Welcome to IBM Employee News and Links

Highlights—October 10, 2015

• Poughkeepsie Journal:

  GlobalFoundries downsizing in Germany; U.S. action possible. By Craig Wolf. Excerpts: GlobalFoundries is downsizing at its semiconductor plant in Germany by 20 percent, about a month after offering a buyout to U.S.-based employees — who now face renewed concern about possible involuntary job cuts here. ...

  Company spokesman James Keller said the actions in Dresden "are a part of the overall measures the company has been taking to realign our cost structure to be more competitive. Each site is managing its efforts locally and labor costs are a key component for Fab 1," the formal name for the Dresden plant. The cuts there are to reduce the workforce by about 20 percent, he said.

  As to the U.S. voluntary buyout, Keller said, "Fab 10 (East Fishkill) and other sites are in the final stages of evaluating the results of our cost-saving efforts, including the voluntary separation program, and will determine if any other actions are still required for us to achieve our goals." ...

  GlobalFoundries has three plants in the U.S., one of them being the East Fishkill site that it acquired from IBM Corp. in July, along with a plant near Burlington, Vermont The third is a new facility in Malta, Saratoga County, which GlobalFoundries built and then put into production in 2011.

• New York Times:

  Amazon Messes With Billions in Corporate Computing Dollars. By Quentin Hardy. Excerpts: There is a famous story from the early days of Google that goes something like this: When a group of New York media big shots heard about the huge efficiency of search advertising, which could hurt their own businesses, the memorable reaction of one of them was a more vulgar take on “You’re fussing with the magic!”

  Amazon Web Services just did much the same thing to the multibillion-dollar business of corporate computing by going after the legacy customers of companies like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft. ...

  Among the most notable, there was a 47-pound data storage device that A.W.S. would ship to a customer, and for $200 would suck down 50 terabytes of data, incidentally converting it from an older system to a more modern one. There was a service called Database Migration, which takes data in proprietary systems and converts their schema to open-source products. ...

  Previously, old-guard enterprise companies dismissed A.W.S. and cloud computing, then grudgingly ceded them a place for start-ups and new applications. But with about three-quarters of information technology spending going to maintaining legacy systems, they could afford to.

  Wednesday, Amazon went after the rest of their business.

• Glassdoor IBM reviews. Selected reviews follow:

  • “Good, but with issues of late.”

    Current Employee — Sales Specialist in Chicago, IL. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 5 years).

    Pros:

    • Good benefits. Great 401k match.
    • 80-90% of colleagues are great and intelligent.
    • Autonomy. IBM does not micromanage people. Most people are free to make their own schedule. Working from home is common. There is a lot of freedom in your day.
    • Good educational and training opportunities, depending on your manager.
    • Better work/life balance than many tech companies. I have never been forced to work on the weekends, etc or anything out of bounds.
    • Heritage of excellence. IBM looks good on your resume.
    • IBM is a thoughtful company, even at the sales level. Substance over style culture.

    Cons:

    • Pay. IBM generally pays below market. This is especially true if you start relatively young with IBM because raises are rare. Pay is also arbitrarily decided or an accident of history. You may find out you are making half as much as someone on your team for no particular reason.
    • Layoffs. IBM lays people off every year. If you are not recovering from a layoff, you are hearing rumors about the next huge layoff. Little job security. Many people with a foot out the door.
    • IBM has arcane rules for job changes and career development. Your current manager will block you from taking a new job if you are any good. IBM allows them to veto your career progression or transfer. HR also has a veto for some reason. I had a transfer all lined up and my manager just said no and that was that.
    • IBM also has formally dropped individual development plans. Development plans, even five years ago, were a serious discussion, now they don't exist. In short, your manager will not help you progress your career and, if you go around them and make the connections yourself anyway, they may blow it up for you which is, within IBM, their right.
    • Political. If you are connected within IBM, you can breeze up the management chain. If you are not connected, you will have few opportunities and it is difficult to get into a clique. VPs, of which there are thousands, are all trying to build out their own empire and don't want any other VP stepping in their territory.

