IBM Reviews

Cons

Employees tend to be siloed into specific roles and it can be hard to shift out of that role without making a big change to a totally different group. - You can feel "left-behind" here at times, so it's crucial to stay organized to keep up with the pace, especially early on. - Work-life balance (self-induced): it's easy to become attached to your work and your accounts, and it trickle over into your personal life after hours, or on weekends. Can't think of anything else. It's hard to find things wrong with IBM, in fact, this section took me a lot longer to provide the bullet points above then the pros section.

Cons

Project managers have no ambition and emotional leadership is rampant throughout the organization. SAP training is over-emphasized, but there are few available SAP roles for Associates. Expect to waste your time learning things that will be obsolete by the time you are able to use them. Upward mobility is nonexistent. Nearly everyone is paid the bare minimum, so nearly everyone severely lacks motivation. Those who appear to be motivated seem to be complacent with mediocrity or afraid of dismissal. IBM pretends to be modern but is stuck in 1992. If you are a recent grad considering working here, I strongly suggest that you reconsider.

Cons

IBM used to be famous for putting its employees first. When I joined, I was told about how good the benefits were, and how IBM was a "family." In the past few years, that philosophy has been discarded. Every few months upper management makes sweeping policy changes, with no employee input, that significantly hurt US employees. When employees react en masse with concern, alarm, and constructive feedback, they ignore or gaslight us, or commit the strawman fallacy by mischaracterizing employees' concerns and then dismissing them. For example, in November 2023 (right after the employee engagement survey concluded), the did away with 401k matching, replacing it with a novel financial vehicle called an "RBA" with much lower yields, and tried to spin it as a good thing for us. Based on publicly available information, I'm estimating that this will probably save IBM at least $100M over the next decade in US benefits payouts. It also means IBM holds our retirement money, rather than the employee. IBM simply does not care about retaining talent right now -- if you are a senior or well-paid employee in the US, they see you as an expense, and they're showing you the door.

Cons

Medical insurance is not at all good as it gives only 50% copay that too has different tnc . very less number of projects with no onsite opportunity. Manager oriented company , there is no hr specific to an account whom we can approach if we have some issues . Very difficult to get release from current project and move to another project in ibm ..as it depends on manager only who will ask to resign but won't release from the project. That is the main reason that people have to resign from here. Domestic projects are pathetic with no work life balance , poor management , will make you to work on weekends forcefully and with no shift allowance . I am telling from my personal experience as I have worked for one of the domestic project (telecom project) and I it was very hard to work there...had to work every weekend and in odd hours as well means they used to call at midnight as well with no shift allowance or comp off and thus I had to resign from ibm. They didn't allow any planned leaves and even if you have planned your travel in advance still they won't care and they will ask you to work during your travel..ssly ...out of the world people are here. They won't understand if someone has some emergency at home.

Cons

Here's the real reason I'm posting. 1. They've stopped 401k matching (6%) and have switched to a "Retirement benefit account" that matches 5% of your salary. The downside is two-fold, returns in the RBA pegged at 3% and you have zero choice in how its invested. If you're early to mid career this is a massive loss. Also because its an RBA and not a 401k you don't have the same protections and choice if something happens to IBM, at least with a 401k its your account, the RBA stays withing IBM's control until you leave 2. The return to office is extremely sloppy, sites not having enough workspace, "come into the office or resign" ultimatums...all of this because of poor planning

Cons

IBM is a manager centric company, everything depends on your manager & there is no such HR to hear about your problems. So, if your manager is biased then this company is hell. In my case, even after doing so much of work, completing assignments on time without delay, I got Low Performance rating for the two consecutive years. So if according to them, my performance was Low then why did they not release me from the project ? Why my project release date was still 2025. So, it completely depends on your manager & mostly managers are adviced by the Tower Leads. After every Half yearly cycle, the tower leads & other senior management call on a meeting to discuss the ratings with the manager. Ibm's Kolkata DLF 1 tower B location PMI account's tower lead is one of the worst guy. He only knows Politics & how to ruin someone's career. And there is no HR or anything to whom you can complain. Salary is also peanut. You will not get any raise, specially for those who joins IBM India from another company. DON'T join IBM India.

Cons

- Has not created a single new technology in the last 10 to 15 years and thus lost most of it's relevance in the market - Company focused on market fireworks and make believe, most of it useless beyond capturing headlines, to keep stock price from being perceived for what it's worth - Leadership mostly has eyes for their compensation (mostly stock related) so they have no incentives to really grow the company or to make bets on REAL future growth - Leadership promotes market reverberating moves like acquisition of Red Hat, spin off of services business etc. as a way to buy time while "transformation" will take some two to three years so please be patient - Meanwhile, no real growth and continuous bleeding of people being laid off and a plethora of manuevers to cut cost to try to boost earnings per share.

Cons

IBM no longer wants employees working remotely, CEO Arvind Krishna doesn't believe it improves the business. They tend to lay people off or do "resource actions" every quarter and we would literally fear for our jobs when the quarterly financials would come out. We had 2 years, 2021 and 2022 that they committed to no resource actions but instead redeployments to move employees into other areas of the company if possible but that ended quickly in 2023 and it is also hard to move internally to a new role as current employees aren't a priority unless you are an exec or more "valuable" resource. Most employees don't feel valued but as more of just an asset and a number. They have started projects to change that and change the perspective but gave up on them when they found other ways to save money.