Company: IBM
Date: 2013-08-23
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Good for the top 10% awful for the bottom 90%
Pros: Great place to work if you are unemployed!

IBM Canada management are spineless, back-stabbers, worthy of being compared to Julius Caesar’s conspirators in Shakespere’s master piece. The art of throwing co-workers under the bus, especially by management, is legendary. The people however, are actually really good. Sad that they are taken advantage of.
Cons: Short term vision; miserly merit pay (should be renamed “demerit pay”); spine-less backstabbing management;  a slave to wall street 

IBM GBS sets “utilization targets” for its billable employees (the vast majority of all employees). For the uninitiated, what this means is that each IBM GBS employee is measured by how many hours they bill to a customer or project, relative to the total working hours in a year. What is contentious about this is that they literally multiply 52 weeks by 40 hours to arrive at the over-all total of workable hours, without subtracting vacation or statutory holidays. 2080 is the magic number. That is how many hours there are in a year according to IBM. Say your target was 90%. That means you would have to bill 1872 hours (0.9*2080). However, that same employee might have three weeks of vacation, or 120 hours. The employee is expected to bill 90% of 2080. IBM does not subtract statutory holidays either. In Canada there are 10 statutory holidays will equals 80 hours. If an IBM employee billed 100% of every hour they work after vacation and holiday, they would still fall short!  That IBM employee is forced to work over time to simply make their target. Oh, and by the way, IBM does not pay over time. In conclusion, a reasonable approach would be to subtract vacation and holidays from the total workable hours in a year, and measure the utilization target against that.
Recently, IBM has publically proclaimed that they have “unlimited vacation.” Well, as per above, you can see what is at work here. You must meet your target, so, how much unlimited vacation can you really have? Also, internal management continue to (as of 2012 anyhow, which is when I left) use defined vacation, so this last point is not universally applied. Specifically, even though I read in the Globe and Mail (reputable Canadian newspaper) about IBM’s new “unlimited vacation” policy, my immediate manager was not even aware of it.
I still keep in touch with co-workers. Last I heard, AMS (Application Management Services – a group within GBS) has a new utilization target of ... wait for it … 101% !!!!