Company: IBM
Date: 2018-07-22
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

The Last Bastion of Corporate Bloat in an Agile World
Pros: * Excellent Paid Time Off policy, particularly for employees in Essential Operations roles.

* Exposure to a very broad array of technologies and systems.

* Progressive values and strong support for equality in and out of the workplace

* Looks good on a resume
Cons: * Massive corporate bloat. The company has been around for well over 100 years, and it still runs like an old company, with numerous levels of management slowly drip-feeding decisions through a painfully dense bureaucratic process. IBM is slow to react, and when your primary competition are billion-dollar newcomers with better brand recognition, that's not a sustainable position.

* Over-reliance on archaic first-party software and systems. I get it, it looks bad if you sell your own email client but use someone else's, but maybe that's just a sign that Notes is a failed product and we should cut our losses and let Microsoft take the .01% market share we're occupying, because Outlook/Exchange is better at everything we set out to do. This applies to a number of areas of concern.

* Inadequate compensation. There's no getting around it: IBM pays below industry average in any given area, for any given skill level in any given field. Other benefits are pretty average for the industry, so the argument that they're making up for the low dollar figure in other ways doesn't hold up anymore. Career advancement within the technical side caps out really quickly, and the only way to continue your development is by going into management, which is far more stress than it's worth.

* Cultural dissonance. As IBM has made a number of acquisitions in recent years, it's failed to integrate the company cultures of those acquisitions into itself, particularly taking the good from them. Instead, it pushes a preexisting central IBM culture that isn't compatible with the way many of these smaller companies' employees are used to operating. As a result, these employees continue to see themselves as employees of other companies and not as part of IBM, and it creates an us-vs-them mentality in the organization as a whole.

* No clear plan. While we hear all the time about "strategic imperatives" and other buzzwords, the fact is, no plan seems to stay in place longer than a couple of quarters, and we're not gaining any ground against our ever-stronger competition. In fact, IBM is still on a negative growth trend. Everyone knows about Watson, but it's still not making us any money, so what's the plan?

* Self-congratulatory management. Various managers and executives are constantly sending out emails and lectures about how IBM is doing so great innovating in x field over y period of time, which while dubious is understandable. However, every other manager uses the opportunity to suck up to the exec in question. Call it corporate politics, but no manager is willing to tell his boss when they're wrong. It rolls downhill in a way I've never seen elsewhere.

* Ginni Rometty. I always say, anything that happens at a company can be blamed on the CEO. In IBM's case, we've had Ginni for the last 12 years, and of that time, just about half of it has been spent on a constant decline. All the while, Ginni waxes on about her strategic imperatives and how they're going to Make IBM Great Again. Prior to being the CEO, she worked in strategic outsourcing, and everyone who could tell her things she doesn't want to hear, which could help make decisions that would improve our standing, is well aware of that history. There are worse CEOs to work under, but don't expect Jeff Bezos or Satya Nadela.