Pros

Unless you're one of the executives who are currently draining the company of every dollar possible in order to enrich themselves at any cost - there is not any good reason to work for IBM. That is unless you have absolutely no other alternative.

Cons

No work / life balance. No security. IBM is a dead-end for anyone except the execs that are currently draining the company dry of all it's resources.

Advice to Senior Management

Shame on you.

Pros

Team building: You are forced into this situation as there is nothing provided to direct you as an employee to an answer. It does build a skill of self reliance and independence, if you survive

Cons

IBM has outsourced so many divisions, including its own HR department, to India and other countries that customers are lied to in the name of profits. Customer facing positions are being relocated to India and customers are "assured" that they will not be impacted. IBM's greed is so excessive that profit margins are demanded from project managers in the neighborhood of 50%. If you cannot produce those kinds of results, they will find a way to get rid of first, half your staff, then you, then either boggle the job so bad that the customer seeks other service bids, and they gives the impression, "well we tried". The technical staff is core unit the customer sees in most cases. Relationships must be developed to keep these customers happy. IBM has torn apart the service staff to the point of hiring completely unskilled labor for $10-12 hr, while stating the idea that you can guide anyone through this kind of work. WRONG! This unskilled labor is usually a "3rd sub" from a company they spun off a few years ago called Qualixserv, in some cases Manpower. This staff is told that they are not to disclose to the customer that they are not employees. Merely to say that they are "John/Jane Doe for IBM". Project teams are facing customers who are discovering this and demanding that if they cannot provide IBM direct employees that they are not to send anyone to the customer PERIOD. We are preached to on a daily basis that it costs more to generate new business than to retain it. But each day we are encouraged to walk away from our customers, "just under the radar", or lying to the point that it requires the entire team to have several meetings, just to prepare for a meeting with the customer when the s*&% hits the fan.

Advice to Senior Management

The entire executive staff needs to give back every bonus it has received in the past 10 years, and retire. if not, I firmly believe that this previously long respected company will be dissolved in the next 10 years based on poor management models, and the fact that most of the "worker bees" will number 1, for every 6 executive/manager positions.

Pros

I was a developer at IBM in Tivoli for a little over two years and started fresh out of school. Generally, starting salaries (fresh out of college) are fairly competitive. Mostly all of my co-workers were very professional and cordial. Given the size of the company you have an opportunity to move around if you really network well; however, this is getting harder and harder to pull off. Also if you want to work from home there are plenty of opportunities in development, test, project management, IT, etc. that will allow you to do it either full or part-time. Also flex-time was truly flexible; many a time I ran long mid-day errands without anyone raising an eyebrow (rating system is "results" oriented, I'll get to this later). There are some really interesting projects mainly in the Software Group Strategy, Rational, and Lotus pillars if you are good enough to maneuver yourself onto one of those teams.

Health Benefits were quite basic for a big company. You get a standard 80/20 with about a $700 deductible for free and you payed about $75 a month for each additional dependant. They had other options that weren't bad but they got expensive quick; however, after the sixth child it's free! You also can get a lot of discounts such as 25% off cell phone service and employee pricing on GM cars. Vacation was 3 weeks plus 4 - 5 floating holidays per year which effectively meant you got 4 weeks of vacation not including U.S. national holidays out of the gate which is pretty good. Also the 401(k) match was not to shabby at 6% dollar for dollar.

Cons

Some people joke about executives only caring about the stock price and running their company only worrying about the quarter to quarter results, IBM does it. This quarter to quarter madness is quite understandable when you realize that a good chunk of the VP's incentives are in stock options. Why should they care about anything else, but the stock price? This is where they get brilliant ideas such as taking out loans to buy back company stock instead of using it to build products or buy more companies to gain market share.

