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Working remotely is great, but it's the only motivation

Analytics Engineering
Current Employee
Has worked at IBM for 20 years
April 6, 2015
San Francisco, California
2.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

Remote work.

Customers continue (blindly) to purchase whatever IBM will sell them without question.

If these billion-dollar customers only knew what they were throwing their money at.

Cons

As most have already stated, the management chain at IBM is deplorable. From execs to senior to middle to junior management, without fail they have ALL been placed there as a result of their incompetency.

Execs are not technical and have no idea what IT does. Most are psychologists, HR types, or from Social systems. Problem employees that can't be dealt with legally are often promoted to some level of management and given new subordinates to manage. Problem junior/middle managers typically find a director or a VP to cling to and spend the rest of their lives kissing their butts to keep their jobs. They provide no leadership, no forward thinking, and certainly no one that can be approached for some meaningful insight. These are truly incompetent people, and the company is full of them - upwards of 45% of the world employee pool is management. Management does not and is not supposed to produce ANYTHING, except that phone call that you've been laid off or a bad PBC review.

The mood/tone at IBM is just awful, and every day we look for the proverbial email of a 2-week notice. Approaching your first-line manager is pointless and often backfires into an RA or a poor PBC rating. Poor PBCs have tripled in the last 2 years, using this tool to eradicate older and other "miscreant" work staff.

Most are fired within 12 months in advance of retirement. IBM only retired several employees last year; all of them were from the management ranks. And yes, everything you hear on the news regarding execs robbing the place blind in the $millions is true.

It's an IT company that's BSing its way through new technologies, and most know it.

Advice to Management

No advice to management that they would either care or heed. They're not here to support, grow, enhance, or build the company. They are here to get rich and feed egos. Most don't know what Analytics even is until their staff of 40 briefed them. The same with Cloud. Their staff writes speeches for them, briefs them with new buzzwords, but still shallow and sharing one common trait - GREED.

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