IBM Reviews

Current Employee – been working at IBM

Pros – Good people to work with.

Cons – Large company with limited advancement.

Advice to Senior Management – Listen to your employees.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at IBM

Pros – travel opportunities, good benefits, good reputation

Cons – big company, many organization changes, conservative

Current Employee – been working at IBM

Pros – Lots of opportunity to get involved with new initiatives and tasks and develop portable skills. Lots of intelligent managers with valuable experience. Excellent top-notch benefits (401k and health insurance arguably the best, as well as free financial adviser). IBM name commands respect on your resume. Flexible work schedules.

Cons – Annual raises are poor whereas new-hire starting salaries are superb. It's highly likely that new-hires will start the year after you, or 2 years after you, with higher, or very similar salaries to yours, including your raises--even if you get outstanding performance reviews year after year. It seems there is more effort spent on acquiring new talent versus keeping and rewarding existing talent. This discourages existing talent from staying for any length of time, or continuing to strive for excellence year after year. An excellent performance review doesn't mean anything if it isn't backed up with financial reward. It just helps my resume look more attractive to recruiters elsewhere.

Also the company laptop situation is poor. On starting day you receive a used, refurbished laptop which is supposed to last you 4 years. That would be fine if you weren't also forced to use it for such basic things like checking email and billing hours--why can't I do these things on my own laptop/tablet/smartphone? Especially if I'm not dealing with classified or SBU materials. Lotus Notes is horrible.

Advice to Senior Management – Reward existing talent with not just a bonus, but a competitive raise. Senior Consultants with several years of outstanding performance should not be paid the same as new college hire Consultants.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at IBM

Pros – Good Flexibility .Good Brand . Good knowledge pool .

Cons – Very bad pay master , HR/RDM are useless.Evaluation of employees is biased . Politics is very much affecting the Cost Center unit .

Advice to Senior Management – Focus on quality and not on mass management .Try to change the Cost center into focussed COE in application management .

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at IBM

Pros – 1. learning experience
2. variety of exposure to different projects.
3. If you are aligned to the IBM way of life, you can have a great time. This also means that dissidence/alternative view points are not liked.

Cons – 1. IBM and IBMers tend to be extremely arrogant.
2. For those who look to do cutting edge work or look for the chance to create IP, IBM is definitely not the place. GBS is focused on meeting customer needs and ISL tends to be more of a testing organization where products are moved to India for maintenance & support.
3. Salary is 25-50% less than industry.
4. Given its size, IBM is only concerned with numbers - eg. people are resources and not much more.
5. To get their job done, IBM managers will attempt to browbeat you or manipulate you, thus leaving a dirty taste in the mouth.

Advice to Senior Management – 1. Please stop referring to the other services people (eg. INFY etc.,) as "those pure play vendors". It is no longer IBM and the ISVs but IBM is just another vendor in the market. Don't forget they are beating you at your game. the only difference is that you are 100 years old, and they are 20 years old. Wait till they get older, the tables will turn.

Bottomline: Please lose that arrogance. You and your people come out of the same pool that the others hire from.

2. Please look outside for learnings and more importantly, please share your knowledge in return. IBM is large and has a huge body of knowlege but if you don't cross-polinate, your pond will turn pretty scummy with time.

Let me give you one example. While I was in a different organization, we moved a group across from one site to another in the city. The whole move from the point of starting to end took 2 hrs including 1.5 hrs of physical travel and movement of personal assets. The 2 hrs included providing complete access and people getting productive. In IBM, we moved a team from EGL to Manyata (in Bangalore) and the entire move took a couple of days.

In my experience - the few times, your people have participated in public conferences, the IBM presentation has been a sales pitch with very little content. Please, it leaves a bad taste in people's mouth.

3. People are NOT resources. You need to care for your people, if you want them to give their best - referring to them as a resource is a clear indication of how you think. You (IBM) definitely don't care about most of your people except for a few 1 raters. You cannot manipulate them and expect them to stay dumb. these are intelligent people.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at IBM

Pros – Lots of responsibilities as soon as you start
Friendly people

Cons – Big Company
Red tape
Slow Moving
Not much bonuses

Advice to Senior Management – Give more perks for employees

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at IBM

Pros – Global integrated company, smart planet strategy

Cons – Local management lack of leadership skills

Advice to Senior Management – Improve skills in people management and motivation

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at IBM

Pros – Work culture is good, work life balance is great. Flexiblility should be appreciated.

Cons – Pay is not good. Sometimes you may feel demotivated.

Current Employee – been working at IBM

Pros – YOu can work from home and flexible timing

Cons – No hike and poor rating mechanism

Advice to Senior Management – don't suck the employees blood and give poor rating

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at IBM

Pros – The company has a matrix management approach which is good when it works and very bad when it doesn't. Lots of colleagues and lots of published materials internally and externally

Cons – Much less interested in customer value than when I started. Management has become "box tickers" and there is no cross pillar cooperation at all.

Advice to Senior Management – Review compensation structure, clean out middle tier management, create incentives for teams to collaborate and combine SWG and GBS into a single business unit with shared KPIs

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend