Be very aware - Recensione dipendente - Program Manager presso IBM

3,0
18 apr 2013
Consiglia
Gradimento del CEO
Pronostico commerciale

Vantaggi

IBM is a highly participatory environment. Everyone seems to be included in everything which tends to make meetings massive and frequent. There's a deceptive lack of structure and formality about most things so you're free to do your job with a great deal of latitude in how you do it. There is still plenty of older hands who know how to get things done vis a vis the organization

Svantaggi

You will probably never see a pay increase, ever. It's possible you'll get a token bonus of 1% every decade but other than that, no. There's always some excuse; the economy is bad, the sector is bad, the industry is bad, you're too far above the midpoint, someone missed their numbers, blah blah blah. Which is fine, except you still have to go through this silly review process where your goals and statements were handed to you by first line management and then you have to write a term paper defending every trivial item on it. There is essentially NO job movement. None. You have to be able find your own replacement to move even laterally and that person has to find theirs and so on. Organizationally if you wind up in a staff role or servicing IBM's own business to itself you can count on spending most of your time in meetings talking about meetings to plan meetings which will be intended to gather information on which to discuss further meetings. To sum up it's "Office Space" meets the Soviet Union.

Esplora altre recensioni su IBM

5,0
19 mag 2026
Consiglia
Gradimento del CEO
Pronostico commerciale

Vantaggi

Great work environment and benefits

Svantaggi

Low salary, not much training received

4,0
26 ago 2014
Consiglia
Gradimento del CEO
Pronostico commerciale

Vantaggi

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.

Svantaggi

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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Risposta di IBM
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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