IBM

I was a developer at IBM in Tivoli for a little over two years, starting fresh out of school. Generally, starting salaries (fresh out of college) are fairly competitive. Mostly all of my co-workers were very professional and cordial. Given the size of the company, you have an opportunity to move around if you network well; however, this is getting harder to pull off. Also, if you want to work from home, there are plenty of opportunities in development, test, project management, IT, etc., that will allow you to do it either full or part-time. Flex-time was truly flexible; many a time I ran long mid-day errands without anyone raising an eyebrow (the rating system is "results"-oriented; I'll get to this later). There are some really interesting projects mainly in the Software Group Strategy, Rational, and Lotus pillars if you are good enough to maneuver yourself onto one of those teams.

Health benefits were quite basic for a big company. You get a standard 80/20 with about a $700 deductible for free, and you paid about $75 a month for each additional dependent. They had other options that weren't bad, but they got expensive quick; however, after the sixth child, it's free! You also can get a lot of discounts, such as 25% off cell phone service and employee pricing on GM cars.

Vacation was 3 weeks plus 4-5 floating holidays per year, which effectively meant you got 4 weeks of vacation, not including U.S. national holidays, out of the gate, which is pretty good. Also, the 401(k) match was not too shabby at 6% dollar for dollar.

Some people joke about executives only caring about the stock price and running their company only worrying about quarter to quarter results. IBM does it.

This quarter to quarter madness is quite understandable when you realize that a good chunk of the VP's incentives are in stock options. Why should they care about anything else but the stock price?

This is where they get brilliant ideas such as taking out loans to buy back company stock instead of using it to build products or buy more companies to gain market share.

And this brings me to my next point.

IBM is not doing very much home growing of products anymore. They tend to buy a company, add some features to the product, slowly let attrition and layoffs take its toll on the U.S. workforce while pushing the product to maintenance mode over in India, China, Argentina, or one of the other BRIC type countries.

One of the products I worked on lost about half of its U.S. workforce in two years. Every time someone would leave the company or move to another product team, they would not backfill them. If natural attrition didn't work, they would do a layoff and hire replacements in one of the forementioned countries.

The problem with this strategy is the replacements were typically very green and knew their jobs were safe no matter what, making motivation an issue. This combined with constant benefit cuts, like Tivoli free sodas/coffee being taken away (oh sorry, the email said they were aligning the drink policy with IBM guidelines), leaves the morale of the U.S. employees effectively in the toilet.

One more note on the drink thing: the email they sent saying they were cutting the free drinks was dressed with the typical corporate language, so they had to send up a follow-up email to clarify it.

This leads me to my next point.

If you want to be treated like a five-year-old, work here.

There is nothing like working hard through a product release while the executives push/prod, make you work the weekends to keep on schedule, and at the end, they send one of those "YOU GUYS ROCK" emails which is supposed to motivate us even more.

I remember sitting in meetings with fellow employees struggling for recognition from the executives. It reminded me of dogs fighting for scraps from the table. The scraps being that when review time came around, only one or two people would get the highest rating while the other 90% got the solid performer/average rating.

And even if you did get a high rating, expect maybe a 5% raise and a 7% bonus. Woohoo! Don't spend it all in one place. For the rest, better luck next year.

Another problem with the rating system was how managers were the only ones with any input, and they normally knew the least about who was the best and did the most work. Their ignorance was not of their own fault so much as the fault of the countless meetings they were constantly stuck in all day.

Oh yeah, IBMers love meetings, almost always to the detriment of productivity.

The meetings were where all the power grabbing was, so usually the loudest voices were listened to and respected. Meaning that if you wanted that high rating, you would need to make sure your opinion was heard, whether or not it was valid, so as to make sure you could check off that teaming section in your end-of-year review.

Now, to get back to my title.

This place is not the worst place on earth to work, but it's far from the best. Don't let the fancy "I'm an IBMer" commercials fool you into thinking it is as hip and progressive as Google or Apple.

If you are a go-getter, self-starter type, you would probably do better working at a start-up or a small company where you can really have an impact.

I remember reading in college about all these famous inventions by IBM and its alumni and start-ups such as Craigslist, started by former IBMers, and for some reason, I missed the "former" part.

Yeah, IBM gets a lot of great people, but many of the truly successful ones in the industry are the ones that leave. If not, you could end up like some of my former co-workers in their late 20's, early 30's, who talk about big dreams outside of the company but get comfortable and never go anywhere.

Getting comfortable at IBM is easy to do, but that is the biggest mistake you can make there.

With the constant layoffs, make sure to keep an exit plan open so when you leave, it is for the betterment of your career, like my case, rather than your group missed its quarterly number by a quarter percent and you get hit by the next "resource action" or "restructuring" (a.k.a. layoff).

So, bottom line: feel free to buy stock in IBM, just don't work there.

Cut out the quarter-to-quarter trickery. You are going to wind up losing your core workforce, followed by your customers, when they finally wake up and realize all you really care about is the stockholders (errr... your stock options) over them. I remember meeting guys when I started in 2006 who were really excited, saying how we were building our own destiny. Only to have them, two years later, counting days until their retirement. Is this really what you all want in a workforce?

Dispassionate people working under a command & control management structure? Well, it must be, because you've done it. My hat's off to you all.