IBM

Can often work from home. Can almost always work from home when you need (deliveries, children, pets, or to get some quiet).

More than one day a week might require negotiation.

Flexible hours - core hours of 10-4, but these are rarely enforced.

Flexible contracts:

• Compressed hours - work 4 days but do an hour extra each day and get 90% pay.
• Term time only (all school holidays off) for 90% pay.

Nice site. Nice, intelligent (if demotivated) coworkers.

IBM wants to reduce its workforce and has a deliberate policy to reduce morale and encourage people to quit:

• Very restricted pay raises.
• PBC 3 process - management are forced to label a fixed percentage of employees in every team as underperforming and threaten them with the sack.
• No education budget. (IBM used to be good here).

You are a very small cog.

Execs may work you into the ground on a project they've already decided to scrap months ago.

Each year, a few new graduate starters are abandoned in a team that has no work for them and are ignored until they either quit or find another team. This is pretty demoralizing, realizing that IBM really cares so little about its employees that it will leave them to rot. This also occasionally happens to whole teams of more experienced staff, but they are better able to cope.

Management: Don't hire staff you don't want. Be honest – if you don't know something, admit it. We respect you more for it. Respect technical staff to know their jobs. We know we don't want to and couldn't do your job. Accept that we might know how to do our jobs, or at least we should have a right to express an opinion.

Execs: You want to maximize share price by maximizing profit by cutting costs and don't care about morale or the long-term future of the company. You'll have retired before the effects of demotivating and culling the workforce damage the profits. You don't care that it's the best people leaving first.