Company: IBM
Date: 2021-01-27
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Terrible Leadership
Pros: Free Snacks every other month
Cons: Terrible management and accountability. These guys run the operation by making everyone submit all the work they do every day by typing out a word document. The shift leads are then required to go through it and tell you everything you did wrong. If there is more than a 15-minute gap, you will be asked about it. No matter how hard you try, there is always something wrong and trust me I tried for years too look at this process with a growth mindset. Instead of actually doing work, a lot of time is spent covering your back. 

Management holds monthly meetings where the shift leads are required to give up one of their team members as “low-performing,” whether it’s true or not. In other words, senior management believes it’s I’m possible to have a team where all team members are good workers, and so they make the shift leads call out a member of the team as low-performing each month. They also are required to tell management about a team member that is excelling at work. The shift leads are then expected to provide feedback and corrective actions to the low performer and nothing happens for the over-achiever—not even positive feedback. The meeting is literally just created to paint the narrative that everything wrong is because of a few technicians. The morale has been low for years and confidence in management has been just the same.

Management plays favorites and if you suck up enough you won’t have any issues. If you try to innovate you will get ideas stolen and other team mates and managers WILL try to take credit for it. It’s the most unreal and unprofessional environment I’ve ever worked at. I was heavily advised by a couple of supervisors and senior technicians during my first year at the company to get promoted to another department as soon as possible because this department is terrible, but I just thought those colleagues were childish and didn’t have a growth mindset. It turns out that I just didn’t see all the wrongdoings at the company early on. Despite putting in years of effort, innovation i offered which was inspired by years of operational EXPERIENCE at other companies just couldn’t compete with the ideas upper management got after reading dollar-store management books. Those supervisors and technicians that told me to change roles/get promoted to another department in my first year of employment were right. 

Unfortunately, there is nothing to be gained for an over-achiever who aims to make a career at this company in the Datacenter Technician role. Another big part of the reason for this is nepotism. There are way too many family members and friends from high school in upper management... there needs to be an investigation into this. 

I have brought up many issues to HR at IBM Cloud but their HR is a joke. 

Efficiency is not a word that’s used very often at the company.

This place is a joke.