IBM reviews

The constant layoffs (at least one or 2 RAs per year involving 3K to 5K US employees, each time, for 5 years now), and the various incentive programs to increase attrition make IBM an extremely dismal and demoralizing place to work. IBM has more recently stooped to increasing the quota percentage of negative appraisals across target organizations. These "3" appraisals identifying "lowest contributors" are a way of avoiding costly layoffs for which IBM annually takes a $1 billion restructuring charge. So, by falsely and unfairly identifying hard-working employees as "3" performers, IBM is able to force these people out without severance packages. These appraisals are not fair, and long-time, hard-working IBMers are being cheated out of their severance as those targeted for the "3" appraisal generally have enough years to collect the maximum 6 months severance through an RA.

IBM's obsession with pleasing the Wall Street brings about a short sighted view to its research policy and hence impacts its Research negatively. All parts of IBM unfortunately scramble to meet short term financial objectives and Research is very often called for help, which takes researchers away from their primary roles of inventing and innovating game changing technologies and methods. By definition, research means investing time and money in high risk high reward problems. For instance, Watson was developed over quite a few years with dozens of people involved. That is what it takes to create serious technologies. Watson team had the few lucky researchers. Unfortunately, many researchers find themselves in a situation where they are asked to help the other parts of IBM improve their bottom line. Since other parts of IBM provide research its funding, they have a lot of influence on defining research projects and therefore how researchers spend their time. Since they are hard pressed to meet their financial objectives, they tend to define projects that help their short term financial goals. Such projects are almost always less innovative and tend to have marginal value for the company. IBM researchers are very capable people. IBM hires the very best to its Research. However, under so much pressure to help IBM's bottom line and do it fast, it is hard for researchers to come up with earth shaking innovations, though they would be perfectly capable to do so if they were given some breathing room. There are still quite a few researchers who still get to work on really promising things but their numbers are quite small.