    Advice to Management: Restore employee morale, i.e. stop cutting and start spending, so they might restore client morale. You need both of those groups on board to bring back growth. The stock will not tick up until Wall St sees consistent top line growth, regardless of what is going on with EPS/profit.

  • “IBM is going downhill”

    Former Employee — Sales Manager in Atlanta, GA. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

    Pros: Flexibility to work from home for some positions. Good medical/dental/vision benefits. IBM discounts. Name recognition.

    Cons: Some managers at IBM are not competent enough for the job. A lot of employees get promoted based on who they know and not what they know. I have seen so many colleagues get passed up on promotions because the person that was hired knew someone at the top.

    Executives and directors are constantly recommending kids and friends to jobs and they get hired, even if they may not be the best fit for the job. A lot of college graduates of IBMer parents can get hired easily even if they are not the best fit.

    College kids are getting hired into IBM and they make a lot more money than IBMers who have been at the company for 20 years, and then the college kids leave within 2 - 3 years.

    In my group, the managers would gossip about other employees and during PBC (annual review) time, those employees who kissed the most butt got the best ratings. If you don't brag about yourself and complain about not getting a high rating, you won't get one. Also, you just need to threaten to leave the company and you will get a high rating, you may not get more money, but you will get a high rating.

    Managers are not proactive with the best employees in terms of praise, they react out of fear. Why should you threaten to leave before you get attention? The best people who are humble and do good work get passed over for other loud mouth, over confident people who complain and threaten to leave the company if they don't get a raise and a high performance rating.

    Don't even bother looking for another position internally because you can't move between the different business groups (consulting to marketing or services to software sales, etc); there is a cap on the budget and most groups can only hire internally within the group, so if you are looking to get another job, it better be in your current business org or you can't move to another job.

    The PBC (annual review) process is a joke (as explained above). You will only get a top rating if you are friends with your manager, you kissed a lot of butt during the year, you complain about not getting enough money and recognition and you complain about how hard you worked during the year.

    Some of the top managers/executives just don't have time for you, everyone is just too busy. My manager would cancel our monthly status meetings at the last minute and not offer to reschedule, so we never talked unless he had something urgent or wanted me to do something for him.

    Good people who do a good job are taken advantage of and expected to do more work than everyone else while the complainers don't get as much work. If you are marked as a "low performer", your manager won't tell you until the end of the year and by that time, it's too late to improve your performance and once you are named as a "low performer", your days are numbered and you are on the list to be asked to leave IBM once it comes time for a round of layoffs. It doesn't matter how much you improve, once you are a low performer, you will always be seen as this.

    I was a manager at one point during my career and I disagreed with this policy, it's so disgusting. I hated every bit of the performance process and wanted to praise all my employees for working hard and I was always forced to name 2 - 3 of the lowest performers on my team even though everyone on the team was strong. How disgusting and horrible, what a way to make people feel good, right?

    I enjoyed a lot of colleagues I worked with, but I had to be careful of the people who gossiped or was looking to backstab you to make themselves look good. Keep your personal life away from work because people will use it against you to say that you are not committed to work, especially if you have some personal issues you are dealing with.

    IBM boasts getting a mentor but the top executives and managers are all too busy to mentor you. During my time at IBM, I had multiple mentors and at some point in time, they just got too busy and they didn't want to take a few minutes to talk; they would have their secretaries cancel the meetings and never respond to emails.

    Oh and people at IBM don't respond to emails; you have to call them if you need something.

    Expect to be invited to long meetings that are pointless and drag on and on. IBMers love to talk and hear themselves talk, so get ready to be invited to meetings where people just talk to talk, no goal or mission. Always request information about the meeting to make sure you need to join, otherwise most meetings are just a waste of time or people sitting on the phone sharing gossip.

    I loved working at IBM at first but over the years, it is getting worse and worse and if IBM keeps hiring incompetent people, it will keep going downhill.

    Advice to Management: If you have a strong team, there doesn't have to be low performers. Give employees more praise and listen to feedback. Stop hiring your friends and family for positions, hire the best person for the job based on experience instead of hiring your friends.

