Company: IBM
Date: 2011-04-05
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

From Great  to Good to Average to ....
Pros: My experience is specific to IBM Global Business Services in Canada and I can not speak to other divisions of IBM. 

Let me start by saying that IBM and IBM management over the years have been great to me. I started as a new grad in 2005 in Global Business Services, worked hard and my efforts were recognized by the management. In 4 years I got 2 promotions, not very common for a new grad, and was given a few different awards between 2006 - 2009.  Early in my career (2006-2009) there were many opportunities for learning, mentoring and networking. IBM also started a program called Corporate Services Corps through which IBM employees had the opportunity to go to different developing countries and work with a local NGO on a development project. I participated in this program, I truly believe this was perhaps on of the most rewarding experiences I had at IBM. 

Overall IBM is a good place to start, you can learn a lot if you are on customer facing projects, however you have to be proactive about your own career at IBM.
Cons: My experience is specific to IBM Global Business Services in Canada and I can not speak to other divisions of IBM. 

Over the last few years IBM has changed significantly. More focus has been put on the services business and a result more emphasis has been put on utilization and billable hours of employees. In addition IBM has cut down on various costs significantly and the impact has been directly on the employees. Overall the employee satisfaction I believe is at the lowest since 2005.

In terms of cost cutting measures, following are a few examples:
- Managers use to have a fair budget for rewarding high performing employees, the budget has virtually disappeared. Within my first 3 years at IBM I got half a dozen of such awards and since then I have received none

- Bonus payouts have gone down: IBM provides bonuses to high performing employees, the system by which IBM calculates payouts has changed several times, the current system takes in to consideration the performance of IBM GBS globally and since IBM's GBS has been missing it's targets for the last few years, the payout has been reduced to almost nothing.

- Salary raise: Salary raise and promotion rates have dropped significantly, from 10% to 6%

- Education: With more focus on utilization and billable hours, education budget has decreased significantly,  There use to be 80 -120 hours of education allocated for each employee, although officially these buckets are still around but education rarely gets approved due to high focus on billable hours

Overall IBM seems to have shifted focus from long term to short term quarterly reports. Employees at GBS are almost treated as sub-contractors and a lot of folks are not happy about this.