IBM reviews

IBM's obsession with pleasing the Wall Street brings about a short sighted view to its research policy and hence impacts its Research negatively. All parts of IBM unfortunately scramble to meet short term financial objectives and Research is very often called for help, which takes researchers away from their primary roles of inventing and innovating game changing technologies and methods. By definition, research means investing time and money in high risk high reward problems. For instance, Watson was developed over quite a few years with dozens of people involved. That is what it takes to create serious technologies. Watson team had the few lucky researchers. Unfortunately, many researchers find themselves in a situation where they are asked to help the other parts of IBM improve their bottom line. Since other parts of IBM provide research its funding, they have a lot of influence on defining research projects and therefore how researchers spend their time. Since they are hard pressed to meet their financial objectives, they tend to define projects that help their short term financial goals. Such projects are almost always less innovative and tend to have marginal value for the company. IBM researchers are very capable people. IBM hires the very best to its Research. However, under so much pressure to help IBM's bottom line and do it fast, it is hard for researchers to come up with earth shaking innovations, though they would be perfectly capable to do so if they were given some breathing room. There are still quite a few researchers who still get to work on really promising things but their numbers are quite small.

- horribly workload. 60+ hours is the normal work week expected. Anything less and you are classified as a 'underperformer'. - salaries that are very significantly under market rates. - penny-pinching to the point of ridiculousness. - virtually no pay-raises or promotion for 95% of employees. The remaining 5% get a promotions where you pay increases by 2-3% for changing a complete band level (eg moving from 'Staff Software Engineer' to 'Advisory Software Engineer' - annual bonuses are typically in the 3-4% range for almost all employees - All perks (Thanks! awards, Breakfast-For-One $2.50 coupons, Christmas dinners, Year-Beginning meetings etc etc) have been cut Basically since the former management instituted their 'financial roadmaps" for virtually doubling EPS, IBM has focused on one single thing .... cut costs by any means neccessary to achieve financial targets. - Droves and droves of the smart people are leaving this company. The only ones left are those not so good that they cannot find good employment elsewhere. - Morale at absolute rock bottom.