  • “Innovative, ground-breaking, technology. Extremely fair and progressive company.”

    Current Employee — Client Solution Professional in Dallas, TX. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 5 years). Pros: Ginny is doing amazing work! It's fantastically awesome with great and smart people surrounding you all the time. Cons: It's a great place to work and I can't say much that is negative. A 100+ year old technology company that has and is continuing to change the world!

  • “No Morale”

    Former Employee — Executive Assistant in New York, NY. I worked at IBM (more than a year).

    Pros: When you are given time (which isn't much at all) to learn, you can learn valuable tools for your various work assignments.

    Cons: Over the course of my 14 years there, the morale just plummeted. Spent the last three years every quarter waiting on a lay-off cycle. In order to keep your job you have to compete against your coworkers, so teaming is a foreign concept.

    Advice to Management: The PBC tool is a JOKE. You all know what we're getting as a rating LONG before we submit results. Stop torturing us all year long and taking time away from our jobs to spend time giving you information you already know anyway.

  • “Lot of Issues”

    Current Employee — Anonymous Employee. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 8 years). Pros: Great legacy, big, lot of capabilities, global network, some great people, brand name. Cons: Very driven by Wall Street's demand for quarterly results, very focused on reducing costs, including shedding people who are on the bench. Advice to Management: Listen to your people; put client service first.

  • “Senior IT Project Manager”

    Current Employee — Senior IT Project Manager in Salem, MA. I have been working at IBM (more than a year). Pros: Long career, education is mandatory, decent benefits. Cons: Outsourcing is widespread. No sense of reward for great work done anymore.

  • “Senior Project Manager”

    Former Employee — Senior Project Manager in New Orleans, LA. I worked at IBM full-time (less than a year). Pros: Pension, benefits, flexible work hours, reputation of stable organization that has been around for a long time. Cons: Fat management, outdated training methodology, increased layoffs. Advice to Management: 360 evaluations of management to reduce bullying.

  • “Interesting place to work, good thing, as you'll work like a dog”

    Current Employee — Program Director in Seattle, WA. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 5 years).

    Pros: IBM leads the world in patents every year. IBM does all kinds of interesting and meaningful work to help the world. IBM has extensive opportunities to grow, travel and see the world, work with clients, etc. You can work remotely in most cases, compensation is okay (average for the tech industry, above average if you compare to other industries), etc.

    Cons: You will work yourself to death at IBM — thanks to the ability to work remotely and the global nature of IBM. The expectation is that everyone in any kind of leadership position works 24x7, responding to customer issues, questions from the field, questions from people in other countries, etc., at all hours of the day, every day of the week. Everyone does this if they hope to even "keep up" let alone get ahead. The only folks that do not do this are the lowest performers or individual contributors that are "in a rut" and basically just coasting along.

    Advice to Management: You are working yourselves to death, and your employees are following suit. You need to stop emailing and asking for things at night and on the weekends, and you need to tell your people to stop doing this too. You have to stop scheduling meetings at all hours of the day, etc. as this just trickles down and hurts everyone in the organization.

    Everyone I know is burned out and literally working several hours extra every night just to stay on top of email, as they spend the entire day on calls, with clients, etc. Last, there are many, MANY employees who just straight up abuse IBM's travel policy and go from customer to customer, country to country, doing nothing but having pointless meetings as an excuse to build up miles, hotel points, status and travel the world.

  • “All hype, but nowhere to go”

    Former Employee — Test Engineer in Austin, TX. I worked at IBM (more than 5 years). Pros: It pays the bills. Management can sure crack a joke. Cons: Considering that the software is kept in-house, your knowledge that you attain there is worth nothing outside of IBM. You are only respected through time spent at IBM, not how much you accomplish. When upper management makes mistakes, the tiers below lose their jobs. Advice to Management: Branding is what this company has that's keeping it afloat. Management should listen to their customers outside of IBM and downstream to other IBM employees.

