Company: IBM
Date: 2015-04-11
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Sweat shop
Pros: Was a good place to work, flex-time flex-workplace let you better balance work/personal life, and projects were interesting.

Work culture when I started in the early 90s was extremely favourable to valuing employees as individuals and not as mere numbers.   Mind you, that changed quickly in the mid-2000's.
Cons: PBC ratings distributions is broken and politics between working groups and employees within working groups only exacerbates the problem.   

Low key and introverted solid performers who meet and exceed all objective are often underrated in comparison to louder self-promoting employees who far too often are more talk than performance.   Being underrated at IBM means no raises, no promotion, and more and more no job.  Flash vs substance - you would think a company like IBM would know the difference.

Constant push to increase productivity and work smarter was totally understandable, but at some point you just can't draw any more blood from a stone.   

I was one of the lucky ones who got to stay by increasing personal productivity to the point where in my last year I was doing work that was once done by four people.  Of course I was now working 12 to 16 hour days on a regular basis, and there were stretches where I had to work around the clock to meet deadlines.  

Concerns expressed to management about workload were met with the response "but we are competing with India".   Schedule pressures and workload continued to escalate.

Then went my health...   I had to get out or literally risk dying.

The model seemed to be, grind  them harder and harder until you burn them out, and then get fresh new hires to replenish the meat grinder.   This may be tolerable when you are young, but less and less so as you age and assume other responsibilities in life such as being around for  a family.