IBM

If you volunteer in your personal time, you can participate in interesting projects where you will learn a lot. Just remember that this is unpaid and in your personal time.

Interviews are not that hard, and the company has a "students" program which hires people with no experience. If you are starting your career, this could be good, but be careful of wasting too much of your life here (see the "cons" section).

Some employees volunteer to present talks and share knowledge. Most of the time, these are open to anybody in the company. If you pay attention and look for them, you can learn a lot.

Some very talented and smart people work here, and you can learn a lot from them. But precisely because they are smart and talented, they rarely spend a long time working for IBM.

The Guadalajara office is very far away, and employees are required to go there frequently, with no clear reason. When asked why we need to be there, the managers look confused and mumble words like "collaboration", "innovation", and other nonsense, but without real explanation.

IBM frequently contradicts itself. Sometimes they say they value inclusion and diversity while having favorites in their teams. Sometimes they say they value the environment and "new ways of work" while requiring employees to pollute by commuting to their far-away campus. Sometimes they say the earnings are very high, while firing employees and not giving raises or bonuses in many years.

I spent many years at IBM, and I never knew an IBM manager who had technical knowledge. They constantly needed to be explained the meaning of concepts like "the cloud", "Red Hat", and many others, which are supposed to be the core business of the company. Often, the managers are even proud of not understanding even the basics of what their employees do. They rely on their employees doing their work for them. Managers only schedule meetings and ask for status, but they never really help their people.

The Guadalajara campus has adopted the worst practices from Mexican companies. Examples include favoritism, old-fashioned managers who don't listen to their employees, a backward mentality, "putting the shirt on" (working unpaid extra hours), and requiring employees to attend "integration activities" which everybody hates, occur after hours, and obviously are not paid.

The IBM managers still think their employees are motivated by cheap T-shirts and tasteless pizzas.

Compared to other companies, salaries are average at best. This is only after you have spent years at the company and create a strong friendship with your manager, so he chooses to give you bonuses or raises.

The things you will learn at IBM are rarely useful outside of IBM. The company uses technologies like DB2 and the IBM Cloud, which are rarely used by other companies. So, be prepared to have to spend a lot of time learning things that will be useless once you get a better job. If you are not careful, this could mean career suicide. You will have to invest a lot of your personal time to learn new things so you can keep being relevant in the market.

Most first-line and middle managers agree with whatever silly thing the VPs and C-level executives say. The CFO announced the return to the office, and there was a strong backlash from the great majority of employees. The only ones with "positive" comments were middle managers with no self-respect, saying things like "Wow, excellent news boss!", "I love going to the office to build culture!". They sound so fake and ridiculous and only show that they don't listen to their people.

IBM often has scandals, like executives firing older employees only because of their age (look for it online). This is just another company that only cares about numbers, not people.

IBM does not seem to know what they should focus on. Years ago it was "Mobile first", then it was the cloud and Red Hat, then it was Quantum, then AI. But IBM never shows leadership in any of these markets; they are often too late or too soon, but never at the right time.

IBM is famous for "firing" a lot of people, but cleverly masking it to avoid bad press. They "separated" a big chunk of the company and called it "Kyndryl". They ask too much of their employees (like moving to another city in a few days) because they know people will quit, and they will not really have to actually "fire" so many people. There are many examples of this online, look it up.

Employees are expected to do "stretch assignments" (extra work) with no extra payment because this will give them "exposure" with upper leadership and it will look very nice in their yearly performance review. These are lies. I got bonuses and raises because I was friendly with the managers, but I saw a lot of people going the extra mile and being ignored completely.

Managers don't hide the fact that they like and dislike some people. I often heard managers talking behind their employees' backs, saying bad things about them to their co-workers. Extremely unprofessional.

Start listening to your employees—what they want, need, and expect from you. If you don't, don't be surprised when people leave.

Learn some technical concepts once in a while, at least enough to understand what your team is doing.

Understand that the Guadalajara campus is far away and in an ugly part of town. Employees are being required to waste their time and money by commuting there. If a company requests this from you, you might as well resign and look for jobs that are closer to where you live. In this day and age, nobody is dreaming of working for IBM, so you should make IBM more attractive to potential employees.

Understand that it is okay to say no to upper management. The VPs and Directors have no idea what the engineers are doing, and First Line Managers never show enough courage to disagree with executive orders that make no sense at all.

Remember that you are a software company. Ask yourselves why companies like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft are more successful. Stop thinking so much about money and spend more time working on customer experience and employee experience.