IBM

Some of the best reasons for working at IBM include the following:

1. Immense scope to participate in technical forums. IBM is part of nearly every technological initiative on earth, and hence, any employee is bound to find something that caters to their taste and skill.

2. Investment in nearly every facet of the IT business. IBM is into services, hardware, systems software, and application software development. There are various teams where one could find an interesting career.

3. Fairly open with diverse mentor-mentee relationships. IBM encourages people to find mentors to help guide them along their career. Given that there are people leading technological innovation, there is always scope to find someone to inspire and guide you.

The downside is as follows:

1. Poor management. Most of management focuses only on delivery and are not interested in employee development. Anything that is not related to the deadline around the corner is irrelevant and harms delivery. Though it is vital to focus on delivery, management doesn't recognize the importance of long-term growth and totally lacks a vision. Management would love to claim that their teams achieved tonnes of things, but only the team members know how much they had to suffer for that. Managers prefer all of the non-delivery stuff to be done in employees' personal time.

2. Very stingy. IBM is extremely stingy as far as benefits and other facilities are concerned. Even if someone has come up with a wonderful paper and wishes to present it elsewhere, they will whine and cite budget constraints, thereby discouraging employees. They will pack people in the minimal quality hotel and not pay much per diem for trips abroad. They make every rupee coming out seem like it has been begged for. Anything which is not for delivery has to be paid out of employees' pockets.

3. Process. IBM only believes in process, and in that process, they make everything so circuitous that an employee would rather suffer in silence than make use of the facilities (which are genuinely inaccessible). The simplest example would be the leave processing system. One needs to raise a request in a database, which goes off to some other country, and a few days later, a form arrives (if at all) which needs to be filled and submitted to the manager. He will then approve it, and finally, you have your leave granted. In countries like India and China, procuring anything is a nightmare as the number of forms to be filled and the number of people who have to say "yes" keeps growing.

4. A lot is only on paper. This is actually a mix of management and process issues. A lot of the so-called facilities are only available on paper. If one tries to realize them, then they are made so difficult to achieve that one loses motivation pretty much immediately.

5. Hiring. IBM focuses a lot on simply meeting headcounts. They do not even care to ensure that a particular person is good enough or not, and whether it makes sense to have them in a good team where the team dynamics can get affected.

6. Mindset. IBM still lives in the mainframe mindset. They only know how to make things utterly complicated and messy. Nothing is simple at IBM. Even the tools and software that we are forced to use are arduous and unimaginably stupid. All of us keep wondering who designed them. Many software engineers would raise objections, which will be dissolved in the numerous processes and higher management decisions. Eventually, everyone starts thinking along these complicated lines. They can make anything messy. Even when they adopt something from the global software community, they have to change it to suit IBM's god-knows-what policy, and then what comes out is an extremely messy and convoluted approach to the same thing.

The advice would centre around the following:

1. Have a vision sans acronyms and catch-phrases. "On-Demand" has been so abused inside IBM that every employee thinks that he is doing work "On-Demand"!
2. Connect to employees and find out where they fit best.
3. Hire only when there is a right fit and not to meet quarterly targets.
4. Cut the bureaucracy.
5. Simplify processes.
6. Ask employees directly what they would like to see in their workplace. Act on it.
7. Reduce complication in everything you touch.