And this brings me to my next point. IBM is not doing very much home growing of products anymore. They tend to buy a company, add some features to the product, slowly let attrition and layoffs take its toll on the U.S. workforce while pushing the product to maintenance mode over in India, China, Argentina, or one of the other BRIC type countries. One of the products I worked on lost about half of its U.S. workforce in two years. Every time someone would leave the company or move to another product team they would not backfill them. If the natural attrition didn't work they would do a layoff and hire replacements in one of the forementioned countries. The problem with this strategy is the replacements were typically very green and knew their jobs were safe no matter what, making motivation an issue. This combined with constant benefit cuts like Tivoli free sodas/coffee being taken away (oh sorry, the email said they were aligning the drink policy with IBM guidelines) leaves the morale of the U.S. employees effectively in the toilet. One more note on the drink thing, the email they sent saying they were cutting the free drinks was dressed with the typical corporate language so they had to send up a follow-up email to clarify it. This leads me to my next point.

If you want to be treated like a five year old, work here. There is nothing like working hard through a product release while the executives push/prod, make you work the weekends to keep on schedule and at the end they send one of those "YOU GUYS ROCK" emails which is supposed to motivate us even more. I remember sitting on meetings with fellow employees struggling for recognition with from the executives, it reminded me of dogs fighting for scraps from the table. The scraps being that when review time came around only one or two people would get the highest rating while the other 90% got the solid performer/average rating. And even if you did get a high rating expect maybe a 5% raise and a 7% bonus woohooo! don't spend it all one place. For the rest, better luck next year. Another problem with the rating system was how managers were the only ones with any input and they normally new the least about who was the best and did the most work. Their ignorance not being of their own fault so much as the fault of the countless meetings they were constantly stuck in all day.

Oh yeah, IBMers love meetings, almost always to the detriment of productivity. The meetings were where all the power grabbing was so usually the loudest voices were listened too and respected. Meaning that if you wanted that high rating you would need to make sure your opinion heard, whether or not it was valid, so as to make sure you could check off that teaming section in your end of the year review.

Now to get back to my title, this place is not the worst place on earth to work, but it far from the best. Don't let the fancy "I'm an IBMer" commercials fool you into thinking it is as hip and progressive as Google or Apple. If you are a go-getter self-starter type you would probably do better working at a start-up or a small company where you can really have an impact. I remember reading in college about all these famous inventions by IBM and its alumni and startups such as Craigslist started by former IBMers, and for some reason I missed the former part. Yeah, IBM gets a lot of great people, but many of the truly successful ones in the industry are the ones that leave. If not you could end up like some of my former co-workers in their late 20's early 30's who talk about big dreams outside of the company but get comfortable and never go anywhere. Getting comfortable at IBM is easy to do, but that is the biggest mistake you can make there. With the constant layoffs, make sure to keep an exit plan open so when you leave it is for the betterment of your career, like my case, rather than your group missed its quarterly number by a quarter percent and you get hit by the next "resource action" or "restructuring" (a.k.a. layoff).

So bottom line: feel free to by stock in IBM, just don't work there.

Advice to Senior Management

Cut out the quarter to quarter trickery you are going to wind up losing your core workforce followed by your customers when they finally wake up and realize all you really care about the stockholders (errr... your stock options) over them. I remember meeting guys when I started in 2006 who were really excited saying how we were building our own destiny, only to have them two years later counting days until their retirement. Is this really what you all want in a workforce? Dispassionate people working under a command & control management structure? Well it must be, because you've done it and my hat's off to you all.

Pros

- bright intelligent worker bees
- flexibility to work from home

Cons

- management and team leads who say what upper mgmt wants to hear -- not what they should hear
- management and team leads who encourage lying and back-stabbing
- few raises or bonuses and constant threat of resource actions
- expectation of 24X 7 availability

Advice to Senior Management

Palmisano and higher execs need to be replaced -- in it only for their executive bonuses not for health and growth of the company

Pros

Industry prestige, intelligent and experienced technical teams, breadth of opportunities available

Cons

rapid migration of jobs away from North America, short-sighted senior management, cost cutting out-of-control, no investment in employees, no respect for technical skill, sales rules the day at the cost of all other aspects of the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Invest in current employees again. Remember the importance technical skill, training and experience have had in creating IBM's position in the marketplace. Finally, Leave some money for everyone else including employees and shareholders.

