IBM Reviews in Boston, MA Area

Pros

IBM has a great internal process of career planning goals and objectives and continually monitors what you have accomplished and can help you establish career steps to reach your career goals.

Cons

Too much 'process'. They have a database for every project related or financial need you have.

Advice to Senior Management

Streamline some of the employee's data entry processes currently required for documenting projects and expense requirements.

Pros

good name recogintion
great benefits
decent products
loyal customers

Cons

constantly changing comp plan
significant quota increase year after year

Advice to Senior Management

pay your top performers what their worth

Pros

IBM is a good company in terms of benefits, flexibility with working from home options, and salary.

Cons

It is difficult to move around within the organization and also difficult to get promotions.

Advice to Senior Management

Maybe you should get feedback from employees about their managers. The managers are allowed to review their subordinates, but I also think it would be good for non managers to provice feedback about their managers. There are many unfair practices and favoritism that goes on.

Pros

* Good people to work with, with some really stellar folks
* Nearly any important company or government in the world is a customer
* Good benefits
* If you're on a good project that's doing well financially, it can be fun (and a lot of work)
* Well known, well-respected company

Cons

* Expense tightening is getting a little too much
* Committees for everything as a way to avoid personal decision making
* Compartmentalization of roles can be extreme
* Antiquated systems and processes (green screens, and Lotus Notes needs a serious overhaul)
* Interruptions and crisis mode are a way of life
* Politics can be soul crushing
* It's a Big Machine

Advice to Senior Management

It's ok to invest and take more internal risks. Have a planning horizon that's longer than 1 fiscal year for more internal investments.

Pros

Big company, Lot of opportunities to switch to

Cons

Some manager is not up to par

Advice to Senior Management

Pay more attention to how the manager were performed.

Pros

Flexible working hours, many online trainings.

Cons

Not so good medical benefit.

Advice to Senior Management

None.

Pros

Great education, opportunity to touch tons of technologies and work with some of the best IBM professionals as well as exposure to work in multiple industries

Cons

Great educational training but not the best mentoring. Be ready to be thrown into the deep end and tread water or even swim laps right out the gate

Advice to Senior Management

You need a better approach to mentoring recent college grads

Pros

IBM has always been very respectful of work-life balance and time off for life events, etc. Leaders are generally very accessible and willing to engage all employee levels. The work can be very rewarding.

Cons

The spreadsheet mentality means that they may not always completely understand how to value a good employee whose benefit to the company rises above their bottom line or utilization tallies (particularly in the area of User Experience and other creative/design roles). It was NOT always like this here. It seems back in the earlier part of the decade, we were encouraged to "Do the Right Thing" and were rewarded for our efforts and risk in a more organic way.

Advice to Senior Management

The PDFA process is not particularly effective in identifying the best candidates for promotion and, in fact, often sews the seeds of discontent and, in some cases, hysteria in the minds of those who are passed over without sufficient cause.

Pros

People working in IBM are one of the best and have good knowledge of what they are doing their and working on.

Cons

Being a large organization it is sometimes difficult to get noticed for the work you do and may seem difficult to progress towards top.

Advice to Senior Management

I will say that management is doing pretty good job at IBM in all the fields that i can think off.

Pros

I naively thought there would be the prestige of working for Big Blue... boy was I in for a surprise.

Cons

It's just not "your father's IBM" anymore. Found that IBM really means: "I'm By Myself."

Managers seemed to enjoy being abusive to the people who reported to them.

While theoretically selling a collaboration product, the spirit of working together & collaborating was crushed on a daily & consistent basis by the managers.

Advice to Senior Management

If there is such a thing as leadership at IBM, it's far too removed from the daily grind of inside sales.

The idea that IBM is going to swing back into software is laughable.