IBM

Career advancement for the right personality type. IBM could work for you if you are a schmoozer and you value moving up the ranks more than product quality or ensuring long-term success.

Pay is competitive.

There are pockets of great people. Finding the right group is critical.

What IBM says publicly does not match how they actually manage their business. If you care about honesty and long-term success, IBM will not work for you.

IBM is totally focused on short-term results. This is frequently achievable only through constant cost-cutting, making it impossible to produce competitive products, particularly those that require long-term vision and development.

This cost-cutting approaches ridiculous extremes. By the time I left IBM, it was essentially impossible to acquire extra RAM for my workstation. I had to buy my own copies of productivity software such as MS Office so that I could work with the formats required by our customers.

IBM incentivizes upper management to change positions frequently. This results in those execs having no long-term investment in their business unit.

IBM does not support remote employees. Yet at the same time, they build teams consisting of people from multiple time zones, requiring everyone to be on conference calls all day and work ridiculous hours.

Continue to narrow the focus, while fully investing in the areas you retain.

Big vision requires big investment and time to achieve returns, so for those types of projects, change your funding model and your revenue targets.

Listen to the senior people who are telling you the reality of what is required to get a product or service to market.

Stop pinching pennies. Enable your workforce to get the job done with the right tools.

Get contemporary with remote/mobile employment.

Stop spreading projects across multiple continents.