Salary Benefits:
IBM offers good salaries and joining bonuses for college hires. i caution potential hires to give considerable thought before joining IBM. I believe there are better places for smart techies.
Career Growth:
IBM's workforce is around 330,000 and its revenues are 97 billion $ annually it fares badly compared to most other top tier companies in the revenue/employee ratio. IBM employs plenty of mediocre talent (and some good talent). I know more than one advisory engineers who cant write or read a Class diagram and plenty of testers, who cant tell the difference between black box testing and white box testing. To grow in IBM you will need to acquire plenty of non technical skills to grow in the technical ladder like "get it done" attitude, working around the system, "not look at the big picture", "manager, over customer", "code first, think never". Most IBM developers will fail to clear MS SDE phone screens.
If you are not a top rung programmer, IBM does provide a long ladder and good salaries if you are willing to put enough hours and have/acquire soft skills. If you are from the top rung, you might get frustrated with the environment suited for mediocrity.
Manager:
Managers in IBM can make or break your career. There are good managers and bad managers, but you should never trust your manager. Always watch for yourself. Relationships matter a lot in IBM. "you scratch my back and i scratch yours" is the way to build them.
There is a mentorship culture within IBM. It is very important for people new to the company.
I heard from a manager that 70+ % of employees who leave IBM never make it past Band 7, a staff software Engineer level. i.e. IBM's policy is get them young, get them cheap, grind them to dust.
of late, it is almost impossible to move within the company and with the company's focus on reducing the workforce it is getting tougher within the company.
Overall Comments:
I have worked for IBM SWG for almost 4.5 years now, in various divisions and roles and i write this review based on my experiences.
IBM SWG is a huge organization, it is bigger than most other companies. While the culture within the organization varies, i will point out what i feel are the common traits across the organization.
Products:
The most important observation about IBM is that IBM does not make the best products (with some exceptions). IBM does not attempt to make good products. While IBM products perform well compared to their competitors, this is because of IBM's pricing schemes and their established customer base. IBM sells its products well, doesnt make them as well as they should. I have seen products with number of lines of code less than my undergraduate projects.I have seen utterly unusable products(bloated, slow, user-unfriendly) being shipped to customers. The internal review process in IBM rates teams, managers and executives in delivering in time rather than delivering good products.
http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/
http://blog.ibmindiasucks.com/2007/04/19/troubleshooting-by-trial-and-er...
http://www.tungsai.com/blog/?p=18
Find below some relevant links about what it means to work at IBM.
http://www.thinkandask.com/news/ibmpeople.html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20071228_003726.html
http://www.allianceibm.org/jobcutstatusandcomments.php
http://www.allianceibm.org/salarycomments.php
http://www.allianceibm.org/visitorcomments.php
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/ibmemployeeissues/
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