Sad - Senior Technical Resource IBM Employee Review

2.0
Sep 13, 2011
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Some opportunity to move around and gain experience in other areas, Good training opportunities. Some good people to work with

Cons

Where do I begin, I have 10 reports, in the last 4 years each has had one wage rise of less than 1 percent, some more junior staff are struggling financially. Staff ratings are frankly inequitable and driven by quotas, and microscopic budgets. While IBM has great diversity & equality guidelines, in practice they are utterly ignored and people spend considerable effort finding creative ways to bypass them. People who work to bypass IBM's gargantuan, unwieldy bureaucracy, to aid the client are p15sed on. We had some guys that reduced the time to completion for projects from 6 months to 2 weeks. The customer was deliriously happy. The guys that did this, put in 100 hours a week for 6 months, were rewarded with a cinema ticket. No wage rise and a poor PBC rating (personnel rating). People who are good at their jobs are surreptitiously blocked from moving accounts. There is a list of staff that are considered essential to the account. No-one will admit to the existence of this list. If someone from this list attempts to move from the account, the manager trying to get the resource , is told, you don't want them, he, she is a trouble maker. This extends to people who apply for work with a customer. This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of sleaze. Up until an account is signed nothing is too good for the customer, however once they are on board, resources are bled from the account till its barely operational, this continues until the customer complains, or its time to renew the account, when the circus begins again. There is zero budget for tools. Any automation is cobbled together by a variety of scripts, that are unsupportable. Collaboration tools are a spreadsheet and a mail folder. Hideous.

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4.0
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CEO approval
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Pros

Disclaimer: A lot of what I'm writing below of course depends on the work area and management chain. But I found this to be fairly pervasive policies in IBM in my 9+ years with the company. 1. IBM's policies and management are very flexible when it comes to working remotely or accommodating various life situations (sick days, doctor visits, etc.). Management is encouraged to measure an employee by their work and impact, and not by hours spent at their office. 2. Great colleagues! Though unfortunately, many have been leaving due to the instability of IBM's HW development business. 3. At least in my area, there's a high level of flexibility on which projects should I undertake based on my and my management assessment of business impact.

Cons

1. Unfortunately, IBM still uses the "normal distribution" rating system, where at the end of the year each employee is ranked as a top contributor (5%), above average contributor (15%), average contributor (~75%), and bottom contributor (5%). This curve is difficult to apply in the R&D world, where you may have many members of the team working long and hard hours, and end up being "average contributors" at the end of the year, because there just isn't room for all to be top contributors. 2. The above may not be so disturbing, if only IBM didn't practically cancelled all raises, performance bonuses and incentive for the non top-performers. I've had a consistent "above average" rating in the last 4-5 years, and my raise and performance bonus were ridiculous mere 1.5-2% of my salary. Were I rated "average contributor" I would have gotten NOTHING. So you can imagine that people can go year after year without any raise to their salary. From talking to manager friend, this is IBM's way to eliminate the non-top-performers without having to fire them, as part of its direction of reducing US manpower. 3. Hiring freeze in many areas - again, as part of IBM's attempt to reduce its workforce across North America and Europe we see many jobs move to the India and Far East markets. This is of course upsetting to see local teams shrink and disappear, especially when many great local IBM colleagues and experts begin to drop out. From my experience thus far working with India SW teams - they are still very far away from the standards I would have expected from US and Europe based teams. 4. Poor top down communication about company's and divisions' future. Employees learn from rumors and news websites what's about to come...

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IBM Response
10y
Thanks for sharing your experience, and we're glad that you've had a positive experience working with talented colleagues and taking advantage of IBM's programs. IBM is in the midst of a major transformation, --our Systems business is going through its own changes to strengthen competitiveness. Change is never easy. As part of our transformation, we just launched a whole new approach for how we are coaching employees, delivering feedback and managing reviews. No distribution guidelines or what some think of as 'stacked rankings." What's particularly great is that this was co-designed with our employee base from all over the world... to the tune of hundreds of thousands of page views, comments, on-line debates and discussions. IBMers even named the new system Checkpoint, to reflect the regular feedback rituals we're adopting. Managers are more empowered with the new methodology to help them acknowledge the great work of their teams and help their employees develop professionally. These steps and more are showing up in our employee surveys as well. So IBMers are feeling the change. We are confident these changes will help us in continuing to attract and retain great talent.
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