Bad Management. Stay Away. - Anonymous employee IBM Employee Review

1.0
12 Aug 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Brand Name (only thing left will help your career) Flexible work hours

Cons

Bad management for the entire branch. One obvious sign: the top management is filled with relatives and friends. Slow promotion. The center tries to put as much as possible requirements to block your promotion. For a small amount of salary raise with the base is already far below the average, they need you to provide an incredible amount of evidence that you deserve it. Yet, there are chances they say NO to it in the end. If it’s approved, you’ll have to wait a couple of months to get the actual result even sometimes the entire process just happen in the center which should just take days or weeks. But if you’re “ favored”, you’re very likely to get a fast promotion, skip bands and good pay with little work. No passion, no vision. The management level talks about the budget all the time instead of vision and projects. Your life will about the billed hours. Yet there are flexible working hours and work from home policy, you won’t benefit from them too much if you want to stay there for the long-term and be promoted. It has lots of small easy projects without any challenges. The big projects are very likely to collapse without real results. Lack of respect for the people who do real work. There are a few amounts of people who handle all the real problems of the projects. They’re overwhelmed and not respected. The managers say they appreciate your efforts but they are really not. Good people leave all the time and the management level don’t care. Poor work environment. Don’t even think about anything nice, there is no coffee machine and you can imagine the rest. Refuse to change. All the decisions are top-down (normal in a big company), and the top management has no intention to change with serious problems like people left and projects collapse. They don’t care about individual success at all. The management style feels like 30 years ago in a bad way. All these may sound very negative, but unfortunately, they’re all true. People leave as soon as they see these issues. Lots of people left after staying here less than one year. Stay away from it if you have other choices.

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4.0
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Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Disclaimer: A lot of what I'm writing below of course depends on the work area and management chain. But I found this to be fairly pervasive policies in IBM in my 9+ years with the company. 1. IBM's policies and management are very flexible when it comes to working remotely or accommodating various life situations (sick days, doctor visits, etc.). Management is encouraged to measure an employee by their work and impact, and not by hours spent at their office. 2. Great colleagues! Though unfortunately, many have been leaving due to the instability of IBM's HW development business. 3. At least in my area, there's a high level of flexibility on which projects should I undertake based on my and my management assessment of business impact.

Cons

1. Unfortunately, IBM still uses the "normal distribution" rating system, where at the end of the year each employee is ranked as a top contributor (5%), above average contributor (15%), average contributor (~75%), and bottom contributor (5%). This curve is difficult to apply in the R&D world, where you may have many members of the team working long and hard hours, and end up being "average contributors" at the end of the year, because there just isn't room for all to be top contributors. 2. The above may not be so disturbing, if only IBM didn't practically cancelled all raises, performance bonuses and incentive for the non top-performers. I've had a consistent "above average" rating in the last 4-5 years, and my raise and performance bonus were ridiculous mere 1.5-2% of my salary. Were I rated "average contributor" I would have gotten NOTHING. So you can imagine that people can go year after year without any raise to their salary. From talking to manager friend, this is IBM's way to eliminate the non-top-performers without having to fire them, as part of its direction of reducing US manpower. 3. Hiring freeze in many areas - again, as part of IBM's attempt to reduce its workforce across North America and Europe we see many jobs move to the India and Far East markets. This is of course upsetting to see local teams shrink and disappear, especially when many great local IBM colleagues and experts begin to drop out. From my experience thus far working with India SW teams - they are still very far away from the standards I would have expected from US and Europe based teams. 4. Poor top down communication about company's and divisions' future. Employees learn from rumors and news websites what's about to come...

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IBM Response
10y
Thanks for sharing your experience, and we're glad that you've had a positive experience working with talented colleagues and taking advantage of IBM's programs. IBM is in the midst of a major transformation, --our Systems business is going through its own changes to strengthen competitiveness. Change is never easy. As part of our transformation, we just launched a whole new approach for how we are coaching employees, delivering feedback and managing reviews. No distribution guidelines or what some think of as 'stacked rankings." What's particularly great is that this was co-designed with our employee base from all over the world... to the tune of hundreds of thousands of page views, comments, on-line debates and discussions. IBMers even named the new system Checkpoint, to reflect the regular feedback rituals we're adopting. Managers are more empowered with the new methodology to help them acknowledge the great work of their teams and help their employees develop professionally. These steps and more are showing up in our employee surveys as well. So IBMers are feeling the change. We are confident these changes will help us in continuing to attract and retain great talent.
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