IBM reviews

3.9

78% would recommend to a friend

(107,357 total reviews)
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Arvind Krishna

77% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

IBM has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 107,357 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The IBM employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

107K reviews
3.0
Oct 20, 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Benefits are some of the best in the industry, IBM brand still looks good on a resume. Great place to gain experience. If you are a high performer and show it you can possibly be recognized for it with financial incentives but this also depends on how well you play into the politics more than anyone likes to admit. Lots of opportunities to build your skill-set, if you prove that you can get things done early on you will get the interesting high skill work as it comes in.

Cons

In these new "delivery centers" micromanagement is the encouraged norm not the exception. Be prepared to be forced to sit though lots of useless "GDF education" seminars which rehash the same information over and over about how you should be working (and then management will want you to do it a different way anyway after the seminars.) Also once a year all employees have to use a time tracking tool for about a month, where everything that is done has to be logged and analyzed to decide if the work can be done efficiently by less people or not. This is an extreme cost cutting environment, instead of having a real catering service they contract that to a local gas station. Things in the building that break will not be fixed for months in the future, if they even are at all. Overtime hours getting revoked is the norm, some teams inside the building have lost entire clients due to the overtime crunches but management doesn't care. With this new "GDF methodology" the hiring of inexperienced people is also the norm. Plenty of people in low level system administration positions have never even logged into a server before. Salaries are also below market rate. The focus on team metrics is also a little extreme, too often it gets to the point where more time is spent trying to game the metrics system rather then trying to improve the real processes. People see the writing on the wall and know that in a few years most of the jobs will be done from India.

1.0
Oct 16, 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

-Overworking means that you're able to learn a lot of new things: I'd think 1 year at IBM is equivalent to ~2 years at another company: experience-wise -Exposure to Customers and designing customer solutions -Flex time, Can work any time you want.

Cons

-Complete Lack of Respect for Employees by Management, No loyalty to employees -Unrealistic exceptions for EPS/Profit that when failed to meet, is then used as excuse to mistreat employees. -Long work hours for no benefit. -Unedible cafeteria food. -Less Pay: I actually didn't feel like I 'wanted' more money, but the job I took after IBM paid >30% more than IBM. -Currently very low morale: In the last 3 years or so all the 'water cooler' talk and been negative and depressing. -Lack of long term friendships: Because of all the turnover and layoffs and moving around people, 100% of my friends had since come and gone. -Embarrassing to say work at IBM. Because of all the Cons, it got to a point where it was embarrassing to say I worked for IBM when speaking with neighbors.

1.0
Sep 19, 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great work from home and ability to move around.

Cons

Terrible moral, working employees to death to meet their Roadkill 2015 target. The truth is they will meet it by selling off all the properties they aquired when times where good how ever in the process their SW/HW and Services group will crumble due to the lack of people, over worked and under paid. Clients are jumping ship and it can be seen as their revenue remains flat how ever profit is booming. That means SQUEEEEEZE. Enjoy IBM while you can, work it, get experience then jump ship ad go some where that will respect and pay you accordingly.

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