shrinking body of great people working for it, but those people are great. Through acquisitions or simple brand recognition, some phenomenal sales and technical people work at IBM. 

There's also a good work/life balance here, and for better or worse, very little micromanagement despite the sheer number of managers working here.
Cons: IBM is a lumbering, ailing giant, and while it managed a pretty impressive third act under Sam Palmisano, I think it's increasingly clear that his "success" was simply clever accounting and good reserves of cash on hand that allowed copious stock buy backs. 

There are essentially two IBM's: the one the public is aware of and the one that actually exists. The former is the world's innovation dynamo - the guys who build Watson - the computer that beat humans on jeopardy. The real IBM, however, is anything but innovative: most of the technology here was acquired, not created, and IBM then cobbles together chunks of disparate tools and sells as "solutions" to their shrinking Fortune 100 customer base.

If you're one of the people expected to sell those solutions, best of luck, and good luck understanding your comp plan as well. It's particularly tough because literally 12 other sales reps will be paid on each deal you close. Your incentive statement every month (or quarter, depending on your plan) will often be a complete surprise to you, and getting it fixed in the even there's an error is no easy task. 

Internal systems are a nightmare. We don't even use Outlook. Lotus Notes was never even intended to be an Email tool, but here we are, 30 odd years later refusing to adopt technology that was a commodity in the 90's. The browser version is even worse. CRM is another area of 'want'. Thing SFDC is the standard? Not at IBM. We built our own; it's called Salesconnect, and it's awful. In fact, the only tools IBM legitimately builds are the ones it forces it's employees to use. 

In terms of corporate strategy and direction, your guess is as good as mine, and it's probably as good as anyone's who isn't a single report from the CEO. There are three basic periods per year at IBM: The first quarter, where we try to figure out what went wrong last year and come up with new buzz words to describe the vacuum where our strategy should be. Then we spend 8 months, the second period, trying to figure out why things aren't working. Then comes December. REVENUE!!!!

One of the most obvious drivers for the above issue here is bureaucracy: there are something like a dozen layers of management between the CEO and ground level employees. Mid level management isn't generally aware of what the actual strategy is, doesn't control their own budget (or even know what it is), and lacks the authority to do much of anything other than take orders.  

If you'd asked me two years ago what I thought of our executive management team, I'd scoff and say they're a joke. I'd dismiss them all as incompetent, and that would be it. But that would be wrong, or at least it wouldn't the whole story. They're also unimaginable dirtbags: year after year, the board, the CEO and upper management all take 8 figure payouts for running a company into the ground. Meanwhile, they run annual "resource actions" which don't effectively change IBM's broken management structure, but simply provide write downs for quarterly earnings calls. This year (2016), they quietly cut severance down to one month for all employees before releasing thousands of them - some of whom had been with the company for decades. Something like 60-70 percent of those most recently laid off were 55 and older. 

I have been with IBM for 7 years, and the company it acquired for two years before that. In that time I've gone from having deep admiration and respect for the tech giant to complete and utter cynicism. Even the positives here - work/life balance and hands off management approach - are simply products of a completely inept approach to the market. While our executive team robs customers, employees and shareholders blind, everyone else here scuttles around trying to make a broken business model work. 

In summary, if you're looking to take the first steps in your career, or you'd like a once-reputable name on your resume, by all means do so, but treat IBM as a stepping stone, not a place to land.