Pros

Work from home.
Average benefits.
Average vacation time
Average pay

Cons

Constant stress
Pressure to cut costs
Every deal includes offshoring support
No training
Very disorganized management

Advice to Senior Management

My advice is to look for a job elsewhere. There is no future at IBM for anybody from North America. Upper management is so out of touch with the employees it creates an unbearable work environment. Avoid IBM it is not long for this world.

Pros

They had good benifits like 3 weeks of vacation and health coverage. My manager allowed me to work from home for 3 years.

Cons

Terrible pay. No more work from home. Senior management doesn't seem to care that all the talent is leaving and new customers are signing with IBM less than 20% of the time due to a terrible customer service record.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop outsourcing tens of thousands of American jobs to poorly trained overseas labor forces. Give your top people recognition and raises so they will actually stay.

Pros

The benefits are good, starting at 3 wks a year plus up to 6 personal choice days.

Cons

You are expected (even though the formal HR policy says not to) to work through your dinner, vacations. You take your laptop everywhere - 24x7. The company is quite matrixed and there is often disagreement about who handles what with sr mgmt deciding that "they" own a tactic, and another sr. mgmt says "he" handles it -- you get caught in the middle - alot. The group owning the money for a tactic is not the same group implementing the tactic, this is why you see Web pages that don't make sense. The advertising and direct mail tactic don't align to web pages, as a consumer, you are just "dropped." The best people have been laid off and the people left were personal favorites and not necessarily the right person for the job. Typically, the job was given to them without any training when the experienced person was laid off. Layoffs have nothing to do with the quality of work, they just got "too old" for IBM. That's how IBM beats the age discrimination rap, most of the laid off people are over 45 (and subsequently high earners)- there's no getting around that. Turning 50 at IBM is the kiss of death. The best person that was laid off had much experience. IBM has not decided that experience doesn't mean anything and so they keep the inexperienced people, which explains why customers are frequently lost.

-There is no loyalty to the employee. As a result of this, morale is very low, the hallways are quiet, there is no socializing, it's not a fun place to work.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep your experienced people, yes, their wages are more (for good reason) but you'll see they save you much more in the mistakes those inexperienced people are making.

Pros

The experience you get. That's about it at this point. Maybe some adrenalin rush due to packed deadlines if you're an adrenalin junkey.

Cons

Overworked, underpaid!! IBM is taking advantage of the 'economic situation' to lay off people and overwork others! Overwork is an understatement. The people who remain in the ship which is not sinking from the first place it's just another avenue for IBM to make more revenue. The people left are expected to do the SAME amount of work in the SAME amount of time as it was laid out to be done with twice as many people originally. IBM is saving money and making great fat profits in this 'economic crisis' while its employees are being burned out, exploited and taken advantage of. There have been several heart attacks at IBM since this started.
IBM was once known as a reputable company.
Now it is a SWEATSHOP!!
Do not come to work here, you will not be respected!!

Advice to Senior Management

Pay more attention to your employees they are your assets. Do not discriminate against older employees because they cost more and will soon go into retirement with great benefits. Shame on you IBM for cutting costs by getting rid of your most loyal employees who have been with you for many many years! Now they cost too much so you're letting them go without due respect and benefits!

Shame shame shame on you management for doing this!

Pros

flexible - work from home or anywhere
good online resources to education you can take in your own time
large company with alot of job opportunity in services, hw, sw etc
some of the smartest people on the planet work here

Cons

too much work not enough employees
sr leadership in somers/armonk out of touch with whats happening at customer's real world
rampant employee burnout from overwork
no investment in $$$ education
micromanagement to wall street/stock results

Advice to Senior Management

see con's
trust your employees in the field
push down decision making to lower levels of management
invest in acquisitions in services like our competitors