Company: IBM
Date: 2018-10-30
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Mixed view
Pros: Having the option to work at home most of the time.

The ability to move to make a sideways move to a different department and go for a completely new role. These new roles could be jobs which as an external candidate, you might have little chance of getting. Your new department would be hiring you on the basis of your perceived potential and your reputation.

Lots of good fellow employees.
Cons: 1. If moving into a different role for which you have little relevant knowledge or experience you might find yourself thrashing about in the deep end with nobody to help you.

2. Terrible remuneration and reward policy, only of benefit to the very lucky, the very clever or the very crafty.  Every year each person was given a performance rating.  Each rating had to have a certain number of people associated with it. The rating you were given was relative to the whole staff population.  If 75% of people performed exceptionally well one year it made no difference because the requisite number of people still had to be ranked average or below average just as per the previous year.  Everybody working harder one year simply meant the bar was raised. You only got an annual pay rise if you were rated above average and even then it wasn't guaranteed, therefore a huge number of people frequently got no pay rises. It was common for people to tell you they hadn't had a pay rise in 6 or 7 years; myself included.

Many people working for IBM had been TUPE'd in from other companies who had decided to outsource their IT (and IT staff) to IBM. These people would be paid the same salary by IBM as they were paid by their previous employer, therefore you could be working alongside someone doing the same job as you and with a similar level of ability and performance but earning much more (or much less) money.

3. IBM were utterly obsessed with internal audits and "compliance". When an audit was announced. It was a case of drop everything and all hands to the pump for a few weeks. Fear and chaos reigned.  Extra bodies would be drafted in to help but never enough. Why did it have to be like this? Nobody had an answer.

4. A small number of nasty senior managers who thrived because under their tyrannical ways things got done.

5. Too many staff with no backbone (or maybe crippling mortgages?) who would let themselves be bullied into working all hours and make the rest of us look like slackers.

6. Surpisingly bad (for such a big name in IT) internal systems for data-churning, call logging, change management etc. Some of these systems looked like they were designed by pre-school children and driven by steam.

7. Unfathomable, undocumented and all but "secret" processes and procedures. So hard to get simple things done and to find out how to get them done.  On a similar note, the wider IBM was very fragmented into different entities, regions and countries. Very difficult to understand how it all fitted together.