I"ve been working in IBM for 20+ years. Smoke and Mirrors is the name of the game. Processes are burdensome, and the bureacracy is heavy. It takes forever and a day to get anything done. It is only thru the tenacity of the highly intelligent and skilled staff that anything gets done at all. All the comments in the article are true. Pay is low, morale is low. Wall street keeps hearing how wonderful profits are, but IBM scrimps and saves on EVERYTHING! Work at home employees can't even get re-imbursement for batteries that are used in the company supplied pagers. Of course, the fat cats in the C Suite are never held to the same cost cutting measures. They continue to get huge raises, while the work-horses of the company get NOTHING year after year. The glue that is holding this company together are the skilled employee base. With global outsourcing to any part of the globe, this will change. I pity IBM once that happens because once the folks that actually get things done are gone, (in spite of the burdensome processes) IBM will be transformed into a company where workers do only what they are told, or what they read in a LEAN manual, and nothing else. Intelligent thinking outside the box will be successfully killed by IBM. The customers will be the ones to suffer, but eventually ,they'll leave too and find a better company to work with. The real question is how long will that take to happen.
"if a worker received the top score last year, he was unlikely to get it again the year after no matter how hard he worked."
I'm sorry, but this is completely false. I've been with IBM for almost four years now, and have received a top rating for the past two years.
Sounds like your manager is making up excuses...
I was a manager with IBM for several years but left earlier this year after becoming disillusioned about how IBM treated its ‘loyal hard working talented’ employees.
I had a team of 10 people reporting to me. I made ‘target’ five years in a row. To say thanks, at the end of 2007 IBM announced they were going to reduce my teams take home pay by in some cases $20 thousand dollars a year.
Of course they didn’t say it like that. It was announced as a ‘restructure of their package’ and presented in a way (as someone else in this thread has said) showing a quite attractive ‘total market value’ for the packages. However to earn it you had to achieve 100% of every possible bonus one could ever get. Bonus targets over which you had no personal control, based on ‘pools and metrics’ no one in IBM seemed willing or able to explain how to achieve!
To demonstrate how misleading this was, some packages offered were show to have a bonus element of almost $30,000 which meant each quarter that person would have to earn around $8,000 in bonus to hit the ‘salary package’ IBM claimed it was paying them. At the end of the first quarter my team got less that $2000 each, predicting a bonus for the year of under $8000, a lot less than the $30,000 counted in the ‘package’.
This points back to the beginning of this piece where I said the actual effect of the ‘new salary packages’ was a reduction in take home pay for some people of $20,000 a year.
I left ‘in protest’ earlier this year, and of the team I led only 3 still work there. Several have gone to IBM competitors, who pay much more than IBM these days, and indeed have done for some time.
I worked for IBM for 2 years after my copany was outsourced. The culture shock was the biggest thing for me. Layers of bureaucracy are ridiculous, but there again, what large company isn't like this? Nonetheless I was grossly underpaid, and heavily overworked. I was in an operational support role, supporting one of the bigger local clients. As noted in this post, support given was the bare minimum - anything extra was denied so we could charge extra $$$. Big business, the way of the future, whatever - I couldn't get out of there fast enough - I obtained a 6 figure salary immediately upon leaving. I'm sure having IBM on resume helped, however what gets me is that I would have stayed, and for less than what I make now, all I wanted was a little something extra - and my performance I believe was exemplary that year. I almost single handedly undertook a very large datacentre move and the migration of a customer website and backends - my bonus that year? After working 55+ hours for 3 months? $1200, no base rate increase - yeah, right, thank you very much. Here's my resignation, go to hell.
This aside, the people I worked with at IBM were very good, and the office culture was fairly lively which I think is important - but for the love of god, look after your good people - they will leave if you don't. I encouraged one such staff member to get his resume out there and get the hell out. This guy had undertaken a 6year engineering degree - hardcore stuff - could code a TCP/IP stack, and had been previously employed by a small software company that paid him very well. He joined IBM for the prestige - he left 12 months later. Don't blame him, we had the poor guy doing reports and updating spreadsheets - complete waste of talent, and they let him walk. He didn't even want more money, he was just after something technical and challenging.
