Company: IBM
Date: 2020-12-17
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

GBS North America technical roles are below industry standard
Pros: The benefits are about the same as other large companies. Internal tools are acceptable. Lots of emphasis on training with free online courses.
Cons: IBM is a big company and experiences are different in each country, as well as in the different divisions within IBM and the roles that are done. I work in GBS, North America, and the pay is far below industry standard for equivalent skills. 50 hour work weeks are expected, and the pay doesn't reflect that. There are no significant raises, no promotions, and no awards. Travel is expected and, in many cases, is in addition to the 50 hours of customer billable time. There continues to be a focus to move all US technical jobs overseas or into low-cost (low paying) IBM centers, so all technical jobs are assumed to be expendable at any time. "Resource Actions" happen at least once a year, where upper level management chooses a skill and randomly fires hundreds, if not thousands, of employees - and it's not based on performance (and generally affects the older, higher-paid employees). Upper level management does an awful lot of patting themselves on the back with one hand for their great decisions, while never actually growing the company: very few executives are ever fired for incompetence - and they never admit that they might be the problem: their explanation is that the problem is with the line employees for not billing enough hours. First line managers can not "manage" employees because they have their own non-employee-management goals that they are paid/rewarded for (like finding new business or performing technical jobs), as opposed to paying them for successfully helping their team.