IBM reviews

IBM is old and it shows. It doesn't really feel like a technology company. Processes are cumbersome. You can just imagine some ancient mainframe software running the place. I worked in the software business group. The overall feeling was that software engineers were interchangeable. There must be something wrong with you if you wanted to be an individual contributor and liked to write code. Promotions and awards were much more about politics than technical merit. There are too many rules and managers are afraid to push back. Employees are constantly told what they cannot do along and threatened with potential penalties. A couple of examples: print jobs needed to be picked up within 30 minutes or you're cited by security. Office doors need to be locked and blinds drawn when away from your desk for more than 15 minutes. Silly stuff.

Reduced hiring in the 1990s created long term impacts to the demographics of the organization as there is an obvious experience gap between the 20+ year employees and the 10 or less year employees. This experience gap creates a challenge in providing incremental steps in leadership and responsibility for the employees in the organization working on accelerating their career development. Although the mentoring opportunities are phenomenal, the struggle to gain design ownership and a feeling of key technical decision making is limited. Employee morale, organization climate, weak middle management, politics, organization complexity, and a feeling of too many executive leaders are additional negatives impacting the progress of this organization.