IBM

IBM fosters a fantastic culture of diversity and inclusion, with a great array of checks and balances to ensure the protection of individuals from harassment of any kind – whether it be for retaliation or any personal difference.

This flows on to the people, too: the number of fantastic coworkers I had, as well as an unbelievably dedicated manager, were by far the hardest part of leaving the company.

Depending on your role, horizontal mobility is also a big plus. In consulting, for instance, there are always an abundance of projects looking for new team members, across all sectors of work:

• Government
• Energy
• Banking
• And more.

This pairs well with the extensive training resources offered, with a huge catalogue of internal tools and courses for almost any imaginable skillset, allowing you to skill up and build your career expertise how you want.

IBM's suffocating bureaucracy and dismal compensation are by far the worst and most damaging aspects of the company.

Any reasonable amount of decision-making is reserved only for executives, and the process of getting their approval is so long, arduous, and slow that it's impossible to believe it's not hostile by design.

This explains, then, why it seems many executives are never actually doing anything and mostly appear to be attached to projects to inspire confidence in clients.

This bureaucracy also saturates career progression pathways, and is perhaps where it is most egregious.

Promotions demand you tick every box in a long list of asinine steps to demonstrate that you deserve a promotion: project reviews, performance reflections, mandatory training courses, and at least 40 hours spent training annually (all of which, of course, is to be completed in your own time, as you are expected to spend at least 40 hours per week billing to the client, despite our contracts only specifying 37.5 hours), plus anything else the out-of-touch upper management and outsourced HR can invent to avoid paying employees even a cent more than the barest of minimums.

This is, of course, when promotion cycles aren't just silently canceled for no apparent reason—a trend shared with quarterly bonuses that are never paid out and growth-driven profit sharing, where employees are gaslit into believing increases in profit don't actually count for the purpose of rewarding the people responsible for it.

This causes a vicious cycle of IBM constantly hemorrhaging skilled employees: tech leads leave, knowledge transfers are botched, more work is dumped onto the next most skilled person on a team without additional compensation, pushing them to leave as well.

If you value a very stable, unchanging job for a long time and don't mind moving at a glacial pace for well below industry-average compensation, you may genuinely like IBM.

If either of those traits concerns you, though, this is almost certainly not the company for you.

IBM claims to put its stock in hiring and retaining skilled developers in order to provide customers the best possible product. However, poor compensation just makes the company a revolving door, taking in graduate/junior developers until they're skilled enough to get a proper paying job. At that point, there is little reason to stay.

If you want to provide world-class consulting capabilities, you need to be offering world-class consulting compensation, or at the very least, enough to shrug off your reputation within the tech community as a cheap employer.

Cut the fat where it actually is: overpaid, underperforming executives. Less friction and more compensation will help IBM retain its best employees longer and overall create a healthier, better performing company.