IBM Rochester reviews

The last 5-6 years pay increases for experienced, high-performing, staff engineers have not kept up with the dollar increases in the cost of health insurance premiums IBM has passed on to employees. IBM used to be known as a family-friendly company by providing good benefit coverages for families of employees. In the last decade, IBM has shifted the burden of providing insurance benefits for employees' spouses and dependents to the employees without increasing the pay to compensate for the added costs. Compensation and benefit plans are geared toward bringing in young, single, employees at competitive starting salaries who generally only last a few years, while ignoring the dependable, experienced, knowledgeable employees who become stuck in the position of perpetually training the new kids who either wash out or are put on the fast-track ahead of the gray-hairs. The employees who are the backbone of IBM are unappreciated, but often have no choice about leaving because they do not want to uproot their families.

Upper management is only running the company to maximize their own personal compensation. Maximum greed. Quarterly fudging of "whatever it takes" to make quarterly numbers is so management can maximize their own stock options to further maximize their compensation. Upper management does not otherwise care about the shareholders. By the time long term shareholders end up getting bitten by all this, upper management will be long gone with fat bank accounts. As for the employees, several years ago the executives decided they are all overhead costs which need to be minimized by any and all means possible. The recent Business Week article about IBM employees being reduced to nothing more than numbers shows exactly what IBM is all about. Young fresh talent out of college is cheap as are foreign emerging nations talent. At present rate, won't be long when all employees except for the executives will be at overseas facilities and/or the company will have already passed on into history. Treatment of US employees a few years or more in the business reminds one of the working conditions akin to slave labor.