Company: IBM
Date: 2013-10-02
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

No such thing as work life balance, not a good long term career option.
Pros: Good place to start a career to gain experience with big clients and projects. Great network of smart, experienced people.
Cons: The work life balance is awful. Late nights and weekends are the norm. Sprinkle in some all-nighters throughout the year for good measure. The Global Services culture revolves only around meeting a ridiculous utilization target rather than delivering innovative work. The employee utilization target ignores vacation days and company holidays (YES, your earned time off counts against you), so everyone is required to carry additional projects throughout the year to meet their target. Any admin employees are forced to perform (completing the hours of regular mandatory training, attending all hands meetings, navigating the bureaucracy, etc.) won't count toward their utilization target, so employees must add more work time to their 60+ hour work week. Many won't take all their earned vacation because they fear not meeting those targets. There isn't enough bench or bandwidth to address business development, so late nights/weekends are spent crafting responses. Managers aren't given raises when they are promoted or even given a break in their utilization targets. Promotions to management positions are presented simply as "opportunity", which meant a 30% increase in work and no additional compensation for my promotion. The real "opportunity" is to gain as much experience as possible and move on to a company that respects their employees. Even if employees meet or exceed their utilization target, raises and bonuses are still minimal at best. I was always a top or higher performer ("1" or "2+" ratings) and typically received only a 1% or 2% annual raise while being told to be "thankful you have a job". Many coworkers would significantly exceed utilization targets and still not receive an annual raise. Employees are ranked as "low performers" so IBM can justify layoffs. The US staff count continues to be reduced while a large amount of work has moved to (cheaper) inexperienced global resources with inferior skills. There isn't any career path for most employees anymore. The management style is often one of instilling fear of a low performance rating and a layoff. The purse strings were so tight that new employees were instructed to download trial software to perform their jobs because we couldn't get licenses for them. Meanwhile, the approval to purchase a software license was a 10-step process of justifying the purchase to people who either would ignore the request or immediately decline. It takes months to get anything done because of the bureaucracy. Toward the end of Q4, it is common to receive an email encouraging employees to sacrifice vacation or work as many hours as possible. Sometimes, the incentive for those sacrifices would be to enter the employees into a contest to win a DVD player or MP3 player (not making this up). Typically, no incentive was offered at all. Last year, we received an email from the organization lead strongly encouraging everyone to work an additional weekend as "an opportunity to catch up on your projects", which was a thinly veiled way of saying "we need to bill more hours so we can exceed our quarterly projections". IBM is run by people who care only about driving up the stock price at the expense of innovation, delivering high quality work, or any consideration of their employees work life balance.