Company: IBM
Date: 2015-01-30
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Run, don't walk, from this sinking ship
Pros: Flexible scheduling and the ability to work from home
Decent benefits, including generous personal holidays and vacation time
Intelligent, hard-working colleagues who really care about the work they do and who want to be successful
Cons: Constant reorganizations throw teams and divisions into turmoil every 6-12 months, impacting productivity.

The constant threat of layoffs has driven morale to an all-time low. The annual performance evaluation process is archaic and only forces talented people out of the company. Due to the bell-curve like system, managers are forced to rate a certain percentage of their teams as low performers, even if those people don't deserve that ranking. Now many of those people are losing their jobs. The executives in charge should be subject to the same unfair rating scale as the rank and file. 

Salary increases are nonexistent. Only the top performers can quality for annual bonuses, and the pool of top performers shrinks every year because the rating system is flawed, so the bonus remains out of reach for the majority of people, despite successfully taking on more and more responsibility.

There is no opportunity or incentive for external training or continuing education to develop new skills, unless it comes out of your own pocket. Internal training and development consists of webinars, videos, presentations and electronic books. 

IBM is late to the game in many new technologies, including Cloud, and this is evident by the consistent loss of revenue and lucrative contracts to new competitors like Amazon. This once innovative company no longer knows what it wants to be and suffers from an identity crisis--ask most people what IBM does, and they simply don't know. Until IBM has a clear plan for the future that involves more than reshuffling employees and changing the names of its business units, its long-term survival is in jeopardy.