  • “Not your father's IBM”

    Former Employee — Anonymous Employee in Boulder, CO. I worked at IBM (more than 10 years). Pros: The company offers great opportunities to gain experience across the company. The pay is quite competitive for people who been able to maintain full time employment status for many years. Cons: However, with all the drastic cuts, the company has created towers of competencies within the Global Delivery Framework (GDF), which allows very little lateral movement. Most technical careers nowadays have very little room for growth.

  • “Great ideas and solutions...poor execution”

    Current Employee — Client Executive in Amsterdam (Netherlands). I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 3 years). Pros: Fantastic solutions, top notch R&D, nice colleagues. It really is a stimulating environment to work in. Cons: Short term views on targets and customer development. Horrible middle management. Lots of insecurity about job role in the coming half year. Unreasonable targets. Lots of layoffs. Advice to Management: Put the customer first. Listen to them and not to your stock ratings.

  • “If you want to succeed you need to start in a smaller company. You can easily get lost in the shuffle here.”

    Former Employee — Senior IT Specialist in Skokie, IL. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 10 years). Pros: Some work-life balance depending on project. Many resources available for self help and training. Cons: Difficult to advance career and no clear career path. Pay increases nonexistent for years. Advice to Management: Stop resource actions; employees fear for their jobs and cannot focus.

  • “Not the company it once was”

    Former Employee — Anonymous Employee in Austin, TX. I worked at IBM (more than 5 years). Pros: Smart people, pretty good benefits. Cons: Not much room to grow. Low morale. Culture has shifted to focus on bottom line and shareholder value at expense of employees. Poor compensation.

  • “Was an OK place”

    Current Employee — IT Recruiter in Frisco, TX . I have been working at IBM (more than a year). Pros: The team was great at first. There seemed to be a lot of international opportunities. You name the type of role, IBM has it. Cons: Team changed due to cutbacks from layoffs which led to a lot of process changes, which resulted in losses and more cutbacks. Advice to Management: Firing your top performers will have a negative impact on the company. Not all numbers can be crunched and you should listen to direct manager feedback when taking this into account.

  • “'Think' before accepting their offer”

    Current Employee — Anonymous Employee. Pros: Opportunity for some high profile work, and smart co-workers. Cons: Isolation with work from home; office locations have no culture, beige beige beige everywhere. Politics as prevalent as the beige; limited work-life balance. Be careful not to burn out. Advice to Management: Hurry up and modernize process, technology, create culture, encourage collaboration. Time to start using best-of-breed technology instead of whatever IBM created.

  • “Junior IT Specialist”

    Former Employee — IT Specialist in Cincinnati, OH. I worked at IBM (more than a year).

    Pros: Good people to work with, great working atmosphere, nice starting job for experience.

    Cons: Company lies regarding career development and salary growth. Let me warn you, once you enter with your base salary it will NEVER, EVER change. They will tell you any excuse (freeze, low profit, etc.) and in the meantime they will suck all your experience and skills. My advise, if you are an average Joe, fresher—join to learn some minor experience and leave after one year. If instead you are a senior, ask for high expectations as they will never change that later; if they refuse it is because they were already lying at you and are trying to scam seniors for low budget for low position works.

    Advice to Management: Stop giving false promises (regarding career growth) when later you simply jump out to other departments. Anyway, I know you won't do it because you are instructed to lie as to keep your employees.

  • “Don't join if you are not a local nor can't work as a robot”

    Current Employee — Senior Managing Consultant in Hong Kong. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than a year).

    Pros: Good online training system; big name; good on resume.

    Cons: People are lacking of professionalism here; do things very random. Even partner level are super disorganized. Most employees speak Cantonese as their daily business language, even though there are non-Canton speakers in the same meeting and English is supposed to be the "official language". Some managers don't like employees to have their own thoughts; they prefer to have robots than intelligent human being. "Don't ask questions, just do it as I said" regularly heard from some managers. Very bad culture if you come from a western background.

    Advice to Management: Learn to respect your staff.

