Company: IBM
Date: 2012-08-02
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Struggles with going global
Pros: Opportunities to easily move around to job assignments globally
Leadership development opportunities are endless for business leaders - because IBM has very experienced leaders (10-40 years of experience) there is a lot of wisdom, in addition IBM has invested heavily in this space keeping the skill current
Family friendly - good benefits, flexible work schedules
Excellent virtual tools to facilitate global collaboration
Cons: Lack of investment in the US - Most of the new talent is being hired abroad, which means tomorrow's future leaders will be in these growth markets (China, India, Russia, Brazil).  

A large portion of US technical talent is wasted on educating cheaper later in the growth markets.  The end result is poor quality products developed by a large number inexperienced developers.  A better quality product could be achieved with a smaller, more experienced team.  There needs to be a finer line established between the people responsible for training and the people responsible for delivering good products.  Almost no one has demonstrated the ability to do both at the same time.

IBM is not as selective as they should be in terms of technical talent.  Instead of hiring the top technical talent selectively, they hire a large number of less talented individuals.  Occasionally this works out ok as people can grow.  However, this often results in poorly designed products that do not meet customer expectations.

It takes too long to fire incompetent engineers due to legal risks.  Thus these engineers drag down product quality and the productivity of teams.  Or, sometimes these individuals hide in the system by moving from one product to the next.  Since it is so hard for managers to get rid of incompetent individuals, the managers resort to transferring them to some other team to become some other manager's problem.