IBM

I love developing. I love my job.

Flexible hours. Comparable pay.

Work with some of the most dedicated, intelligent technical workers in the industry, with decades of experience all around you. Work with people around the world with different cultures...exciting!

10 years ago, I would have put 5 stars and had lots to say. 5 years ago, it would have been 4 stars and still quite a bit to say.

When I was young, I wanted to be an IBMer. My parents knew people who were IBMers. IBM had a reputation for taking care of its own, and that's where I wanted to be.

That IBM is gone. There is no loyalty to employees. I've been through 8 resource actions in the last 10 years. Some were small; some were very large.

When I started, I knew I would retire here. Now, I don't even know if I'll have a job next month. It is so distracting and stressful. The state of the company is reflected in every aspect of our life, all the way to the inability to get pens! I have to buy my own because they are no longer supplied.

Working with too many people around the world! Four different major time zones in one product. Four different cultures. Much is lost in the translation, resulting in undesirable results. Quality suffers as a result. It's not an issue of whether employees from other countries are intelligent enough to do the work; it's a problem with too much diversity, too much distance, and not enough of the right tools to bridge the gaps. Web and phone meetings only get you so far.

IBM doesn't know what it wants to be. IBM drove the market in the past and successfully developed its own products. The IBM of today outsources and scatters its work in too many different places. Managers do not even know what direction we should be going.

No real benefits to being an IBMer today. IBM used to have the best benefits, IBM functions that made their employees feel special, and, if nothing else, you knew you had a job for life. None of that exists today. If you want that type of treatment, you have to go somewhere else like Google: catered lunches, carnivals, free tickets to whatever, large bonuses, etc. Even the 401k match is lacking compared to other companies.

We used to have a lot of opportunities to move into other areas. Now the teams are squeezed so hard that everyone is paralyzed with work. Managers cannot let you go because they need you, and there are no jobs anyway because of all the cuts.

1. IBM needs to decide what kind of business it wants to be, announce it, and get to it. Pull the band-aid off fast, not slowly.

2. Restore employee confidence by doing the above and stabilizing as fast as you can.

3. Do it now, even if it costs you money.

4. Stop the attrition! Show your employees they have a job for life. If you do nothing else, do this!

5. Come up with reasonable benefits that make your employees feel special.

6. I understand the reason for a global business solution, but use it wisely. Stop splitting up the teams into too many remote chunks. Two time zones max, splitting up projects in a more reasonable way (i.e., dev in one location and test in another).

7. If you are going to support global teams, then you must allow travel to allow team building and face-to-face task discussions and training. Anyone that says you can do this over web and phone with the same results is a fool. I can tell you as an online gamer that you can "know" someone for years over the internet, then meet them and be totally wrong on everything about them. I've worked with many countries and am continuously surprised by how much I learned about someone I've worked with for years the first time I meet them.

8. Buy me some pens, darn it! Some paper would help as well.