Declining company without too much hope - Senior Software Engineer IBM Employee Review

1.0
6 Sept 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Good place to try and learn new technologies - Have some amazing people Overall this is a good place to learn, but not a good place to capitalize on what you've learned. They won't pay you what you deserve, even after your capability have already leap frog far above what they pay you. It's annual fixed 0~3% or at maximum 5% salary increase no matter what performance rating you get. So many people come here to learn things just to move to another company with better pay and position 2~3 years later.

Cons

Senior executives only care about their own compensation. Most of them are over 50 years old, so they have 10 or less years left in their career. That essentially means they only care about short term. As long as they can make up the numbers to get the bonus they want before they retire, they don't care what happens after that. That's where all those cost cutting and spending billions to do share repurchase comes from. They obviously hurts the company for long term, but boosts the numbers to get what they want in short term. There are many many problems in this company, but the above one is the root cause of almost everything. Other than that one, the other major issue is lack of hands on management capability among senior management. They meet clients a lot, which is what they do in their entire career, because most of them come from sales. By the way I have to agree that having sales as your senior management rarely work. They manage by numbers, and by numbers only. They don't walk around the company and see what's really happening. Granted, it's not possible to manage a company with hundreds of thousands of people without the help of numbers, but managing through numbers ONLY does not work. Take their push for Agile for example. CEO and senior managers talk about that a lot, but the actions are lacking. It's not that they don't do it hard. It's that they only look at numbers, so they don't know where the impediments are, which is the process and culture are still widely waterfall, especially for finance and HR. With your finance, HR and process deeply waterfall oriented, how can you become Agile? It's not something that will change with CEO talking "we want Agile" repeatedly. They don't do hands on management, don't look inside in the company, so they never know.

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5.0
19 May 2026
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CEO approval
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Pros

Great work environment and benefits

Cons

Low salary, not much training received

4.0
26 Aug 2014
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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