Company: IBM
Date: 2010-04-22
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Great people, not so great company anymore.
Pros: IBM has some of the most creative and great technical staff in the world. Walking in the halls of a Research building, or walking across the aisles of a development floor is intoxicating. There is also great respect for personal needs in the sense of social acceptance, and respect for family overall. The company also has an overall grand strategy (Smart Planet) that is very attractive qrand makes you proud to say you are an IBMer.
Cons: I am seeing great talents leaving right left and center across the company because it seems that IBM has lost its ways. Although you do get some respect for your personal life (managing family and work and so on), you feel completely undervalued as an employee.

Opportunities to move across the company are very limited, salaries have come down significantly in the past few years as bonuses for a good performer moved from 15-20% down to 3-8%. Additionally, there is a clear and obvious bias towards US-based employees and attrition feels like an orchestrated corporate policy to diminish the ranks.

This means concretely that moral is low of course, that people who are left have to pick up extra work, and more importantly to me at least, that work that used to be about creating new market leading technologies is turning slowly into work focused on managing offshore resources and remote teams. Combined with the lack of travel opportunities (due to draconian cost cutting measures) to meet with your fellow team members, you end up feeling dissociated from your co-workers, communication is greatly impaired, you end up working longer hours to compensate for the inefficiencies that arise, and taking calls early in the morning and late at night.

I am a workhorse, and i certainly do not mind working 60+ hours a week. But when i feel that i am achieving a lot less than i did with 60h a week 3 years ago, that the overall working mood is a lot more frustrating as a result (not feeling empowered and efficient), is it really worth it anymore? You hear all the time that employees are the most important asset for a company, and in day to day practice, you feel like IBM is forgetting that: it talks and walks in very different ways.