  • “Consultant”

    Current Employee — Senior Consultant in Armonk, NY. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years). Pros: Incredible depth of skills in the company. Can always find experts in almost any area of business. Very open culture of knowledge sharing and cross-training. Culture that encourages pursuing new interests. Cons: Opportunities for salary growth are extremely limited. Frequent layoffs keep salaries low and leave those who remain both demoralized and yet thankful just to continue their jobs.

  • “Working @ IBM”

    Current Employee — Anonymous Employee. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 5 years). Pros: The people I work with are great I'm grateful to have a job/pay check. The new relaxed dress code. Cons: Constant rumors of the next round of lay offs (which most times come true). Not even a 1 cent raise the whole time I've worked here. Advice to Management: A cost of living raise would go a long way to help retain current employees.

  • “IBM offers creativity, expertise and innovative thinking”

    Current Employee — Marketing/Talent Acquisition. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than a year).

    Pros: IBM has built a 100 plus year tradition on the ability to re-invent itself with new products and services and continuing to provide excellent customer service to its clients. This is a strong asset on behalf of IBM. By providing strong resources and tools, IBM allows its team players to open up creatively and take chances. Compensation options are strong and work-life balance is excellent. The options to stay connected in every aspect of work is also available but not mandatory.

    Cons: The culture and energy is strong. With strong and diverse client relationships, there are many pressures for delivery of top solutions. Stress can get high at times.

    Advice to Management: Continue to provide strong training programs and listen to new ideas to continue to grow the business.

  • “Software Developer”

    Former Employee — Software Engineer in Hyderābād (India). Pros: Awesome company to work with, but stressful. The overall rating is good and is a good company to work for. Cons: No work-life balance. No sick leaves. Have to beg for leaves. Salary hikes are really less.

  • “Proven big consulting firm driven by sales goals”

    Current Employee — Managing Consultant in New York, NY. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 8 years).

    Pros: Once you settle down you can flexibly manage your time. Virtual relationship with your manager Work independently. You work for top class clients in major cities across the world. Promotion process is straight forward; you get promoted once you meet and document the predefined requirements. It does everything you can imagine. A lot of smart hard working consultants who always delivers what is promised.

    Cons: Top heavy. Too much overheads for non profitable internal works. GBS and few other divisions feed other nonsense divisions. Slow to market and new technology demand due to its size and decision making hierarchy. Inversely undiverse. One lump sum 401k match at the end of the year—if you leave before year end you lose a year's worth 401k. (I am not making this up). You have no control over your raise; you get what they decide. Bonus is a joke. Too many org changes and moving corporate goals

  • “IBM Past Its Sell By Date”

    Current Employee — Managing Consultant in London, England (UK). Pros: Good experience for graduates and those new to consulting. Cons: Utilisation rates higher that anything. No work-life balance.

  • “IBM Dublin Software Engineer”

    Current Employee — Software Developer in Cleveland, OH. I have been working at IBM (more than a year). Pros: Good work-life balance and working with good talent from Ohio State, You would be working on good analytics product design. Cons: Most of the work is quite boring and repetitive. Advice to Management: Need to ditch the old methods and try inheriting some of the new methods used in the startups.

  • “Lead Recruiter”

    Former Employee — Recruiting Consultant in Atlanta, GA. Pros: Status, pay, benefits, opportunity, other workers. Cons: Kenexa — no employee loyalty. Throw you out like tissue paper if client doesn't like you. Advice to Management: Good recruiters are not easy to come by.

  • “Contractor vs. Full Time”

    Former Employee — IT Architect in Boulder, CO . I worked at IBM (more than 8 years). Pros: Very flexible work schedule, good vacation and sick leave. Working from home is a plus. Cons: USA-based outsourcing is constantly under bid, and with less than knowledgeable global resource staff. GR staffing can rarely compete with even the most mediocre USA-based resource. Constant layoffs, managers forced to give X amount of bad PBC reviews. Advice to Management: Less upper management; bid outsourcing deals appropriately and staff them the same.

