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.
Kontras
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.