Anyway, enough griping, I got what I needed from IBM so no complaints, it's just a shame is all.
FYI - training aint bad, generally if you ask, you will get.
It is completely true that there are staff within the various areas of IBM who are fortunate enought to have a strong manager who is willing to treat them fairly and equally, and rate them as they deserve. This is, however, the exception, and not the rule.
In 7 years with big blue, I saw this only once, and that manager was relieved of his responsibilities and moved sideways. Having had the bucket, bell curve, and quota talk directly from a second line management several times, I would not dismiss anyones negative experiences.
Training is NOT a universal constant - cost factors play a huge part, and if you are unlucky enough to be outside of Melbourne or Sydney, then invariably your training is impossible, as travel is not an option. Training is often used as a reward option where ratings quotas restrict appropriate bonuses and increments, and if you work in a services area, there are none of the bonuses that the sales areas are subjected to.
Sage words of advice given to me were to negotiate as hard as you can when you join Big Blue, because it will be a long time before your salary makes any head way.
IBM may win EEO awards, but there are far more negative experiences with gender bias than positive ones.
There are too many excuses made on the part of some lines of management - you can't work staff 70+ hours a week in stressful environments, and expect top results and ongoing loyalty from them.
There is a massive discrepancy in wages for staff at apparently the same level/role. Add to this threats of punitive action for discussing your results and your salary, little or no opportunity for genuine engagement of staff and management to resolve morale issues, and it is no wonder that there are unhappy staff.
More power to the BH staff who are standing up for themselves - it is certainly a very brave move, and I hope that they fully appreciate the potential cost of this move.
Things will never change as long as the culture of fear and intimidation reigns.
Take over companies/data centres either by force or in outsourcing agreements. Tell all sorts of lies to keep staff happy. Keep wages low by quoting 'market figures' and IBM banding policy. Change policies to suit, keep staff scared of the big 'offshoring beast', cut staff to a level of approx 30% less that actually required and work your staff ragged. The IBM bubble is about to burst - stand back, it will be ugly !
Australia was meant to be the "Sales" branch promoting the Blue solutions at the Data Centres, instead of the Green space that had been conquered over ten years. Those of us who had Multi-Vendor expertise were forced to Sell "Blue" or leave. Ignorant and young Line Managers were hired to get rid of experienced professionals without retrenchment packages.
I hope the Line Management will be held accountable for their actions one day! Clients valued IBM only for the "quality" of service; not for low cost , inexperienced labour as portrayed by Line Managers. As expected the results showed up in less than six months of professionals leaving the company. Clients with multi-billion $ contract will get their money back!
You are spot on mate! Anybody who dared to be honest and sincere was considered an enemy.
I chose to resign rather than serve the Mafia.
Young thugs were hired to be Line Managers; they had no education or understanding of technologies. PBC ratings were just a big joke!
Spies got a rating of "1". Diligent, Hard workers who served the client contracts got "2" or "3" dependent on their salary Band.
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I have been with the company for 15 years and find that every year morale decreases throughout the company as there is constant fear of losing our jobs.
Every quarter there are emails on how well the company is doing although from our immediate managers we are scared off by being told to cut back on expenses as much as possible and that the business is not doing well. Will this comes fear of losing our jobs.
For gods sake they took away foam cups because of expense issues.
For the past 5 years we are finding it hard to receive a pay rise and are always told there is not enough money in the bucket.
Outside of IBM doing the same job there is better pay and less stress. IBM has its good points although as mentioned myself and my coleauges are fearful of being made redundant.
In our opinion IBM is doing everything to outsource and save where possible but this is creating highly dissatisfied clients and IBM throws a smoke screen to cover themselves up.
Definately not a company to work for to go home at the end of the day with peace of mind.