  • “Working with mainframes”

    Current Employee — Software Engineer (Band 6) in Poughkeepsie, NY. I have been working at IBM (less than a year). Pros:Very relaxed environment, hours are very chill and people can easily work from home. No one will care if you leave early as long as you finished your work. Great compensation for the work. Cons: Working with mainframes means working with technologies that are very dated. Location of this site is pretty meh.

  • “Great people, terrible company”

    Current Employee — Anonymous Employee. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 3 years). Pros: Great people can be found with good skills, knowledge and support. Cons: Terrible management of employees at a corporate level and end-of-year review systems are reliant against 'peers' with the term being so broad and the person defending your case likely knows little about you. Advice to Management: Link people management more closely to the employees involved to promote understanding and good will.

  • “The elephant moves slowly.”

    Former Employee — Senior Hardware Engineer in Atlanta, GA. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 10 years). Pros: Great benefits with good medical and vacation. Cons: Long hours, work even on vacation. No job security. Advice to Management: Not enough room to say everything they need to know.

  • “Not for the faint of heart”

    Former Employee — Anonymous Employee. Pros: Pockets of great people — who work really hard for the company and don't get much in return (except a pay check). Cons: Highly bureaucratic (worse than the government); constant re-organizations; onerous processes. The endless downsizing actions mean more and more work piled on fewer and fewer people.

  • “Opportunity Manager”

    Former Employee — Project Manager. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 10 years). Pros: IBM paid for my Masters degree and offered much room for growth. They have a professional board on which I sat for 17 years. Cons: IBM lost the perspective that the employee was an asset to be invested in and changed their outlook to that of a cost. Advice to Management: IBM needs to step up its image with the millennials, and increase the cool factor. It's not clear that it is transitioning to remain the leader it once was.

  • “Rudderless”

    Current Employee — Anonymous Employee. Pros: Brand name. Watson and cognitive. Cons: Lack of leadership. Spreadsheet driven leadership. Lost sight of the business.

  • “Look around, the world is changing so fast”

    Former Employee — Senior Soft in San Jose, CA.

    Pros: Lot of big empty offices. Getting to work with great people who revolutionised computer science Many people end up getting paid for nothing.

    Cons: It's like hug aircraft carrier almost out of supplies, sailing to somewhere it thinks is land. Captain is making decisions based on the gauges and dials which are broken and only really smart engineers know what needs to be fixed. But they are never being asked so they are taking out the lifeboats and leaving the ship.

    Advice to Management: Its decisions are made top down, and way down in the bottom people have really lost confidence. Most probably, people in the middle tier are faking the numbers for upper management (like Volkswagen did for EPA). If good people are leaving the company or group/team is not doing well; start the restructuring from the top. If only people in the top are punished for not achieving something they can bring in growth or even keep doing what IBM is good at.

  • “IBM is definitely not the company that it used to be.”

    Former Employee — IT Specialist in Denver, CO. I worked at IBM full-time (less than a year).

    Pros: IBM offers a large selection of web-based training. It is also nice to have the option to work from home.

    Cons: No matter how highly you are rated or how many years you work, do not think for one minute that your job is secure. A large number of my peers and I were just laid off, so they can move our work to India and pay a fraction of our salaries. If you are laid off before the end of the year, you get screwed out of the company matching 401k funds. No respect or value to employees is shown. In fact, IBM will not release any information on how many jobs are outsourced per year, but the number of U S employees is definitely going down. Finally, there are too many layers of management. If they want to save money, this would be a good place to start.

    Advice to Management: Understand that employees are more than just numbers. When our jobs are eliminated, it has big impacts for many of us. For example, I have a special needs child who requires expensive therapy sessions. Without a job, it is hard to pay for these. Become a human being and understand this! Will WATSON end up having an Indian or Chinese accent?

• Alliance for Retired Americans Friday Alert. This week's topics include:
  • Negotiators Reach a Deal on TPP – Alliance Members Focus on Stopping it
  • Hillary Clinton Joins Sanders and O’Malley in Opposing TPP
  • House, Senate Democrats Propose Fixes to Medicare Part B Premium Increase
  • Minnesota Alliance Stands up to Drug Company Giveaway

  Download a PDF version.