Company: IBM
Date: 2012-12-16
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Focus is mis-directed, management illogical
Pros: Work alongside many very smart software engineers with a wide variety of expertise.
Products you develop get used by large, well-known enterprises for critical operations.
Pay and benefits are good, although ongoing deterioration is occurring.
IBM is like an Amazon.com of software projects.  There are many different interesting projects and you can pursue them (if mgmt will allow you to leave their team, which is often a struggle).
Cons: Layoffs (aka Resource Actions or RAs) are an annual event.  Areas impacted often have job openings for more people when they occur, which are then frozen until the RAs last day.  Replacing experienced employees with inexperienced employees, and then mgmt wonders why nobody on the team knows how to handle a critical customer problem in an area that they just had the talent walk out the door.  Many layoffs occurred in such areas in March 2012, and products went out the door to customers with extremely low quality.   RA'd employees also get last day set to be a couple days before the end of a month so that they employee does not get vacation credit for that month even though they almost completed it.

In US, focus is more on Project Management and less on those putting in the long hours and actually creating the product.  A software engineer will get more positive feedback/rewards for putting together a simple status report for management (on something they shouldn't be micro-managing) rather than for high quality work on a product that only shipped because of excessive overtime and commitment put in by the team.

Salary has essentially been frozen the past few years.

Expectations are that you will work nights and weekends on a regular basis.  A 50 hour week will feel like a vacation after you have been here awhile.  IBM used to brag about its "Work/Life Balance" but has in recent years change that term (publicly) to "Work/Life Integration".  In other words, you are expected to integrate work into your personal life.  Don't be surprised if you work 14 hours on Saturday only to be questioned in your Sunday morning status meeting (yes, Sunday) about why you aren't finished.  

I have never witnessed so many employees voluntarily leaving IBM as I have now seen in the past few years.  In my early years, nobody left unless retiring or RA'd.  And that was when the economy was roaring and software jobs were abundant.  Now when the pool is much smaller, we are seeing more voluntary exits.

Ongoing deterioration of benefits.  The most recent change to the 401K is an obvious example.  Back when the defined contribution pension was converted to a cash balance plan, IBM tried to present it as a better benefit to the employee (which for most, it was not).  Now the change to only contribute to the 401K at end of the year is 100% a cost savings measure that has negative benefits to the employees.  Along with no salary increases, while the company is making more money than ever before.