IBM

Opportunities to work with other teams.

Interesting projects if you are on the right team.

Opportunities to work on Open Source.

Disconnect between customer-facing executives and internal teams.

Was constantly being asked to complete PoC projects that were dropped 3-4 months in because the sales effort failed.

Frequent resource actions (layoffs) resulting in brain drain from the team.

Highly technical managers being replaced with MBAs.

Example: Our manager equated new college grads' Linux experience with 20+ year Linux developers.

Male managers and senior developers openly displayed a lack of respect towards women on the team. Indian managers were heavily biased towards certain members of the team of similar Indian caste. Projects and patent innovations frequently had "select few" added to other people's work.

Worked on OpenStack. Was forced to use a private repo, and commits were pushed by certain developers on the team and the management, even though the work was done by others. When pushing directly to the public repos, executives would reprimand.

Major brain drain over the years resulted in IBM Cloud outages. People were in positions due to their relationships with executives, not their skill or experience. Some of the best engineers have left the IBM Cloud team for VMware, Cisco, Dell EMC, etc.

Recent IBM Cloud outages were due to a lack of BGP security. They had projects to prevent this in place in 2016, but those developers left, and the ones left weren't experienced enough to realize this was even needed!

Important projects were pushed to teams in India using inappropriate technologies to match their skills. The motivation was to send managers in San Jose back to India.

We need to pay closer attention to executives' and managers' actions. There is no accountability, and IBM competitors gained significant advantages after certain IBM Cloud executives pushed distinguished engineers out. A lot of time and money is being wasted on projects that aren't important.