I know every IBM group is different, so chime in from your angle.
25 replies (most recent on top)
From the posts on this board it sounds like IBM functions just like Congress.
Maybe its time to RIF the top.
There are 8 layers of management between me and the CEO. Been there long enough to experience many exercises of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic by those middle layers. I've helped build some projects from the ground up, gained unique expertise in the process only to have a reorg place me on another project where I can't use that expertise (and someone else taking over my work who I'm sure has expertise in other areas).
Agree with most of the other comments. Sick, toxic - that sum up the current situation I see day to day.
It wasn't always that way. Way back, we had a nice 80/20 allocation of local onshore to offshore staffing. The managers were great. People liked each other and I would look forward to coming to work and learning new things.
Fast forward to now. We're 10/90 in terms of local to offshore resources. All the managers and most staff that I enjoyed working with before are long gone, by their choice or IBM's. It's become a horrible, depressing cesspool of back-stabbing, chaos and instability. That's the most positive spin I can give to it.
"You must choose 4 of your colleagues and ask them to write a review of your performance in your job. You will not be allowed to see what they have written. If you are asked to write a review of one of your colleagues you must not discuss it with anyone other than a manager. These reviews will be used in your annual performance rating to decide whether you will get a pay rise this year."
@ZtEkwIm-3plf "manager to employee ratio is 4:1"
As someone who recently joined, it really is hard to fathom. Best analogy is one of those road construction crews where there always seems to be 1 guy working and 8 guys watching. Doesn't matter the position or the organization - services, software, hardware, and engineering, sales, or delivery, there are always multiple managers for every individual contributor. And it continues up the chain - multiple executives for every manager. Everyone who comes in from the outside takes one look around and says "this is insane, how is this possible?"
Two things: first, IBM is and has been the most over-managed company on the planet. Lou Gerstner was my 8th line manager when he came on board and he vowed to "flatten" IBM's organizational structure. Ten years on he was my 9th line manager. Nothing could get done without oodles of conference calls, paperwork etc., etc., etc. And I the ratio of actual working employees (folks that sold/designed/made our stuff) to the folks that "managed" the "process" became an insufferable, stifling atmosphere. In sales (my area of the business) we worried far less about competition than we did from overcoming the huge drag of what was commonly known at the Big Grey Cloud (BGC) that s---ed the air from any kind of imaginative idea.
Second, IBM has arrived at the fresh Hell that's worse than just flat-out tanking...irrelevance to the market. This was blindingly obvious when we started seeing major companies (think Netflix) that were built from the ground up with zero (really, absolutely zero) IBM technology/services/hardware. It's a wonky comparison but IBM's trajectory has reminded me of the life cycle of stars like our sun. When it runs out of fission energy (the thing that powers a star for most of its lifetime) it expands rapidly and becomes a red giant. A large ball of warmed-over gas but not really a star any longer...after that it becomes a white dwarf; a small, dense remnant of its former self destined to do nothing but get cooler for another few billion years. IBM is a red giant right now. Too many people with not enough innovation or imagination to just keep things as a status quo.
Organizational culture is one of the hardest things to change. But when someone at the top consistently fails to move the needle one would think it would be time for fresh blood. But like Kudzu, the BGC just grows back faster than you can hack through it.
CogApps 'legacy product' here, we had a lot of our employees poached to work on watson apps, and we lost half our us based team last year. manager to employee ratio is 4:1, no managers were laid off. People are great, site is really nice, but management and faith in the company is gone. We're all hoping to be sold to HCL, I hear it's a big step up...
I came in with a big round of college hires, they're all gone, and I'm the only one left. I guess the pay is ok, can't really match against others because nobody will talk about salaries ;)
Good thread, useful
Morale is appalling and there is no sense of teamwork. Everybody is second-guessing managerial decisions while upper management wants us to drink the Kool-Aid.
