Company: IBM
Date: 2018-11-16
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

IBM Airoli is the worst place to work for Java developer
Pros: IBM offices apart from Airoli/Mumbai have very good culture
Cons: (False JD And HR Commitments)
Required skills are not mentioned correctly in JD. They mentioned Java and spring resource is required but their actual work is in older version of Java and in Applet and Swing. 

(Support and shifts)
During the interview they may tell you that work structure would be like 80% development and 20% support. But more than 50% work is in support and that is also L1+L2 support.This project have weekly rotational second shift and developer has to support in shift.There are 10 public holidays every year but because of shifts each team member has to support at least 1 public holidays out of 10. And in those days person has to work for 12 hrs instead of 9 hrs.

(Experience with overall team)
Lateral resources with 3 to 8 years of experience coming from other organization or from other IBM project usually leave this project within 1 or 2 years.I have seen more than 10 farewells in less than a year.In this entire project, most of the resources are from mainframe and few are from java. Its not a development or maintenance or enhancement project.Its a support project. Java resource is the least valuable resource in this project.There is no team bonding. Old members can use new members to cover their mistakes in front of client. You may face group-ism. Favoritism from boss is also very common, and that is even for those people who are technically worst but listen each and every thing of their boss and force new members to do unrealistic thing. Old team members create dependency and hide many things from new joiner to secure their place in the project and in front of client.No transparency about the tasks. New joiner remains unaware from many things even after a year . Old team members easily get big leaves for their vacation but new people get limited leaves(hardly a week- even after sufficient leaves are available in their buckets) even for genuine reasons like to take care of hospitalized parents, for once in a life moments and  other important work.

(Work from home and work culture)
Work from home is not a part of this project even though IBM is famous for that. Only few political people are eligible for that.This people focus on documentations more than technical things. Making 10 documents for the same same thing is highlighted more than new  optimization ideas, new strategies/techniques used in the project.Many times this documents are getting created in hurry as a part of the process. 8 out of 10 times this documents are created with lack of requirement information.So they are not actually useful for the people who will refer them in future.Instead of seating with Client and finalizing appropriate solution and proper planing they emphasize on work to be done(documentation, coding, testing). They don't have BA/Tech arch. Programmer seat with client finalize the solution which ultimately turn into technical loopholes at the end of project.

One resource perform task of two resources.

(Pathetic Time sheet management system)
Time sheet claiming system is very bad. PMO can shout on you if you have done mistake in filling the time sheet. In first six months you really do not understand whether to focus on your work or in filling the time sheet properly. Many times you spend your valuable time in calculating and adjusting your hours among the tasks assigned to you.Utilization, that is claiming 9 hours everyday in timesheet is the most important whether you have worked on that particular task or not, doesn't matter you just have to put time against some task. If you are working on a development project for which somebody else has given estimation long back ago  and you are taking extra time then it is your fault and over burning of timesheet which is not acceptable.Utilization of resource should be 104%. There are many open change requests in their stack. You can take and work on such open requests in weekends to increase your utilization beyond expected 104%(This may help in your appraisals). If you are taking privilege leaves then it can impact your utilization. In such cases you can work on public holidays for 12 hours and maintain your utilization.Indirectly privilege leaves is not a right of an employee.You can have unlimited sick leaves but again it is questionable and not acceptable even if it is used while having genuine reasons or emergencies.

(Managers)
Resource is responsible if resource's manager doesn't have work for the resource.Manager usually do not respect resource's priority after office hours. They may ask you to do work(Support) even in high fever(in this situation work from home is OK). Managers only think about billing hours of an employee(technology, innovation, automation, new ideas are not important, all the time they follow same old school methods) .There is a concept of people manager who takes care of your shift allowance approvals, appraisals, leaves approval, trainings etc. You and your people manager(who may not be from your project)should talk on daily basis to monitor your progress but my manager talked with me only for 2 times, on first day and on last day.Manager can ask female employees to stretch till late night in shifts(They don't provide any cab service during night and Airoli is like an outside area for the people leaving in Mumbai), unprofessional attitude of managers. Biased Appraisal culture.Managers are very bad in estimations and management.There is no BA who can tackle and deal with client properly which eventually results in setting unrealistic deadlines.Manager never encourage you to spend your time in trainings available at IBM portal because it is again a non profitable task which you can claim in timesheet but project will not earn from it.

(Technical)
Developer's local system setup usually does not work and people working there from last 4 years doesn't have idea about it. Since they have not taken proper KT from their seniors(This project's  ex-team members). Its a hell for Java resource. Strongly not recommended if you have more than two years of experience and want to work in Spring, hibernate, angularjs, springboot, microservices, java 7, 8 and other advance techno;ogies.