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Highlights—March 19, 2011

• eWeek: IBM to U.S.: Headcount Is for Us to Know, You to Find Out. Full excerpt: If I was an IBM stockholder, I'd be mighty confused about Big Blue's reluctance to break out its workforce numbers for North America in its annual report. IBM has stopped informing shareholders of regional breakouts for its employees. The company only lists total number of employees, which is now at 399,409 worldwide--an increase of 954 employees from 2008.

  Recent news in 2010 showed IBM continuing to lay off North American employees. Last year, it was estimated that IBM eliminated over 10,000 jobs in the United States and Canada while the work for those jobs has been moved to other countries, according to former employee reports and reports from the Alliance@IBM, an organization trying to unionize U.S.-based IBM employees.

  IBM will not confirm the eliminations.

  You see "global integration" of IBM operations mentioned a fair amount in the report. If you are wondering what that means, put it in the context of what IBM calls "workforce reduction actions"--something it has done with regularity in 2009, but gets no more explanation than this in the following statement: "In response to changing business needs, the company periodically takes workforce reduction actions to improve productivity [and] cost competitiveness and to rebalance skills."

  IBM is a global company, indeed, but what harm is there in telling your valued stockholders the locations--even regionally-- of your headcount? What's the big deal? You used to provide that information. Why the pull back?

  It's easy to focus on earnings, but it's harder to focus on what you did to get those earnings in a year where you admitted revenues were down. Why can't you let shareholders know that you are chopping U.S jobs and replacing them overseas to benefit from foreign tax deferral and improve the bottom line?

  Here is how Samuel Palmisano, chairman, president and CEO of IBM, put it in his letter to shareholders (PDF) in the annual report:

  "We delivered strong results in 2009, once again achieving record pre-tax earnings, record earnings per share and record free cash flow -- despite reduced revenues. At the same time, we continued to deliver superior returns to you, our owners... The explanation for this performance -- and for our optimism about both the near-term and the longer-term future -- is threefold. It rests, first, on the ongoing transformation of our company; second, on our focused strategy to capture the large opportunity of a globally integrating world..."

  IBM is becoming a model company for killing good U.S. jobs while it supports the need for more H-1B visas within the United States and benefits from foreign tax laws. Kill off U.S. jobs, keep the dividend strong and keep your marketing "smart."

  Here is what IBM boasts to its shareholders:

  Since the dot-com crash in 2002, we have added $12 billion to IBM's pre-tax profit base, increased our pre-tax margin 2.5 times, quadrupled our earnings per share and more than doubled our free cash flow. Cumulatively, we have generated about $80 billion of free cash flow.

  Did you add up how many lives you have ruined?

  "By hiding its offshoring, IBM is doing a disservice to America--through omission the company is providing misleading labor market signals and information to policymakers," said Ron Hira, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, to Computerworld's Patrick Thibodeau.

  If this is what all this "smarter planet" marketing is about, then, yes, IBM, you have outsmarted many, and are helping to make the United States a poorer part of the planet.

• Morningstar: On Cathie Black's retirement from IBM. Excerpt: Cathie Black, the former chairman of Hearst Magazines, isn't known for being sensitive. After New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg got some flak for appointing her as New York City's next school chancellor, she made even more enemies by (jokingly) telling concerned parents gathered at a meeting that the best way to solve overcrowding problems at NYC schools was birth control.

  But it looks like Black may have had the last laugh. In December, right after she signed on as chancellor, she retired from the board of directors at IBM (IBM) with one of the largest director compensation packages that we've ever seen: a whopping $3.3 million.

  According to the computer company's March 7 proxy, that includes $260K in earned fees, and $3.1 million of earned compensation and dividend reinvestments. That's more than ten times the $300,723 she received last year, according to IBM's 2010 proxy. Last year's compensation included $40,623 of dividend equivalent payoffs on her Promised Fee Shares on top of her $260,000 earned fees.

  As we've said many times before, that's not too bad for a part-time job.

