IBM reviews

3.9

78% would recommend to a friend

(107,291 total reviews)
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Arvind Krishna

77% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

IBM has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 107,291 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The IBM employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

107K reviews
1.0
Sep 15, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

– Work-life balance is moderately alright (but ultimately depends on the project).

Cons

– Management gives absolutely no interest in your career goals & aspirations: often empty promises & lip services. Neither do they check-in with you to understand you better nor your current progress. – Way too many mid-management whom no one seems know what they are doing all day except for attending meetings. Too few hands-on staff to carry out the real work – Compensation is below market rates for tech roles. Moreover YOY salary increment, as well as promotion, is negligible. – Benefits are non-existent. Annual paid-leave are minimal. – While local mentorship + networking is a common practice in most MNCs, it's a fairy-tale here. – Interview process has regressed in terms of rigour, resulting in many incompetent IT "talents" populating the workplace in the last 2 years. – Overuse of (cheaper) employees who came from a career-switch background who are not quite yet experienced in running the show. – Projects are poorly executed: what was sold to clients hardly match with the reality on the ground. – Attrition rate is really high for technical staff: knowledge transfer & hand-take are frequent, resulting in many messy sub-projects.

1.0
May 9, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

IBM does have some pros. The sheer size and history are incredible. A lot of diversity, and a lot of insanely smart people

Cons

The cons list is too long to be listed cleanly so I'll try to summarize: IBM still uses layoffs in a way that (to me) is antiquated. A lot of long term people's only skill is surviving at IBM. Expenses and audits are extremely painful. People work in fear of getting a resource action or an audit. Extremely talented people get resourced just because the machine is too big to really notice them.

3.0
Mar 15, 2022

Good people, mismanaged company

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- The work-life balance is good - Gain experience working with big customers with complex systems - Good people work there

Cons

- They had layoffs almost every year during my many years with them. People that were toxic would be left around as a buffer for the next layoff and great people would leave after a layoff so they're not next. - So many layers of management and bureaucracy. Upper management were often out of touch and developers often felt underappreciated or powerless. - Almost never got bonuses and when we did, it was so small I was embarrassed to mention it to friends that worked at other places. There were hardly any incentive to do exceptional or give my all when it'll often go unappreciated. - No longer an innovative company for many reasons - one reason being that the innovation often comes because someone wants a promotion not because they're solving a great need in the industry. There is so much process and bureaucracy, there is hardly any inspiration for innovation. There is also little incentive to try something new because you know there will be no reward for it (no bonuses) and it'll be met with so much resistance and process, it's just not worth fighting. There is no space to try anything new in the midst of all the process, bureaucracy, resistance, daily grind (paperwork, training, support, etc) and the business definitely didn't facilitate innovation or make it easy/attractive.

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