IBM reviews

It seems more and more evident that everything at IBM comes down to "the bottom line" (money/revenue). Earnings per share (and the resulting Executive compensation) seems to have become more important to the corporation than their employees. The company cuts back costs (staff, equipment, contract services) at the expense of the workers. Meaning we are expected to "do more with less." This mentality seemed reasonable at first, but it has perpetuated into a vicious cycle where we expect more and more (and more!) out of our people. Many/Most people are overworked, and work-life balance seems to be a distant memory. While the culture has traditionally supported employee career development, in harder economic times managers can be reluctant to let their good employees pursue opportunities, for fear of losing the head count - Finance will see it as a chance to save money (and not allow you to backfill the position)... So if somebody leaves your group, more likely than not, one of the existing team members will just have to absorb the additional work... again adding to the overworked staff. There are MANY corporate practices/processes that have been put in place over many years. Most (not all) of these processes were meant to make sure that the teams delivered a high quality product that met certain industry standards/regulations. Though we cut back on staff, and we have to do more with less, we never seem to cut back on process. This is a double-edges sword... Cutting back on some of these practices/process may cause us to deliver a poorer quality product, or to not meet certain standards/regulations... But not cutting back on process means that more and more of our time is spent navigating process. Spending time on this, and trying to get your "real work" done adds to the problem of an overworked staff. While there is a system in place to compensate based on merit, over the years the differentiation between the best employees and the average employees has become laughable (corporate funding for these programs seem lower than expected, especially considering reported company earnings). The minuscule difference between compensation for the best and the average employees have made many people question the point of working so hard (If you can put in less effort and get compensated the same, why kill yourself working 60 hour weeks???). Finance seems to be making many decisions which they are not qualified to make. All they care about revenue versus expense. They have been given power to dictate our expenses, though they do not understand the impact of cutting certain expenses. Penny pinching today may cause you revenue for the next few years if we don't have enough resources to put out a product.

This is one place where one person holds their career in your hands. If the manager does not like you, your career is pretty much over. There is a constant fear of being RA'd (IBM's term for laid off). The relative contribution metric pretty much assures that you will in fact not share your accomplishments with the team. Instead of making the slice of cheese larger, an increasing amount of people compete for a smaller slice of cheese while the executive ranks get the big bonuses.