Company: IBM
Date: 2013-10-28
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

A great corporate culture poisoned by executives
Pros: Some very talented people.  In hardware development the employee culture is excellent, friendly and helpful.
Cons: The executive strategy hits hard on two fronts: reducing US headcount and focus on EPS.  US hiring has been frozen for years, in our are we have few people younger than 40.  In a highly technical area you need to keep the pipeline of people coming in, which is not happening.  Oversees hires have generally not worked out well, but management cannot change the excutive direction.  Focus on EPS at the expense of revenue means that when financial targets are missed, cost cutting is the way to make the EPS targets.  We have no discretionary budgets or travel anymore, so layoffs are the only cost cutting method left.  So they are doing layoffs even from areas they say are critical and strategic to IBM's future.  And of course layoffs are mostly limited to the US workforce.  And the stack employee evaluation system (PBC) is not helping anything, but of course that is the executive goal.