Company: IBM
Date: 2012-07-24
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

IBM is not what you would expect...
Pros: - Solid company, good benefit pack
- Health and dental insurance
- Job stability
- Home-office
Cons: - Too much management

- The rules of the game are always changing

- If you succeed you will receive more work than any human can take

- Your salary will be the as good as your negotiation skills, I know some folks that work the same job as I and receive half of what I receive.

- Management is not as experienced as you would expect -- I've found cases where my salary and experience would be a bigger than my managers and team leaders. 

- Project managers are not experienced at all. If you remove the jargon from 60% of the project managers you'll end up with empty shells and bullies.

- Too much clients to support (I'm currently supporting +10 different clients), and the problem with this is that the level of support get's a lot lower

- Attending IBM's policies is more important than client satisfaction (something every IBMer eventually find's out). Participating of the mandatory training's or internal meetings is by far more important than attending client's critical meetings.

- If you're not physically located where most of your team is, or if you work on home-office, you won't be remember for nothing. As an example, me and some folks from my team were forgotten from the list for hardware upgrade this year. 

- Unreal targets and prices. IBM many times dump the prices and targets to win a contract, as a result you end up working 18h a day without overtime and if you refuse you get accused of not being a team player.

- The culture of the company is too strong for some folks -- you end up having the craziest and unattached from reality conversations about the current state of the market, and how everyone is supposed to work for free on the holidays.

- Depending of your project, prepare to work with really old technology (I'm currently working with some products that are out of support for over 10 years).

- Lean GDF metodology, you'll discover that it's bad for the client and for the employees, as it tries to put a factory mindset on services and consulting, which in my humble opinion is just plain stupid.

- I've replaced many folks from USA and Canada, as their job's got outsourced to Brazil, and as they got fired at the end of the project, from what I've seen, most were not treated with the proper respect and considerations that a employee with 20+ years deserve.