IBM

IBM offices, apart from Airoli/Mumbai, have a very good culture.

(False JD And HR Commitments)

Required skills are not mentioned correctly in the JD. They mentioned Java and Spring, but the actual work is in an older version of Java and in Applet and Swing.

(Support and Shifts)

During the interview, they may tell you that the work structure would be like 80% development and 20% support. However, more than 50% of the work is in support, and that is also L1+L2 support. This project has weekly rotational second shifts, and developers have to support during these shifts. There are 10 public holidays every year, but because of shifts, each team member has to support at least 1 public holiday out of 10. On these days, the person has to work for 12 hours instead of 9 hours.

(Experience with Overall Team)

Lateral resources with 3 to 8 years of experience, coming from other organizations or IBM projects, usually leave this project within 1 or 2 years. I have seen more than 10 farewells in less than a year. In this entire project, most resources are from mainframe, and few are from Java. It is not a development, maintenance, or enhancement project. It is a support project. Java resources are the least valuable in this project. There is no team bonding. Old members can use new members to cover their mistakes in front of the client. You may face groupism. Favoritism from the boss is also very common, even for those technically worst but who listen to their boss and force new members to do unrealistic tasks. Old team members create dependency and hide many things from new joiners to secure their place in the project and in front of the client. There is no transparency about tasks. New joiners remain unaware of many things even after a year. Old team members easily get big leaves for their vacations, but new people get limited leaves (hardly a week, even after sufficient leaves are available in their buckets) for genuine reasons like taking care of hospitalized parents, once-in-a-lifetime moments, and other important work.

(Work from Home and Work Culture)

Work from home is not a part of this project, even though IBM is famous for it. Only a few political people are eligible for it. These people focus more on documentation than technical things. Making 10 documents for the same thing is highlighted more than new optimization ideas or new strategies/techniques used in the project. Many times, these documents are created in a hurry as part of the process. 8 out of 10 times, these documents are created with a lack of requirement information, so they are not actually useful for people who will refer to them in the future. Instead of sitting with the client and finalizing appropriate solutions and proper planning, they emphasize the work to be done (documentation, coding, testing). They don't have a BA/Tech architect. Programmers sit with the client to finalize the solution, which ultimately turns into technical loopholes at the end of the project.

One resource performs the task of two resources.

(Pathetic Timesheet Management System)

The timesheet claiming system is very bad. The PMO can shout at you if you make a mistake in filling out the timesheet. In the first six months, you do not really understand whether to focus on your work or on filling the timesheet properly. Many times, you spend your valuable time calculating and adjusting your hours among the tasks assigned to you. Utilization, that is claiming 9 hours every day on the timesheet, is the most important thing, whether you have worked on that particular task or not. Doesn't matter, you just have to put time against some task. If you are working on a development project for which somebody else gave an estimation long ago and you are taking extra time, then it is your fault and over burning of the timesheet, which is not acceptable. Utilization of resources should be 104%. There are many open change requests in their stack. You can take and work on such open requests on weekends to increase your utilization beyond the expected 104% (this may help in your appraisals). If you are taking privilege leaves, it can impact your utilization. In such cases, you can work on public holidays for 12 hours and maintain your utilization. Indirectly, privilege leave is not a right of an employee. You can have unlimited sick leaves, but again, it is questionable and not acceptable, even if used with genuine reasons or emergencies.

(Managers)

A resource is responsible if their manager doesn't have work for the resource. Managers usually do not respect a resource's priority after office hours. They may ask you to do work (support) even with a high fever (in this situation, work from home is OK). Managers only think about billing hours of an employee (technology, innovation, automation, and new ideas are not important; they always follow the same old-school methods). There is a concept of a people manager who takes care of your shift allowance approvals, appraisals, leave approvals, trainings, etc. You and your people manager (who may not be from your project) should talk daily to monitor your progress, but my manager only talked to me twice, on the first day and on the last day. Managers can ask female employees to stretch till late night in shifts (they don't provide any cab service during the night, and Airoli is like an outside area for people living in Mumbai). This shows an unprofessional attitude from managers. There is a biased appraisal culture. Managers are very bad at estimations and management. There is no BA who can tackle and deal with the client properly, which eventually results in setting unrealistic deadlines. Managers never encourage you to spend your time in trainings available on the IBM portal because it is again a non-profitable task that you can claim on the timesheet, but the project will not earn from it.

(Technical)

Developer's local system setup usually does not work, and people working there for the last 4 years don't have an idea about it. Since they have not taken proper KT from their seniors (this project's ex-team members). It is hell for a Java resource. Strongly not recommended if you have more than two years of experience and want to work in Spring, Hibernate, AngularJS, Spring Boot, microservices, Java 7, 8, and other advanced technologies.

Provide a proper JD before hiring. Respect team members. Use professional language at least in the office. Avoid remote manager or technical lead culture, at least for critical projects. Make sure that the new person will get involved in the project and get proper knowledge before releasing existing resources from the project.