Horrible experience - Consultant IBM Employee Review

1.0
23 Oct 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Diversity, well-known brand, fairly laid back environment.

Cons

An extremely mismanaged organization with years of declining revenue under Ginni Rometty's "leadership". Expect to spend most of your working day making sure that you are compliant to a large number of different internal procedures. Management tends to believe that this is what gives IBM the competitive advantage. If you are a "consultant", expect to spend months and months doing internal admin and eLearnings far way from any project - not a great place to get exposure to interesting work or to build any useful skills. For anyone considering a career in consulting, be very careful and explore your options! There is never any money to do anything. Trainings are being scrapped, travel is being forbidden. Expense reimbursement is slow and complicated. Salaries are low and increases and bonuses are long gone. Even simple office supplies are often in shortage - and this is IBM in Western Europe! They say you get to work with the latest technology and the brightest people. All the top performers have left. Expect to receive a used, empty, five year old laptop as your equipment, and extremely time consuming procedures to get the applications you need - nowhere near any leading technology. The "management" has no ambition to understand their business or drive it in the right direction. Instead they a spend most of their time creating and promoting blog posts or videos containing very little substance. The fact is, IBM will never ever survive. Everything is based on short-term penny pinching thinking - creating a very uninspiring working environment. If you have any ambitions whatsoever, do not join IBM. There is no happiness or positive energy, only people trying to get out. You will regret it. More importantly, there is a real danger that you will be trapped, having aquired few new skills after a couple of years in IBM, hence making it very hard to move to any other respectable employer.

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5.0
29 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Supportive and friendly team with helpful mentorship, interesting machine learning work, and an overall positive internship experience.

Cons

As a large company, processes can move slowly at times.

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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