IBM reviews

Oh my god, where do I start. I worked for IBM for 20 years. Things started out good, but then Sam Palmisano became CEO and it started to go down hill, for the employees. When Ginni Rometty took over in 2012, the descent only accelerated, much like the descent in the stock price. Work life balance was terrible at IBM. The only focus was on billable utilization. Utilization targets ranged from 90% for very senior people to 114% for junior people. That means billing 1872 hrs to 2371 hrs per year to clients. This does not include your administrative work that you need to do. Nor does it include travel time or professional development time. After taking into account sick time, vacation and holiday time; in addition to your administrative work, travel time and professional development time it became obvious to anyone that making their BU targets were achievable in a normal work week. When I pointed out to management that if I missed more than 5 days in a year I would not make my BU targets. Keep in mind that I had 20 earned vacation days and 10 stat holidays. I was told that we were expected to work OT to make up for our time away in order to make the BU targets. That's right. Work unpaid over time to make up for annual leave that you have earned and for stat holiday time that they are legislated to give you. This is how it becomes necessary to work 50+ hrs per week just to meet your BU targets. 60+ hrs a week are fairly normal and burst periods of 70 to 80 hrs a week occur a number of time a year. IBM even demands that people work from home if they are sick, rather than actually take a sick day. Many people even do some work while on vacation. I had had to do some work even over Christmas holidays. If I add up my BU, travel time, admin time and professional development time I clocked in an average of 2500 hours every year. That amounts to about 16 weeks per year more work than the average Canadian worker. Anyone who posts on Glassdoor that work life balance is a PRO for IBM either has a very low bar for work life balance or is a plant from IBM to write bogus reviews to offset the negative reviews. The performance reviews have a 5 point scale. 1, 2+, 2, 3 and 4; 1 being the top performers. Performing at a 1 (which I did on several annual reviews) gets you a whopping 1.5% pay increase and 1.5% to 2.5% bonus. Get a 2+ and you one or the the other, depending on the year. Hardly keeping up with the cost of living. And that is for the top performers. 2 and 3 you get to keep your job.... for the time being. 4 and you are put on probation with unrealistic targets; which, if not met, will result in your dismissal. I remember one year, on the back drop of optics of no-one getting a bonus, Ginni Rometty announced that she would not be getting her bonus either. But she still got her $7M in shares. I guess her $1.6M base salary was not enough to live on. And this is even after the stock price has been in a down trend since she took the CEO position. Isn't stock price her one job to take care of? That sounds like a poor performance rating to me. A very disingenuous move on her part. Professional development is a joke. You are expected to take IBM online training on your own time. I took some training outside of the company once that was specifically relevant to my role at the time. Initially IBM refused to pay for it. After my manager (1st line manager) went to bat for me, the senior managers agreed to cough half the cost. This was for skills development that made me even more productive immediately. Yet another example of how employees are viewed as a liability, not an asset. IBM is on constant lay-off mode. The going joke in my office was to call out on Monday morning "Who is still here?" IBM tries to short change people on their severance packages. When people fight the severance IBM looses every time, but the people have to fight. IBM plays a numbers game. For every person who fights and gets a bigger severance there are 10 who don't. IBM rides the raged edge of the labour law, trying to implement U.S. style labour policies. Some of the managers that I knew would tell me stories of IBM lawyers reminding executives that Canadian labour law would not let them do some of the things that they wanted. Maternity leave top up is a joke. I know two separate women who were given poor performance ratings on two consecutive years because they did not meet BU targets. These just happened to be years that their maternity leaves intersected with. No pro-rating of the BU for the time that they were actually in the office. There is no parental leave top up for dads. If you really must have the IBM name on your CV then have an exit strategy. Five years max then get out and take your experience with you. You are just a number to IBM; return the favour.