IBM

Access to the latest development software and tools.

Work from home flexibility.

Good environment to sharpen your teeth.

Mediocre pay and benefits. IBM's salary plan considers your pay to be sufficient for your position as soon as you hit the 50% percentile for industry pay. This is designed to always pay you less than the 50% percentile of what your peers make doing the same job.

IBM recently granted all employees a deferred stock grant as a "Retention Incentive." It's $1000 in stock over 5 years. It's pretty obvious this wasn't designed to retain US employees. Would you bat an eye at an extra $200 a year to stay for 5 years? What a joke.

Extreme cost cutting has reduced the company to a self-serve mode of operation. For example: Need to mail a package? Stop writing code and try to figure out how to find a box and tape (hint: they are too cheap to stock these), then box, print, and mail your own package.

Bi-annual "culling of the herd":

• Bad quarter? Layoff 5% of the US work force.
• Good quarter? Layoff 5% of the US work force after having them train their overseas replacements.

In the future, the US employees will consist of management and project managers that are managing teams of overseas developers in India, China, and the next cheap labor country. Unless you want to be a manager or project manager, my advice is to work somewhere else.

Engineering experience should be a requirement for management. Stop promoting salespeople to run this company, and we might be able to actually produce products that generate more revenue instead of continuously engineering more profit through cost reductions. Invest in your people again or realize that they will get tired of being dumped on and leave.

You say your strategy is to compete in high-margin areas, yet you treat your employees like they are all commodities. Rather than foot the bill for dedicated teams for products, you think you can just shuffle "resources" from project to project, never having any experts who are familiar with the codebase. How do you expect to compete for the talent you need to create the next great high-margin ideas?

Performance-based pay is a joke. If you're rated 1 (top performer in the department), you may get a 6-7% bonus; 2+ (you may get 4-5%). Why bust your ass all year to get the top rating in your department for an extra 2% bonus?