IBM

IBM, unsurprisingly, has a lot of moving parts. It's not hard to find projects to work on here, and they are good about moving groups (well software groups anyways) from project to project.

There are a number of okay-ish tools to facilitate communication and collaboration.

There are some movements (albeit haphazardly) to adopt a more modern software development pipeline.

If you like to coast and just cash a paycheck without really doing much work, you will excel here.

If you dig around a bit, you will find some really smart people here.

It's not unusual to find individuals that have worked here for multiple decades.

• Red tape. This is one step bureaucratically removed from working for the government.
• Erratic high-level management decisions. The work-from-home culture has effectively been killed company-wide here.
• Technical skill and innovation are frowned upon. A problem-solving individual will quickly find themselves frustrated.
• Very management-heavy. I have been on many "scrum" teams where there were more managers in a room than developers. You can imagine how efficiently that works.
• Projects are invariably short-sighted. Long, or even medium-term, solutions are frowned upon and dangerous for your career here.
• Promotions and even simple cost-of-living adjustments are doled out based on who the manager is buddies with, as opposed to who shows leadership and completes the vast majority of the work.
• Don't really expect any career advancement here, or even the smallest cost-of-living adjustments. Typical raises are 0% a year. Seriously.
• It's not unusual to find individuals who have worked here for multiple decades.

To the top-level management:

Work on maintaining a consistent culture. Major cultural shakeups are making your best and most talented individuals leave the company. Focus less on catching up and following what existing companies are doing, and take some risks and LEAD again.

To the mid-level management:

Honestly, there are far too many of you. Managers should never outnumber developers in development meetings. It's like they don't even know where to be or what to do, there are so many of them.

Also, recognize your true top contributors. These are the people trying to make you look good, and are almost always NOT the "yes-people" you seem to favor so often.

And overall:

I understand that the company is in dire straits and doesn't want to have any sort of raises year-after-year, but you can get creative with ways to retain employees. Extra days off, stock options, etc. SHOW that you appreciate the hard work.