IBM Senior Software Engineer reviews

3.9

81% would recommend to a friend

(2,153 total reviews)
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Arvind Krishna

74% approve of CEO

77% positive business outlook

Software Engineer/Senior Software Engineer employees have rated IBM with 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 2,153 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Engineer/Senior Software Engineer professionals have a good working experience there. IBM is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Engineer/Senior Software Engineer professionals compared to other employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
3.0
Aug 27, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good working environment. Flexible timings. Nice process outlined to manage your career within the organisation. Trainings.

Cons

The 'worst' in terms of compensation compared to other organisations. Our effort is directly linked to billing, meaning if you did a good job in your project and your utilisation is not up to the mark, then your effort is, simply put...ignored. Too much of policy dose from the managers. Bragging about the past achievements and their brand image. Employee referral is a complete catastrophe, no one ever has been placed in IBM referred by an employee..except may be by some managers. Everybody knows that HR and some consultancies have some 'illegitimate tie ups' and the only promote candidates from them. IBM is not transparent on this except for sending out repeated emails to its employees to refer candidates. The following comments are specfically to managers/Sr consultants in IBM Hyderabad - Managers in Hyd do not possess the capability to win over a customer, they cannot manage the careers of their employees, unprofessional attitude, hypocrites, encourage boot lickers, show bossism..and living examples I heard about are ....well..most of the managers :)

2.0
Jun 29, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Good balance between work and life. - Pursuit of knowledge is encouraged and facilitated by the many classes and other opportunites offered - Benefits are exceptional

Cons

- Difficult to push for new ideas - Seniority over meritocracy. Promotions general are done based on number of years rather than competence level - Silos: Each team is isolated from the other teams. There is a significant amount of either duplication of effort or product cannibalism due to this lack of collaboration

2.0
Jun 6, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There are some good projects to work on at IBM, you just have to find them. Pay is not great for the vast majority, but if you have a smart manager, you can be very happy. It is all about finding a good manager, but those guys are difficult to find, and therein lies the problem. IBM has a number of very smart people, understandably so, since there are so many areas of software they have pioneered in the past. It has a very rich legacy.

Cons

Good jobs or projects are getting rarer and rarer at IBM and towards the end of my time at the place, I couldn't find any. If your immediate manager is good and your relationship with him/her is good, it can be a good place to work for. Otherwise, it is a constant nightmare. There is a rule, or so I have been led to believe, by a number of managers, that a first line manager should not be technical, that all technical work should be "measurable". The problem with this is that a manager's review of an engineer's work can be wildly off base. It leads to situations where the engineer is forced to spend time on issues that really are trivial but look very attractive to management. It also forces the manager to rely on already debunked methods such as KLOC (1000s of lines of code written) or number of defects fixed to do performance evaluations. There is very little focus on quality and a lot of focus on release times. Anything that can be expressed as a number gets measured, and if can be measured, it gets managed to death. This has been my own experience. I'm sure IBM has employees who are very productive and happy, in a company of 350k+ employees, there are bound to be very diverse experiences, but in my six years with the company, I did not meet a single engineer who was consistently happy with IBM.

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