• Yahoo! IBM Pension and Retirement Issues: Opinions strong on state pension issue. By Kathi Cooper. Full excerpt: It's your money. Your pension consists of your deferred compensation, plus any promises made by IBM. I was a Financial Analyst for 25 years and your deferred compensation was booked into an SEC (Standard Expense Classification) called Burden. We called it L&B for short (labor and burden). Your total compensation was always more than what was claimed on your 1099, but you never saw it, because the law says they don't have to disclose your true cost of your benefits. Your deferred compensation was taken out of your total compensation by your IBM serial number. It wasn't tracked after that by your serial number though. As soon as it was taken out, it was pooled, with others, to be used by IBM according to the limits that ERISA would allow them to do.

  I've told you for 10 years that 'It's your money, you earned it.' and I mean it.

  When IBM froze the pension plan, your piece of deferred compensation ceased to be booked. They 'made' a ton of money because it was no longer their 'Burden'. Kathi

• Yahoo! IBM Employee Issues message board: "Re: Any news on IBM 2011 Salary Hikes?" by "makeyourignorancework4u". Full excerpt: Until I learned some hard facts of life from my son and daughter in laws, I always thought IBM engineers were paid pretty well also. I do remember new college grad engineers receiving about $60K/year about 10 years ago..so $70K/year more recently doesn't surprise me very much.

  However what I learned from my son who graduated bout 10 years ago as a CPA was that he started fresh out out of college at only $40K/year, BUT he averaged a 15% raise EACH and EVERY year since and after 10 years is making 4X the original $40K/year...and that's not counting the bonus he gets every year....AND he is by no means a "1" performer in his job. His wife is probably closer to that and gets about 2x what he gets.

  The problem with engineering pay according to my son is that although it is relatively high right after college, it doesn't do much thereafter. At best a "Senior Engineer" will be earning 2X what the college grad gets. So If the new guy got $70K....the Senior Engineer with typically 20+ years experience will only be getting $140K/year. That's 6 figures alright...but it comes down to a REAL average raise (after inflation) of only slightly more than 3%/year.... AND that holds only for the GOOD years...which don't se

  What has happened in the IBM as far as I can determine amounts to Salary Hike Shell Game. Only the "1" performers and "outstanding contributors" get a "decent raise" which may average as much as 3-4%. The very good ones probably get 2-3% every other year...and thus average about 1.5%. All the rest...about 50% of the total get to keep their job if they are lucky.

• Yahoo! IBM Employee Issues message board: "Have a Strong Stomach?" by "blue_in_pok". Full excerpt: ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/annualreport/2010/2011_ibm_proxy.pdf. For as often as I hear the word 'team', it sure seems like Sam and the executives play for different team than the rest of us common folk.

  Cathy Black gets $3M for leaving to take the NYC school chancellor job. BTW, NYC signed a big contract with IBM for IT consolidation, I'm sure that was just a coincidence.

  IBM allows execs to use company air craft to travel to BoD meetings of OTHER COMPANIES if they happen to be on more than one board.

  Execs get compensated for travel to and from their physicals.

  How do I get my annual performance 'award' to be based on the same metrics as Sam ?

  Still wonder why your GDP was lower than last year ? Seems the perks never trickled down out of the board room.

  I also noticed that BlackRock is now right up there with State Street as one of the major share holders. Any one know who/what BlackRock is?

• Yahoo! IBM Pension and Retirement Issues message board: "COLA Promises" by "danmayerinetport". Full excerpt: I was employed by IBM for nearly 35 years and was a manager from 1992 thru 2005 and participated in many HR prep sessions for resource actions, in Boca Raton and in Austin. Never as an employee or manager did anyone ever say to me or give me a presentation saying or implying that COLAs would be part of the pension plan. Even back to my early career, I don't remember any presentations or Annual Benefits statements saying anything about COLAs. I do remember being told in an mid-1970s HR presentation that retirement was a 3-legged stool: pension, social security, and employee savings. I heard variations of that statement repeatedly through my career.

  Like most, I didn't pay attention to retirement financial planning until relatively late. At around 25 years, by running the estimator program multiple times with different inputs, I became aware of the enormous amount of pension payout at stake by staying with IBM for the next few years. That prompted me to wade through the details of the pension plan document. Once I understood the formulas and tables, the mysteries of the estimator program's answers went away and I was able to plan effectively for retirement. And of course the pension plan document speaks to a constant payout and does not promise COLAs.

  Because it seems that a lot of people have memories of COLA promises from HR or upper management that don't correspond to my experiences, I'm wondering if this was something that was site-specific.

