IBM

Opportunities to easily move around to job assignments globally.

Leadership development opportunities are endless for business leaders. Because IBM has very experienced leaders (10-40 years of experience), there is a lot of wisdom. In addition, IBM has invested heavily in this space, keeping skills current.

Family-friendly: good benefits, flexible work schedules.

Excellent virtual tools to facilitate global collaboration.

Lack of investment in the US.

Most of the new talent is being hired abroad, which means tomorrow's future leaders will be in these growth markets (China, India, Russia, Brazil).

A large portion of US technical talent is wasted on educating cheaper talent later in the growth markets.

The end result is poor quality products developed by a large number of inexperienced developers. A better quality product could be achieved with a smaller, more experienced team.

There needs to be a finer line established between the people responsible for training and the people responsible for delivering good products. Almost no one has demonstrated the ability to do both at the same time.

IBM is not as selective as they should be in terms of technical talent. Instead of hiring the top technical talent selectively, they hire a large number of less talented individuals.

Occasionally, this works out okay as people can grow. However, this often results in poorly designed products that do not meet customer expectations.

It takes too long to fire incompetent engineers due to legal risks. Thus, these engineers drag down product quality and the productivity of teams. Or, sometimes, these individuals hide in the system by moving from one product to the next. Since it is so hard for managers to get rid of incompetent individuals, the managers resort to transferring them to some other team to become some other manager's problem.

Stop all cross-border virtual training.

All development of growth markets needs to be in person, in the growth market.

Provide incentives to lower-level US engineers to take temporary assignments in the growth markets to develop their skills.

Allow US engineers to work on producing excellent products without constantly having to retrain some replacement team.