IBM Reviews in Austin, TX Area

Pros

Work/Life balance
Flexible work schedules
Ability to work remotely
Challenging assignments
Co-workers and first line management
Location
Reputation
Customer interfacing

Cons

IBM Proprietary tools and processes
Focus on services and software
Lack of IT support and tools
Raises
Bonuses
Promotions
Ratings process

Pros

Nice to telecommute, nice to have access to latest technology

Cons

Constant fear of lay offs, long hours, poor internal communication structure, upper management inaccessible - often times seem to think they are royalty, see a lot of empire building without apparent regard for the company

Advice to Senior Management

Be more sensitive to the needs/desires of all levels of employees and not so entirely focused on self.

Pros

Technical teams have a lot of experience and are extremely competent, some of the best in the industry
Technology, at least historically, has been good
Good work/life balance is possible
If you can telecommute it is a big win/win

Cons

Most of the top talent will be retiring soon
Benefit plans repeatedly raided, older employees lost big-time from retirement plan bait and switch
Little or no salary increases year after year
Employee profit sharing is a joke since only the executives see anything even in an outstanding year

Advice to Senior Management

Cost cutting has helped the financials short term but its taken a huge toll on technology and ability to compete in the future. You need to get rid of the bean counters and invest in retention policies and competitive analysis.

Pros

- Intellectual freedom in Architecture, design and implementation
- Compute resources and associated technologies
- Office environment (ie. no cube-land)
- Accessibility to world class research and personel
- prestige

Cons

- Mature environment (ie. gray ceiling), growth requires extra effort
- Some areas not focused on modern tools or enforcing best practices in SW engineering
- very poorly implemented bonus program

Advice to Senior Management

- Please communicate more with employees on group strategy and directions. It's best for technical teams to know where they're going for technical and company buy-in.
- Bonus structure and salary are one of the primary causes for loosing key talent.

Pros

Some good people.
Decent 401k

Cons

Totally incompetent management. No respect for regular employees. Constant layoffs. No clue how to develop great products.

Advice to Senior Management

Nothing. Too ignorant to know what they're doing wrong.

Pros

Decent pay, they love people who want to grow their career and will give you the opportunities. Can be fairly flexible with work hours and location (can work from home).

Cons

Have to play the corporate game if you want to be seen as a "valued contributor" - raises and bonuses are tied to this. Continuing to offshore jobs which makes it difficult to work with knowledgeable people that are needed when developing new projects, makes the job that much harder. Company is less concerned with putting out software that doesn't look like it was developed by interns and tons of defects. If the project needs 5 people to work on it, only 2-3 will be allocated.

Advice to Senior Management

Learn how to properly evaluate your employees and quit using the generic/all-in-one PBC method that gets abused by people putting soo much spin on what they do, they make paint drying sound like an engineering breakthrough.

Offshoring jobs may save a buck to make the stock look good, but the people you hire are mostly incompetent with high turnover. In the end it will cost you more money than what you saved since it's takes them 3x as long to get it done and hurts the companies image by producing a poor user experience due to all the bugs/defects.

Pros

The best part of my experience in IBM was the right mix of engineering and research. While I was working on real product, I also got to solve challenging problems to make my way.

Cons

Did not work long enough to find a downside. Except they are not in a hiring spree. Otherwise great.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the good work would be most of it. On a side note: finding ways to speed up the logistics of a new hire will help.

Pros

Work with intelligent people, actual technology and development work is interesting

Cons

The work assigned to teams is consistently and significantly more than the teams can produce in the given schedule. Items/scope is rarely traded off or out, the teams are just required to work more overtime to contain the work effort.

Advice to Senior Management

Too much thrashing on work items for the teams reduces the actual time available for development to deliver the product. Everything can't be the highest priority and need to be delivered yesterday.

Pros

No micromanagement. can work from home. pretty decent with time off. no career growth. mostly waiting to be laid off while IBM does outsourcing.

Cons

management does not help with career growth. bean counters really.

Advice to Senior Management

motivate engineers. incentivize them. help with career growth.

Pros

excellent work atmosphere
great infrastructure to support remote work (telecommuting)

Cons

need a better bridge for contractors to become regular employees

Advice to Senior Management

work more closely to bring on contractors as regular employees