IBM reviews

3.9

78% would recommend to a friend

(107,137 total reviews)
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Arvind Krishna

76% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

IBM has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 107,137 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The IBM employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

107K reviews
2.0
Jun 29, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

IBM has some very bright people and some good technology. They allow flexible work hours and location. Benefits and compensation are industry average. Work/life balance is generally pretty good.

Cons

IBM is old and it shows. It doesn't really feel like a technology company. Processes are cumbersome. You can just imagine some ancient mainframe software running the place. I worked in the software business group. The overall feeling was that software engineers were interchangeable. There must be something wrong with you if you wanted to be an individual contributor and liked to write code. Promotions and awards were much more about politics than technical merit. There are too many rules and managers are afraid to push back. Employees are constantly told what they cannot do along and threatened with potential penalties. A couple of examples: print jobs needed to be picked up within 30 minutes or you're cited by security. Office doors need to be locked and blinds drawn when away from your desk for more than 15 minutes. Silly stuff.

4.0
Jun 27, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The IBM corporation offers best in industry flexibility with regards to work location, work at home options, flexible hours and minimal focus on counting vacation days. The high level of technical expertise and leadership within Systems and Technology group creates great growth opportunity as most senior technical employees serve as passionate mentors accelerating the career growth opportunities for up and coming engineers. The full systems development ownership ranging from chip design to wafer fabrication to system manufacturing enables a tight interlock between the development engineers and the teams responsible for building machines for our client set. The "womb to tomb" ownership of a design enables a broad development experience.

Cons

Reduced hiring in the 1990s created long term impacts to the demographics of the organization as there is an obvious experience gap between the 20+ year employees and the 10 or less year employees. This experience gap creates a challenge in providing incremental steps in leadership and responsibility for the employees in the organization working on accelerating their career development. Although the mentoring opportunities are phenomenal, the struggle to gain design ownership and a feeling of key technical decision making is limited. Employee morale, organization climate, weak middle management, politics, organization complexity, and a feeling of too many executive leaders are additional negatives impacting the progress of this organization.

2.0
Jun 27, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There is still some feeling of teamwork among certain practice groups. It is possible to get good experience because you are working so closely on solving client's problems. This experience comes on the back of the client and has your mgmt may have very little to add.

Cons

Lots of travel to client site to stay in horrible IBM selected hotels. Once you are on-site on the client you may have two spend your days working with the client and your evenings talking to IBM India. Lots of staffing challenges trying to find competent technology folks in India. Overall, a very difficult place to work.

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