IBM reviews

3.9

78% would recommend to a friend

(107,253 total reviews)
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Arvind Krishna

77% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

IBM has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 107,253 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 Tecnologías de la información industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

107K reviews
2.0
Jan 29, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Flexible work schedule but expect to work much more than 40 hours a week. If a new hire they will treat you better for awhile until the favorites are chosen and the next batch come in.

Cons

Below average pay for above average work load. No pay raises for several years in a row. Raise have been below CPI since Gerstner left. Lower level management is very political and petty. Upper level management completely clueless. They think being a "me too" company will lead to profits.

5.0
Jan 20, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The shift from a hardware-centric to service-centric and now to a cloud and cognitive service model. A transformation of this kind is not easy for any company with more than 75,000 employees let alone 400,000 that IBM has world-wide. Google reports at 57,000, Apple around than 80,000, Blackberry/RIM at 7000 (at its peak) to put into perspective. Blackberry led the market was too comfortable and failed to transform to market demands. Many, many of the leaders and executives at IBM have Engineering, Computer Science backgrounds - they aren't your typical no-work experience MBAs. They make decisions very analytically (as Engineers tend to do) with their clients in mind trying to help solve business and world problems. That problem was once mainframes, servers, storage and systems; evolved to implementing and building IT solutions around that hardware; now it's an hybrid cloud implement-yourself-slash-business-service. Very few companies own the entire ecosystem (mainframe, business solutions and cloud availability) - IBM does. The cognitive guys can request improvements and features to the hardcore engineering server CPU team for maximum optimization- making the most advance system easily available to all businesses. No doubt, IBM is years ahead the competition with their Watson Services and it's built on an ecosystem that is in line with the CIOs and CTOs initiative going into the future. The platform also lends well to startups and smaller companies being able to leverage and take advantage of IBM's top-notch enterprise and industry services at flexible, scalable and affordable rates. This is new ground for IBM that was typically reserved for big firms and enterprise companies. Way to go, IBM!

Cons

Old sellers not willing to adapt to what the industry is demanding will have a tough transition. Again, 400,000 employees makes it difficult for any company. People can get comfortable and changing becomes difficult. Again, Blackberry/RIM is evidence of being the smart phone leader who failed to transform and was just barely saved from a bankruptcy by being acquired for pennies on the dollar. Again, Jim Balsillie, former CEO of Balckberry, had no engineering or computer science background, and tried to run the company solely with his Harvard MBA, which he ran into the ground. IBM has a lot of work to transform a lot of people who are more comfortable doing things the old way.

1.0
Mar 17, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Flexible hours (if and only if your manager allows them)

Cons

Not known for high salary ranges, except maybe if you're in sales. GTS has terrible work environment. Everyone is stretched to the limit, paid badly and people do not really care about their colleagues. If you like to work at a place where people are friendly don't join GTS. If you're stuck with a bad manager on top of all this, your life will be miserable.

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