Company: IBM
Date: 2009-10-08
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current

Used to be a mixed bag but not any more... It's already started going downhill... difficult to arrest that trend now
Pros: 1. A lot of information about most industries is available, provided your project is ready to give you time.
2. Excellent training material available on just about anything, provided your project is ready to pay for it.
3. Some good free training material also available on many subjects.
4. Some old IBMers are real gems in professionalism.
5. Somehow, the brand name still exists.
6. If you are in the higher management, you will most likely be taken care of.
7. Chances to do well if communcation skills are above par.
8. Did not sack too many during the economic downslide.
9. Did not cut salaries during the economic downslide.
10. For women, for now, this is a good organization because they don't usually mess with women and certain facilities like cabs on late stay, prefernce on working from home, etc are available exclusively for women.
Cons: 1. Technical skills are being sidelined.
2. Training is difficult to get aprroved because your project has to pay for it and that affects the profits for the project and the manager's commission.
3. The intranet is a wild world and simple searches usually do not work. You may search for a cab in Mumbai and they'll point you to one in Shanghai.
4. Good professionals are being lost because of unfairness in performance evaluation and extremely low salaries.
5. The management has a "we are IBM" kind of attitude which does not help provide real value to clients, nor employees.
6. Lack of skilled professionals is resulting in extreme pressures for the mediocre lot that remain.
7. Sales professionals are dishonest. They bid for projects quoting impossible hours to complete them. This results in the coders working overtime every day and weekends without even clocking it. This obviously affects work-life balance.
8. Although they tout the fact that 22 leaves are in the offing every year which is more than most companies, IBM stopped carrying forward of leaves a few years ago. Besides, even designated holidays will affect the count of your utilization percentage. So, in effect, if you take more than 3-4 days of leave in a year, your manager will be on your head to clock overtime.
9. This being a manager run organisation, your manager is your god and you cannot say no to anything he says. This culture obviously promotes sycophancy and many undeserving "professionals" have risen in ranks due to these tactics. That, in turn, has further deteriorated the quality of deliverables to the clients.
10. Office politics is very common.
11. There is a catch 22 situation. If you're too quiet, they'll give you all the work, including theirs. If you are too loud, they can openly threaten you. One must be very careful of the current managers running IBM. They are not good professionals. They can and do resort to lowly tricks to get their selfish ends met.
12. Infrastructure is poor in some offices and good in others. Problems range from parking (this is very important) to simple things like not enough space for lunch (this is also important) as well as trivial issues like banging doors and coffee machines not working.
13. The once good behaviour of IBM managers is not there any more. The manager may openly threaten his reportees of dire consequences in the annual appraisal if his demands are not met.
14. They've started 360 degree feedback for the managers but that's only on paper. I have not seen the managers changing their behaviour and it certainly does not affect their rating.
15. Salary hikes are very low and usually less than the inflation figures of the Indian government.
16. The HR is just invisible. You will be very lucky to get to know whom to approach in HR in case you urgently need help. They've started an ID to ask the HR but when they changed the ID recently, no one knew.
17. If one is lacking in any skill, instead of training the person to fill the gap, it is more likely that the person will be threatened so that he pays for a course himself.
18. Very poor opportunities for higher studies because the tie-ups are too expensive and IBM reimburses only 15%, that too subject to a max amount. Also remember that if you are doing part time courses or once a week courses also, your utilization will get affected.
19. Even if for business necessity, you may not be reimbursed an expense simply because your manager does not wat to pay it from the project.
20. Support functions like IT are very poor in delivery. Basically, the problems are the same - the good ones have left. The others are learning using your support tickets as experimental guineas. If you need a quick answer, you are more than likely to never get it.
21. Support functions like payables (reimbursements) are the worst I have ever heard of. They take a month on an average to reimburse any expense and carry quite an air at that.
22. Never escalate anything against any manager because the complaint would most likely be investigated by a friend of his. This will only get you into trouble. So, all "speaking up" options are better not taken.
23. Very, very bureaucratic organization this is. It will take years to make a change. It is this same thing that will prevent IBM from coming back uphill. They will realize it too late. So, if you're a person who is impatient or who really wants to make a change to the things, this organization may not be for you.
24. They survived this slowdown only because of their name and size, not skills.
25. If they do not increase the salaries as soon as the economic situation improves, they will see a huge "brain drain".