IBM reviews

3.9

78% would recommend to a friend

(107,087 total reviews)
avatar

Arvind Krishna

76% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

IBM has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 107,087 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
Aug 12, 2018

Bad Management. Stay Away.

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Brand Name (only thing left will help your career) Flexible work hours

Cons

Bad management for the entire branch. One obvious sign: the top management is filled with relatives and friends. Slow promotion. The center tries to put as much as possible requirements to block your promotion. For a small amount of salary raise with the base is already far below the average, they need you to provide an incredible amount of evidence that you deserve it. Yet, there are chances they say NO to it in the end. If it’s approved, you’ll have to wait a couple of months to get the actual result even sometimes the entire process just happen in the center which should just take days or weeks. But if you’re “ favored”, you’re very likely to get a fast promotion, skip bands and good pay with little work. No passion, no vision. The management level talks about the budget all the time instead of vision and projects. Your life will about the billed hours. Yet there are flexible working hours and work from home policy, you won’t benefit from them too much if you want to stay there for the long-term and be promoted. It has lots of small easy projects without any challenges. The big projects are very likely to collapse without real results. Lack of respect for the people who do real work. There are a few amounts of people who handle all the real problems of the projects. They’re overwhelmed and not respected. The managers say they appreciate your efforts but they are really not. Good people leave all the time and the management level don’t care. Poor work environment. Don’t even think about anything nice, there is no coffee machine and you can imagine the rest. Refuse to change. All the decisions are top-down (normal in a big company), and the top management has no intention to change with serious problems like people left and projects collapse. They don’t care about individual success at all. The management style feels like 30 years ago in a bad way. All these may sound very negative, but unfortunately, they’re all true. People leave as soon as they see these issues. Lots of people left after staying here less than one year. Stay away from it if you have other choices.

1.0
Jan 1, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You can do anything at IBM - lots of room to move laterally. You are given a lot of room to develop your skills and are mostly autonomous on your projects if you are a senior resource. IBM brand is tarnishing but still impressive in the industry. I loved working here and remember what it used to be.

Cons

One word - "co-location". The death sentence for IBM US marketing and all high performers -- co-location drove out the best performers into the arms of competitors (myself included). I still have contacts within IBM and am told executing any marketing tactic is virtually impossible. Too much IP went out the door w/the best employees and the new collar newbies lack knowledge of the market and products. All of my team left to go to competitors vs. co-locate to Austin, TX . We were a successful remote team who worked with WW resources so moving to 1 location to "be together" is frankly absurd.

1.0
Sep 12, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

IBM brand recognition. Some great colleagues but don't expect them to still be there after November 2017 when retention bonuses are paid.

Cons

This practice is failing. It failed in integrating the Meteorix acquisition by not providing the tools needed to succeed and then replacing the bonus with a small %'age of that amount as salary. The practice appears to be losing at least 1 experienced consultant per DAY and replaced by new consultants with 0 experience. This translates to the worker that stays there continually expected to do more while pay does not increase. This practice is led by SS who was the previous CEO for Meteorix. Meteorix was successful in spite of him because he had smart people around him that he was able to empower to make the practice successful. As part of IBM, he now has to stand in a boardroom and fight for his practice to get a piece of the pie against more experienced/groomed executives in other practices that are more politically savvy and he is failing miserably. His leadership team are all frustrated and handcuffed with no ability to improve the situation. It is astonishing and sad to see how quickly the great Meteorix practice has crumbled and fallen apart as a product of IBM's acquisition. The technology at IBM is lacking. It still uses Lotus Notes (IBM Notes) which is a great tool for administrators but lacking from an end user perspective (compared to Outlook). Other tools necessary for the job are rudimentary and may meet the needs of a large consultancy but does not work well with the Workday practice with a predominantly remote workforce. It has recently introduced Concur, Webex and Outlook but the execution is lacking (Outlook is just a front end replicating Notes) so you always feel like you're getting a knockoff version of what the real tool should do. The pay is not comparable to Workday eco-system standards. Base salary pay seems like it is 10 to 15% under what you would see at other Workday partner firm practices. Also, there is no bonus for utilization (this may be a "pro" for some) so your "total" pay will be 10 to 20% less than other Workday partner firms. While employed, I got more spam at my work email address (from internal IBM) than I do in my gmail box. There is so much junk email coming from executives about things that you will have no interest in and you wonder why the organization is paying executive salaries to a glorified blogger. There is no "unsubscribe" option for these. The intranet has a wealth of information but is set up like a flea market. You'll have to dig thru the content that is 10 to 20 years old to find the info you need, and hope that it is current. Everything goes to a call center which seem to be in the Philippines or India. They are generally helpful for simple troubleshooting but they read from a script only so if you have anything out of the ordinary, you will spend an exorbitant amount of time trying to get something resolved. I went from spending 5 to 10% of my time on "administrative" tasks while at Meteorix. With IBM, this was closer to 15 to 30% of my time. This is less relevant now since utilization bonuses have been taken away but you will still find yourself working more hours because of the lack of efficiency. Communication from leadership is non-existent. Townhalls are a lecture with no Q&A opportunity and there have been no comments/communications to dispel or confirm rumors that affect the practice (are remote workers required to come back to the office? rumors still exist that retention bonuses will not be paid in Nov 2017). What little communications that I did get were given at the last minute (we missed the cutoff for the salary remix so it will be in 7/31 payroll instead of 7/15). Meteorix was a crystal clear lake with open/consistent/clear communication from leadership. IBM's acquisition stirred up the sand and has made everything cloudy. The management team for this practice seem inept and incompetent.

Viewing 142 - 144 of 107,087 Reviews

Glassdoor has 131,465 IBM reviews submitted anonymously by IBM employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if IBM is right for you.