Company: IBM
Date: 2015-04-30
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

STSM; Software Architect
Pros: The pay at IBM is good.the benefits are good. You can work at home at least some of the time.
Cons: Highly political, no one has job security, so high stress. The lowest performers, as determined by management, some of whom who have never met the people they are ranking, are pruned every year, except that somehow, pruning doesn't seem to happen much at the executive ranks. Trying to turn everyone into a salesman as much as possible (which is a mistake). No loyalty whatsoever to employees. The company is run on the opinions of top executives (who want no anonymous feedback from employees) not on actual data collected to see what works to make employees more productive and more motivated. They keep acquiring companies (to acquire and absorb new technology just like the Borg in Startrek), So they get much more innovation and smart people than they could generate themselves, but they also get a lot of functional overlap in the software and the resulting confusion and complexity and political battles, and a huge, overly large number of products (aka the "frankenstack") and they get extra people, so some existing people are pruned, even if they were top performers for 20 years and they could be transferred to another job in a different department. A company of over 400,000 people is unwieldy and extremely difficult to manage. Over time, the total number of employees fluctuates over a range of hundreds of thousands.

They want to put everyone in cubicles. The want to remove the locks from all offices. They enforce a clean, sanitized desk policy.

IBM is worldwide, so there is a lot of time zone pain on phone conferences, because the world is round.. No way around that problem.