IBM Senior Software Engineer reviews

Senior executives are clueless idiots. They are so far removed from the technology and are totally preoccupied with hitting a specific EPS, that the bottom is falling out of this company. The hardware business is on the verge of total failure. The software business is based on buying smaller software companies, pushing the new product to existing IBM customers, then off-shoring development & support for the product. This is "pump and dump", but for software. IBM has done so poorly in Cloud services, that they had to abandon their current offering and spend a rumored $2 billion to buy another cloud provider. That provider (rightfully so) refuses to integrate solutions like IBM Power because they know what an unmanageable and uncompetitive disaster it is. The working environment is incredibly toxic. The threat of layoffs is constant. The vast majority of tech people in this company are embarrassed to work here. The ones with skills are leaving in large numbers, even if it means losing stock grants, 401k matches, and retirement benefits.

Upper management is solely focused on meeting an unrealistic stock target. Consequently, as soon as any revenue target is missed they resort to chopping senior engineers and their salary and bring in junior engineers. Unfortunately, since the senior people are gone it is difficult to train so many new people and work of the remaining senior people suffer because they have to pick up the slack as mentors or take on more duties. It is an unsustainable situation and I don't think they can make this work. Also, give the recognition to the people who have earned it not the ones who are the loudest.