IBM reviews

3.9

78% would recommend to a friend

(107,103 total reviews)
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Arvind Krishna

76% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

IBM has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 107,103 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 29, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Name recognition on a resume. If you do join, don't stay long; a couple of years max, then move on to some other company with better prospects.

Cons

Incompetent upper management. Executives are more interested in driving the stock price up in the next quarter to line their pockets, than to plan for the company's long-term prospects. Most senior management is completely clueless on the technical front and rely on underpaid and overworked folks in the trenches to do all of the hard work. Powerpoint presentations are ubiquitous and long (100+ slides in a presentation are not unusual), and people spend months and months between pre-pre-reviews and pre-reviews before the final review.

1.0
Jul 10, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Best reasons to work for IBM? Wow, that's tough! When I started with IBM 10 years ago there were many good reasons to work for IBM. It was a company with a great history of respect for its employees and their customers. It was a company that paid well, treated people fairly and honestly, was respected by the industry, it's customers and it's employees. It offered people fair pay, good benefits, rewarding work environment and opportunities for career advancement. Today,all of those things are no longer true. In reality, in 2008, there is no good reason to work for IBM.

Cons

Today employment at IBM has nothing but negatives. The bureaucracy is far worse than ever. In order to accomplish anything at all, one must fill out an endless stream of web forms, request databases, spreadsheets, management approvals, etc. A simple change can take weeks to get all the "ducks" aligned. The chance for career advancement is almost nonexistent. The internal jobs website has been revamped to make it almost unusable. When applying for a job, the hiring manager doesn't even give the applicant the courtesy of a response. This has happened to me on many occasions. Most of the folks that I've talked to have said the same thing. Apparently it's now considered an acceptable practice to not even acknowledge receipt of an application. I guess that should be expected given the fact that employees are now referred to as "resources" and not people. If I had a dime for every time I heard a manager refer to employees as "resources" I could retire today. Employees are continuously bombarded with 'take aways' and benefit reductions. Pension freezes, pay cuts, band reductions, forced overtime for exempt employees, offshoring, employee layoffs and a blatant sense of dishonesty coming from upper management. These are all part of everyday life at IBM now.

1.0
Jun 12, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Well if you are in Global Services, and in the US. their is no good reason, all you are doing is dodging the big blue bullet if you still have your job. If you are outside of the US things are great for those people.

Cons

IBM as a whole is outsourcing and downsizing its US workforce. Each Day I see more and more of my colleagues lose their jobs. Its disgusting, most of the people posting good reviews on this board are kidding themselves. IBM is not the great company these folks say it is.

Viewing 163 - 165 of 107,103 Reviews

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