In my organization the local culture is people joining together to try to survive. All workers and even managers are openly critical of upper management. These are smart people that know IBM executives are clueless and we are doomed. We have to joke because no one can take such fools seriously. We know we will be RA soon.
Software group here (yes, I know the name has changed but you get the idea). Just a continual soul-s---ing series of layoffs which can fall anytime, anyplace and affect anyone -- no matter if that person is a high performer or slacker. Executives have become the non-thinking, robotic yes-men parodied by Apple so many, many years ago.
Leaving after 35 years as part of divestiture. IBM has made this departure to my new employer so easy -- I can't imagine working in an organization with a worse culture. (P.S. It wasn't always this way.)
From Band 10 who helped keep this company alive and is watching its slow-motion demise.
Fear and intimidation culture describes GBS CAI to its very core. Everything requires an escalation instead of having processes work for the employee. General malaise abounds and makes it difficult to serve clients. I feel like I consistently carry the burden of unmotivated colleagues and I hit near mental breakdowns multiple times due to stress. But I can’t blame my colleagues - what does the company expect with years of no pay rises or bonuses?
But all that said, it was the extreme s-xism and favouritism I experienced from India resources, both remote and landed, that was the single biggest motivation in me resigning recently. Nobody wanted to listen to innovative new ideas, even from someone like me who came in quite senior and had a depth of experience with competitors. The near shore colleagues were great but we were pressured to use India even at the expense of training up junior staff.
Colleagues in GTS tell me it is worse.
I also know that Accenture and Deloitte are doing some pretty fishy tactics with older employees. This is rife for investigative journalism.
My Ranking: Educated id--ts doing the same things expecting different results.
Translation: Fuster-cluck.
For every 1 person doing actual productive work, there's probably another 100 that are plagiarizing, stealing, "reporting" and creating "dashboards" of others.
Global markets is toxic. Hard to sell out of date, legacy on prem software in a native cloud world...and our cloud is a joke (hint to offering management, stuffing on prem c-ap into a docket container doesn't make it a cloud solution!). But never mind the reality of the portfolio, the broken market focus, arbitrary firings, or constant territory changes...it must be the seller and tech sellers fault for not meeting absurd numbers.
But hey, having the entire NA team spend a half day watching vp's cheerlead the failed strategy and blow smoke about the state of the offerings will solve everything.
GBS SAP also
In my group there was lots of backstabbing and credit-stealing. I left on my own partly because of this.
Security services NA: Culture of fear and intimidation. Young kids leaving
It was toxic as can be when everyone was located inside an innovation center.
As soon as they assigned our teams to off site managers things improved 100%.
Promotion's happened immediately and work life balance did as well.
Way too much management levels. CogApps is the worst, they run their employees into the ground and don't produce anything. The management creates a very toxic atmosphere and morale is rock bottom
In my group there was lots of backstabbing and credit-stealing. I left on my own partly because of this.
But these people were otherwise fine people, so I theorize that much of the negative behavior at work was a result of the ranking system - it put people in competition with each other and they knew that in order to win, that someone (in their team) had to lose. It absolutely discouraged teamwork. By the time the ranking system was replaced the cultural damage was done. (And that assumes its replacement does not still encourage the same level of toxicity - I am not there anymore to find out if that is the case.)
Exactly the same as what has been said already. Very sad really.
All depends on what department you work in yeah. Mine is widely known as one of the worst, probably the very worse.
I'll probably get some downvotes for this but my dept. and coworkers have all been wonderful. The pay is great, the flexibility/work home benefits are unlike any company I've ever worked. The site is one of the nicest locations around... I'm just rare I suppose.
Toxic, fearful and depressing. This is a dying company where the people with the skills are being jettisoned and a whole army of has-been managers create Powerpoint charts and spreadsheets.
Sick, toxic, extremely high turnover approaching 100%. Dept is ran like a Banana Republic. My only hope is sliver of chance to transfer to new dept.