IBM Reviews in Austin, TX Area

Pros

You work with some of the smartest people in the industry.

Cons

Upper management is not good in valuing top performers.

Advice to Senior Management

Upper management needs to be flexible towards career advancement and rewarding their top performers.

Pros

Employees are very cooperative and open to constructive opinions.

Cons

Managers are not technical which hinders the progress.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to leverage a technical ability for the group.

Pros

There's not denying that IBM is a large company with a very wide portfolio of jobs. In theory, one could stay with IBM and experience any number of roles.
The benefits package is pretty comprehensive.

Cons

IBM pay 'the market rate', but prevailing wisdom is that most competitors will pay you more to do the same job.
IBM has a very poor support strategy which undermines the good wok of many engineers. This leads to a great deal of dissatisfaction on the part of customers and IBMers alike.
IBM does amazing research, but it's development vision seems to be pretty lacklustre. There's a lot of talk about Smarter Planet and Business On Demand and whatever the next buzzword is, but technological excitement never seems to permeate the business.

Advice to Senior Management

Decide whether you are a services or a technology company and then start acting like one.

Pros

Great work life balance, the IBM culture respects personal and family priorities.
Hard work and good job will be recognized.

Cons

Internal transfer is not as easy as it should be.
Your visibility depends on your manager's relative power among his/her peers. IBM evaluate employee's performance relative to all employees in a larger organization. Your relative contribution depends on how well your manager promotes you.

Advice to Senior Management

Announce layoff when there is a layoff. The term "resource action" is more demoralizing than layoff.

Pros

lots of opportunities if you chose to pursue

Cons

too large a compnay and ur just a number
focus only on short term deliverables
benefits being systematically reduced every year
career growth or job changes practicalyy impossible

Advice to Senior Management

take a slightly longer term view of things

Pros

IBM is always on the forefront of IT technology and services such as Cloud Computing and High Performance Computing. It allows individuals to have a challenging IT career involved in many different, diverse roles. They have a good formal and informal mentoring program as well. IBM's values and promotes it's innovative employees.

Cons

Being a large company, an employee can get lost in the masses. Becoming an expert in your assigned area is the best way to benefit yourself and your current organization. This allows you to also be considered for the next great opportunity to move into when a career change is so desired.

Advice to Senior Management

It is important to protect your most valuable resource...your experienced IT professional staff.

Pros

Flexibility is great.
Work from home.
Benefits are pretty good overall.
No micro-management (this, of course, depends on division/organization and employee's skills/performance).
Annual salary reviews (depending on your performance review, you get an increase, I have always gotten an increase every single year, but in recent years that increase is about 2-3% only).
Annual performance bonus.

Cons

Base salary paid is a little lower than other top companies in the Austin area.
Off-shoring like crazy... too many folks here in the states are getting displaced by employees and/or contractors overseas.
There's smart people anywhere in the world... but it seems that in many cases IBM just hires "global resources" without conducting a good technical interview.... and what happens next is just horrible... you, as the person facing management here in the US, then have to deal with these folks who lack technical skills and you are asked to make it work...
If you are a good and excellent software engineer, you are rewarded like this: you become the lead of some "global team" and you are left with very little time to own a component since you have to spend a lot of time on communication: many global resources do not speak English and/or lack many technical skills (sometimes the need to do baby-sitting is just too much).

Advice to Senior Management

Hire good and experienced global resources who do speak English.
Allow US employees to get some education (in other words, invest in your US employees).
If you have a top performer in your team, please reward that person: increase their salary not by just a mere 3%... after all, that is about the same % increase the other folks who are not top performers also got.

Pros

Flexibility around managing my work day and time
Worked with great people
Good benefits package - health care, dental, vacation

Cons

Required many hours of un-paid overtime to meet project goals
Very few class-room training sessions available in the US. Only had access to on-line, self-directed training
Many, many US jobs being off-shored

Advice to Senior Management

Stop sending so many jobs overseas

Pros

The technical talent at IBM is unparalleled. Working with smart engineers and developers is one of the primary perks of IBM.

Cons

The company is being taken in an unfortunate direction by upper management. Aggressive attrition of the US workforce is causing loss of incredible talent, and leaving abysmal morale.

Advice to Senior Management

Your technical talent is your biggest asset. Lose it at your peril.

Pros

+ Benefits are very comprehensive.
+ Salary isn't great, but reasonable for the industry.
+ The employees work together as a team, even across organizations.

Cons

- Totally random layoffs - it's like thinning the herd - you never know who is going to be next.
- Getting the top appraisal means you've worked the most billable hours, not that your work was the best.
- I'm seeing a recent trend where offshore employees are hired based on who is cheapest at the current moment. With the fluctuation of the dollar we're looking at Brazil one week, Phillipines the next, Cairo the week after. The offshore employees miss out on a lot of the benefits of working on a team.

Advice to Senior Management

If you're moving work offshore, be organized about it. Do it at the beginning of a project. Don't layoff US employees mid project. Don't hire from 3 different countries for a single project. Treat the US employees as more than a drain on the bottom line.