Company: IBM
Date: 2013-04-12
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Employees, customers have no value, shareholder is king.
Pros: Huge company with opportunity for career advancement, however this is only for people who are strong networkers and self-promoters, don't expect your boss to have any ideas.
Cons: IBM very openly only wants to please one stakeholder - their shareholders, and that really should be your only interaction with IBM - buy their stock - it rises slowly but steadily no matter the business outlook.
The reason for their ability to grow the stock price is that everything else is expendable - particularly employees - when I think of the talent we once had in our team I could weep. The farewell emails from experienced people get very depressing.
IBM management now sees employees in very black and white terms - if their business unit is hitting targets then everyone is good, if targets are not met, everyone must be bad.
Targets are set from on high, and the pressure to hit them is intense. No excuses, no explanations.
The sad thing is that when I joined, people seemed to be everything. People were proud to work for IBM. Now, morale has never been so low, everyone is unhappy. We all know that employees have very little value in IBM - everyone is replaceable.
When I joined, IBM had three values:- "Dedication to every client's success, Innovation that matters, for our company and the world, Trust and personal responsiblity in all relationships". Let me tell you these values no longer exist, and are very rarely mentioned. It should now more accurately be:- "Dedication to the 2015 Roadmap, Acquisitions that save us the bother of innovation, Trust and responsibility towards the shareholders."
I think the way to approach IBM now is that it's just another job in the modern world, working for a large company who only sees the bottom line, working for managers who don't understand the business in which they work. You do your job for a couple of years and keep your head down.