• Yahoo! IBM Pension and Retirement Issues message board: "Re: COLA Promises" by Dr. James Beaker Jr. Full excerpt: Most of us tried to make the same plans for retirement, but many of us were not allowed to stay with IBM long enough to earn a bigger pension. The day I left IBM (quite involuntarily) at age 53, I was told by a co-worker that 7 other people from the same building were being let go and that all of us were of ages 49 to 53. It occurred to me later that this may not have been age discrimination as much as, that the "big pension benefit" was the reason we were being kicked out. The great IBM benefits we were earning were the reasons we were gone. Later I heard that young employees with less than 5 years service were also being let go so that they would not earn any pennies of pension at all.

  f only I could have just listened to you and chosen to stay with IBM until I was 55! But that's not how it worked. IBM had a choice too, which it exercises very often. I would have assumed that an ex-manager of IBM would know that we didn't always have that choice of staying at IBM as long as we wanted to. How could you have forgotten? As a manager, you probably saw it up close and personal. Did you tell yourself that these people being laid off were choosing to leave IBM by their own choice?

• Yahoo! IBM Pension and Retirement Issues message board: "Re: COLA Promises" by "danmayerinetport". Full excerpt: There was a time in the 1990s when IBM pay was severely lagging competitors and many people, including myself, were being offered higher paying jobs by the competition. That's the choice to which I was speaking. Many people took the offers of higher pay without realizing how much future pension payout they were giving up.

  The larger point was that reading many of the posts on this forum, I have the impression that many never bothered to look into the retirement plan at all until a few weeks before leaving IBM. Looking at the plan wouldn't have avoided a layoff, but it would have helped better plan retirement finances, regardless of whether eventual separation from IBM was voluntary or involuntary.

  Obviously we don't have time machines and can't go back and make different decisions. Going forward, I think it might be helpful to stop viewing IBM as a parent who betrayed their child. The bitterness in many of these posts goes well beyond the financial setback of a layoff and reduced pension and instead speaks to expectations found in a child/parent relationship. Employment is not a parent/child relationship. For those who may have viewed it that way, it's never too late to change.

  As the old saying goes, holding onto bitterness and similar feelings is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies from it. The bitterness you hold onto is poisoning you, not the other party.

• Yahoo! IBM Pension and Retirement Issues message board: "Re: COLA Promises" by Dr. James Beaker Jr. Full excerpt: As the old saying goes, holding onto bitterness and similar feelings is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies from it. The bitterness you hold onto is poisoning you, not the other party.

  I wondered how managers were able to emotionally/mentally handle laying people off year after year. They absolved IBM for any of it's actions, and blamed or labelled the ex-employee as "bitter" or "disgruntled". If it helps you with your conscience, then maybe you don't have one. I avoided becoming a manager just for that reason, I had a conscience and could not face laying off so many good employees.

  What I saw were underpaid, dedicated, and loyal employees who were working many hours of unpaid overtime for an IBM that then in untold thousands of cases laid them off at the whim of an accountant somewhere. I realize that the first-line manager had little say in the matter, but let's stop blaming and labelling the laid-off employees, shall we? Those employees wanted to work for IBM, and were led to believe that we were part of the IBM team. Don't change the story now.

  Much of the reason for the layoffs was to save on benefits, perhaps mostly on the pension benefit. Let's just all accept it that the layoffs were a money-saving device and stop calling laid-off employees names. Grow a conscience.

• Yahoo! IBM Pension and Retirement Issues message board: "Re: COLA Promises" by "thefielder". Full excerpt: Well, this manager, who was one for over twenty five years, and told to "get rid of" the bottom 10% of my employees responded by saying the bottom 10% were removed four (4) downsizings ago, and I refused. I also argued that the current salary plan administered which essentially pits one dept employee against another is wrong. Bottom line, I stepped down to a non-management position, which is the best job I ever had in IBM. I worked to enhance IBM without compromising my principles or beliefs. To be honest, it helped that I worked for "old school" executives who appreciated and understood my position. A lot of line managers do not want to do what they are being asked to do.
• Yahoo! IBM Pension and Retirement Issues message board: "Re: COLA Promises" by "divaberyl". Full excerpt: I agree that many managers hate RAs. . The problem is that after several actions and no new hires, you are choosing between having electricity or running water.

