Extremely limited mobility and salary potential... - Level II Support IBM Employee Review

3.0
18 Nov 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There are a lot of nice people to work with and opportunities to learn and take leadership/responsibility. Relatively good job security unless you are in the hardware / storage side of the business..

Cons

Even with multiple years in a row of '1' PBC performances, salary raises are incredibly limited. Typically 1-2% a year would be 'great' year. This is coming from someone who put in 50-60 hours a week. Teams and entire groups make it extremely difficult to move laterally within the company because they have such a hard time back filling positions (getting open reqs). Get used to having a used (old) laptop and then having to hold on to it for 4 years before an upgrade. Basically "BYOD" is mandatory if you care about your equipment. The security / process is ridiculous.. easily spend 20% of your time just doing that stuff. There are too many people who were acquired and have great salaries.. there is just no incentive for them to work hard. For example, in the same job role, there could be one guy making $150k, and another making $75k for the same job. The guy at $150k has no incentive to work hard because they are capped at their band level and are unlikely to make more money. The other guy at $75k also has no incentive to work hard because even if they are an all-star, they will get maybe a 1% raise if they are lucky. I can't even count the number of people that work remote that just stay in "meeting mode" all day. You know perfectly well they are just making themselves look busy.. ridiculous. Get them back into the office and productivity would likely crease 2x.

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12 Nov 2025
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CEO approval
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Pros

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Cons

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4.0
26 Aug 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Disclaimer: A lot of what I'm writing below of course depends on the work area and management chain. But I found this to be fairly pervasive policies in IBM in my 9+ years with the company. 1. IBM's policies and management are very flexible when it comes to working remotely or accommodating various life situations (sick days, doctor visits, etc.). Management is encouraged to measure an employee by their work and impact, and not by hours spent at their office. 2. Great colleagues! Though unfortunately, many have been leaving due to the instability of IBM's HW development business. 3. At least in my area, there's a high level of flexibility on which projects should I undertake based on my and my management assessment of business impact.

Cons

1. Unfortunately, IBM still uses the "normal distribution" rating system, where at the end of the year each employee is ranked as a top contributor (5%), above average contributor (15%), average contributor (~75%), and bottom contributor (5%). This curve is difficult to apply in the R&D world, where you may have many members of the team working long and hard hours, and end up being "average contributors" at the end of the year, because there just isn't room for all to be top contributors. 2. The above may not be so disturbing, if only IBM didn't practically cancelled all raises, performance bonuses and incentive for the non top-performers. I've had a consistent "above average" rating in the last 4-5 years, and my raise and performance bonus were ridiculous mere 1.5-2% of my salary. Were I rated "average contributor" I would have gotten NOTHING. So you can imagine that people can go year after year without any raise to their salary. From talking to manager friend, this is IBM's way to eliminate the non-top-performers without having to fire them, as part of its direction of reducing US manpower. 3. Hiring freeze in many areas - again, as part of IBM's attempt to reduce its workforce across North America and Europe we see many jobs move to the India and Far East markets. This is of course upsetting to see local teams shrink and disappear, especially when many great local IBM colleagues and experts begin to drop out. From my experience thus far working with India SW teams - they are still very far away from the standards I would have expected from US and Europe based teams. 4. Poor top down communication about company's and divisions' future. Employees learn from rumors and news websites what's about to come...

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IBM Response
10y
Thanks for sharing your experience, and we're glad that you've had a positive experience working with talented colleagues and taking advantage of IBM's programs. IBM is in the midst of a major transformation, --our Systems business is going through its own changes to strengthen competitiveness. Change is never easy. As part of our transformation, we just launched a whole new approach for how we are coaching employees, delivering feedback and managing reviews. No distribution guidelines or what some think of as 'stacked rankings." What's particularly great is that this was co-designed with our employee base from all over the world... to the tune of hundreds of thousands of page views, comments, on-line debates and discussions. IBMers even named the new system Checkpoint, to reflect the regular feedback rituals we're adopting. Managers are more empowered with the new methodology to help them acknowledge the great work of their teams and help their employees develop professionally. These steps and more are showing up in our employee surveys as well. So IBMers are feeling the change. We are confident these changes will help us in continuing to attract and retain great talent.
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