IBM

Salary, benefits, flex hours, friendly colleagues.

• Poor project planning.
• Poor coordination between teams.
• Weak management team, unable to strategically plan and coordinate, resulting in chaos that falls onto the backs of the developers to sort out and save the day (and not be rewarded for it).
• Poor hiring standards (low competency).
• Managers rarely care about the people they manage; professional assessments are arbitrary.
• The degree of professionalism is low. IBM used to have very strong engineering and innovation leadership, but not anymore. It dissipated in the last 8-10 years.
• Uses 20-year-old technologies and is slow to adopt new things.
• Does not reward passion. In many cases, managers are of the type to "steal the credit, shift the blame." The environment tends to get political.
• Keeps cutting essential services. HR and IT are cut and moved to a site in a different city.
• Work is boring.
• The environment is gender-biased.
• Very bureaucratic.
• Lots of process overhead (e.g., annual "how not to get bribed" re-certifications trainings).
• Talent is fleeing the company.

• Start caring. Make sure your managers are technical and understand the effort and competencies required to get tasks done.
• Pay attention to and reward engineering talent. Mugs and t-shirts don't inspire people; they don't foster talent.
• Focus on fair assessments. Make sure these aren't pulled out of thin air.
• Make banding definitions formal and transferable across teams. Add peer reviews. Reward passion.