Little chance for pride in what I work on - Software Engineer bei IBM: Mitarbeiterbewertung

3.0
5. Jan. 2009
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CEO-Befürwortung
Geschäftsprognose

Pros

At least in my organization, there are few impediments to working from home, where I tend to get more work done during busy periods than I do at the office. (However, I'm discouraged from working at home more than twice a week. Managers have told me that, because of a lack of office space, there are people who patrol our work areas, on the watch for absences of over two days and supposedly eager to transfer unused spaces to other people.) Also, you can show your appreciation for people who have helped you out by giving them a Thanks! award. This award allows those people to choose a gift from an internal site. Although the items all have "IBM" sewn, etched, embossed, or whatnot on them, some of them are useful. Finally, my health insurance served me very well recently. My service provider paid out large claims promptly and never second-guessed the opinions of my doctors. I can't say more about that without the risk of identifying myself.

Kontras

We are given much direction about the sorts of goals that we should be seeking; however, we must meet those goals on top of completing grossly understaffed projects. For example, near the beginning of every year, we're told what our organization's strategy is going to be. Higher-ups give presentations that span the entire strategy, while senior staffers present on substrategies meant to ensure the success of the larger one. Every year, the strategies seem to encompass more than they did in the previous year. Yet, we have many fundamental problems in our processes that lead to poor quality in what we produce. The yearly blasts of strategy never address these problems, instead tending to aggravate them because they ensure that we will continue to look elsewhere for our self-respect and job satisfaction than in producing quality products and decreasing the aggravation that leads customers to call our support line. Moreover, the goal of our management team seems to be to push more features into our products more quickly, and not take time to address a growing accretion of defects, shortcomings, and other insufficencies.

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5.0
23. Apr. 2026
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CEO-Befürwortung
Geschäftsprognose

Pros

Incredible mentorship from experienced engineers and exposure to real-world production code. The team is very supportive and encourages questions.

Kontras

The onboarding process can be a bit overwhelming at first due to the complexity of the internal tools and systems.

4.0
26. Aug. 2014
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CEO-Befürwortung
Geschäftsprognose

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.

Kontras

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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Reaktion von IBM
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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