IBM

Telecommuting, flex-time, good pay in otherwise bleak employment towns.

The few of us who remain in the U.S. with IBM feel as if we are on death row. It's just a matter of time before the remaining jobs are yanked or outsourced, even on our award-winning, profitable product. We are bleeding people left and right as they leave voluntarily for more modern-day companies.

Everyone else is left holding the bag, adding to the 3-5 jobs they already do. Management views us as cattle or robots, interchangeable and instantly producing equal output to the person who left. Backstabbing and snitching is encouraged and even demanded by management, so that they can continue to downgrade and lay off otherwise productive and competent workers.

The outsourced workers might earn less, but they also work far less than the U.S. employees. The U.S. has to cover for the incompetence and laziness of many overseas, unionized workers. Few skills are transferable in the real world, other than perhaps in another bureaucratic nightmare. I would not recommend this company to my worst enemy.

Management thinks that we are bleeding people because they didn't rotate them enough and left them in certain niches where they thrived. Management is so removed from the real reasons, it's not even funny.

Their big solution is to rapidly escalate movement, so that no one will have a chance to truly learn the job they are doing.