IBM reviews

3.9

78% would recommend to a friend

(107,297 total reviews)
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Arvind Krishna

77% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

IBM has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 107,297 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The IBM employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

107K reviews
2.0
Jul 11, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Scale of the company provides an ability to be at the forefront of services given the large number of industries and countries IBM is in. IBM India is also a woman-friendly organization. IBM India provides a fairly good work-life balance which allows enough time to pursue interests outside of work. There is a large amount of knowledge within the system which can be very good for people who are willing to invest time in mining the knowledge artifacts. The company also provides enough opportunity to work with a large number of customers some of them the best names in the industry which is an experience by itself.

Cons

IBM India has been growing at a very fast pace and now is a very large company with more than 70000 employees. This means you tend to feel like a cog in a giant machine and employees very rarely get to be truly transformational in nature. Compensation is also much lower than the market and the hikes are getting poorer with every passing year. In addition because of the size, it becomes difficult for employees to feel as if they are contributing really to any meaningful activity. Also, the overall quality of the resources seems to be declining with the size of the company.

2.0
Jul 10, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Salary is competitive and often exceeds other local employers. Time allowed for vacation and personal choice holidays is good (if you can actually afford to lose time from work to take it). If you do not abuse it, time away from your cube during the workday to take care of personal business is accepted without even a raised eyebrow. Project assignments can be interesting and challenging.

Cons

Zero investment in professional development. Unbelievably low investment in providing employees with the tools necessary to do their jobs. Physical work environment is substandard. Poor yearly bonus system. Ever-deteriorating product quality due to insanely short development cycles and offshoring to incompetent workers. Low performing employees are tolerated far too much and are often simply passed from one department to another - it's like a government job. Too many layers of management. The bureaucracy would make Kafka cry.

1.0
Jul 10, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Best reasons to work for IBM? Wow, that's tough! When I started with IBM 10 years ago there were many good reasons to work for IBM. It was a company with a great history of respect for its employees and their customers. It was a company that paid well, treated people fairly and honestly, was respected by the industry, it's customers and it's employees. It offered people fair pay, good benefits, rewarding work environment and opportunities for career advancement. Today,all of those things are no longer true. In reality, in 2008, there is no good reason to work for IBM.

Cons

Today employment at IBM has nothing but negatives. The bureaucracy is far worse than ever. In order to accomplish anything at all, one must fill out an endless stream of web forms, request databases, spreadsheets, management approvals, etc. A simple change can take weeks to get all the "ducks" aligned. The chance for career advancement is almost nonexistent. The internal jobs website has been revamped to make it almost unusable. When applying for a job, the hiring manager doesn't even give the applicant the courtesy of a response. This has happened to me on many occasions. Most of the folks that I've talked to have said the same thing. Apparently it's now considered an acceptable practice to not even acknowledge receipt of an application. I guess that should be expected given the fact that employees are now referred to as "resources" and not people. If I had a dime for every time I heard a manager refer to employees as "resources" I could retire today. Employees are continuously bombarded with 'take aways' and benefit reductions. Pension freezes, pay cuts, band reductions, forced overtime for exempt employees, offshoring, employee layoffs and a blatant sense of dishonesty coming from upper management. These are all part of everyday life at IBM now.

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