Company: IBM
Date: 2016-04-12
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

The Worst Company I've Ever Worked For.  Degrading.  Dysfunctional.
Pros: Opportunities to work from home.
Cons: Where to begin?

The company acts distressed, so it has cut just about everything you normally take for granted when you work for a company.   Some examples:

Have a question about your benefits?   Too bad, there's no HR department to contact.  Everything is "self serve".   The words "self serve" sound nice, right?  Almost like ice cream.  It really means you need to hunt for the information you're looking for, and once you find it, you spend hours trying to decipher the mumbo-jumbo that was obviously written by lawyers.

It turns out that my manager had an HR contact, but wasn't allowed to share that contact with me.  So there IS an HR department, but only managers get to use them.

IBM software tools are a joke.  Why would any rational, intelligent mind contract a company that tries to market the steaming pile of garbage called "Lotus Notes"?  Seriously?  You're going to trust the company responsible for that abomination with your business needs?

And please don't think that Lotus Notes was a fluke.  Oh, no!  IBM is the worst software company on Earth.  I need to use a billing system to account for my hours since I'm a consultant.  You should see the barely functional piece of java-junk I use to enter my hours.  You can't look billing codes up on it, the "help" button is non-functional, it's slow, the error messages are too cryptic to be useful, etc.

There was a traveling component to my job.  IBM, being the cheap Scrooge of business, has mandated that every single flight is done via coach / economy.  OK, I understand that a 1 hour flight from NY to DC hardly warrants the premium of business class.   How about a 6 hour flight to California?   Nope!  How about a 14 hour flight to Tokyo?  Nope!  Yeah, that's right.  I made 4 round trips to Tokyo -- that's 112 hours of flight -- cramped like some monkey on economy class.

If you're reading this, you're probably a professional.  Think about your office.  Does your company provide you with lunch?  snacks?  coffee?  soda?  water?  A damned paper napkin?  My office provides nothing.  Not even a measly paper napkin.  If I need to clean up a spill, I need to go to the men's room and wind toilet paper around my hand.   What company is so cheap that it doesn't even provide napkins to its employees?

IBM's internal website is a joke.  Half the pages are non-functional, outdated, or non-helpful.   The internal phone system and it's associated website for messaging looks and feels like it was cobbled together by an old, bearded black-rimmed eyeglass wearing programmer from the 60's who still favors Fortran over C.

I happen to make a decent salary, but that's only because IBM devoured my company, so I got shanghaied into IBM.  A person entering the company through the normal hiring process will make a crap salary.

Our benefits are horrible, and many of the benefits they tout are useless pieces of garbage, like "financial planning".  Seriously?  Why would I need "financial planning"?  Instead of offering something that nobody would use, why not subsidize our health insurance a little more?   Instead of giving us access to "Money Smart" why not match our 401k contributions a little more?

There are little to no education benefits.  Oh, they'll do a good job making you think there are, but good luck collecting the money.

In short:

Working at IBM is humiliating and degrading.  It is a miserly company that acts like it's down on its luck and needs a dime today to buy a Kahuna burger on Tuesday.  Of course, a paycheck is better than no paycheck, so if you need to make a decision between IBM and homelessness, you should pick IBM.  However, if you have the option, this company should be the LAST company you work for!