IBM

A good place to try and learn new technologies.

They have some amazing people.

Overall, this is a good place to learn, but not a good place to capitalize on what you've learned. They won't pay you what you deserve, even after your capabilities have leapfrogged far above what they pay you. It's an annual fixed 0-3% or at maximum 5% salary increase, no matter your performance rating. So many people come here to learn things just to move to another company with better pay and position 2-3 years later.

Senior executives only care about their own compensation. Most of them are over 50 years old, so they have 10 or less years left in their career. That essentially means they only care about the short term. As long as they can make up the numbers to get the bonus they want before they retire, they don't care what happens after that. That's where all those cost-cutting measures and spending billions to do share repurchases come from. They obviously hurt the company for the long term but boost the numbers to get what they want in the short term.

There are many, many problems in this company, but the above one is the root cause of almost everything.

Other than that one, the other major issue is the lack of hands-on management capability among senior management. They meet clients a lot, which is what they do for their entire career because most of them come from sales. By the way, I have to agree that having sales as your senior management rarely works. They manage by numbers, and by numbers only. They don't walk around the company and see what's really happening. Granted, it's not possible to manage a company with hundreds of thousands of people without the help of numbers, but managing through numbers only does not work. Take their push for Agile, for example. The CEO and senior managers talk about that a lot, but the actions are lacking. It's not that they don't try hard. It's that they only look at numbers, so they don't know where the impediments are, which is that the process and culture are still widely waterfall, especially for finance and HR. With your finance, HR, and process deeply waterfall-oriented, how can you become Agile? It's not something that will change with the CEO talking, "We want Agile" repeatedly. They don't do hands-on management, they don't look inside the company, so they never know.

Do hands-on management.

Focus on the long term instead of the short term.