  We who remained in management did everything possible to minimize the pain of our decisions on the affected employees and those who remained. I slept well at night because I did my best to treat my employees as I'd like to be treated. Having been on the RA list once, I knew how important it was to carefully administer the plan. (A glass of wine helped.) Beryl (happily retired for 41 days)

• Financial Times: Prosecutors say trader passed tips from 'intimate' ties. Excerpts: Raj Rajaratnam, the hedge fund billionaire on trial for alleged insider trading, received tips and swapped information with a cadre of associates including one trader who peddled information she obtained from "intimate" relationships with two executives, prosecutors said on Monday. ...

  Mr Kumar testified that in 2008 Mr Rajaratnam told him that his value as a source was "a little bit diminished" because he had another source in Danielle Chiesi, a Bear Stearns hedge fund trader who had "intimate" relationships with Hector Ruiz, the then-chief executive of AMD, and Robert Moffat, then an IBM executive.

• Glassdoor IBM reviews. Selected reviews follow:
  • IBM Anonymous: (Past Employee - 2010) "Good to have on the resume- just be aware that you are just a number." Pros: - Good health benefits; - Looks good on a resume; - Flexible work at home jobs; - If you like to travel, you can see parts of the world on their dime. Cons: - Be aware that you are just a number that can be replaced at any time; - Be sure to get a high starting salary because raises are very small to nil; - Annual bonus used to be up to 20% of salary, that has been reduced to about 6%; - Limited promotional opportunities; - Always feel like you could be laid off at any time; - Company continuously has lay offs about every 6 months; - Management doesn't care about you and be prepared to get laid off at any time; - Most employees would leave if they could find an equivalent job and the ones with pensions are just waiting around to get laid off and get the package. They don't care about the company. Advice to Senior Management: Bring back the days where the company actually cared about the employees. Since Palmisano took over the employee morale has plummeted.
  • IBM Client Manager in Glasgow, Scotland (United Kingdom): (Current Employee) "Demoralising." Pros: - competitive salary; - flexible working; - lots of opportunities. Cons: - stress and expectation levels; - workload ridiculously high; - zero work life balance; - lack of investment; - focus on cost reduction; - lack of reward for double digit growth; - processes and administration. Advice to Senior Management: Forget EPS and acquisitions, invest in staff and research, reduce workload, processes and unnecessary admin,
  • IBM Anonymous: (Current Employee) "Its a grinder run by bean counters." Pros: - Working from home means you have a lot of freedom; - You can travel and learn about different cultures and business environments; - Benefits are OK; - Time off is pretty good; - Innovation is honored. Cons: - All cash is used to buy new companies and legacy employees get squeezed to pay for it; - Execs are compensated primarily with stock so huge; -Focus on pleasing wall street; - Communication is very secretive; - There is no relation between your yearly rating and compensation; - Management talent is really poor. Internal training is non-existent; - Travel needs to be approved by 3rd line management; - Business cards need CFO approval; - Internal processes are byzantine; - Senior Executives rotate from one assignment to the next but are never held accountable for poor management or performance; - Employees get no recognition and job security is low. Advice to Senior Management: Slim down executive ranks. Give more power to managers. Focus on product development, not just acquisitions. Bring back job training and a focus on people management.
  • IBM Sales Representative in New York, NY: (Current Employee) "Overworked, sales comp plan has *gotchas*" Pros: For Sales folks - you can leverage the client team matrix (I have heard - so far it hasn't worked for me.) If you can reach them, there are some really SOLID tech folks (when customers complain about bugs.) Cons: Sales plan is dismal at best - if you work the same amount at another company, you probably would make twice as much...many gotchas in the sales comp plan - not the best way to retain hard working sales folks. Competitive products within IBM itself - and you probably would be selling only one of those products, No work/life balance - you are expected to work over the weekends. Takes 3-4 days for folks to respond to your emails if it is not urgent. Not a place to make money.
  • IBM Senior Software Eng in Pune (India): (Past Employee - 2010) "IBM-Worst Cmpany-No package, No Skill Set." Pros: Flexible timing and Work from home sometimes (only if u got laptop here and less than 50% people get that.) Cons: Bad things:
    • Variable pay : If ur variable pay is 1 lac, u will not be given more than 30 K and that too with best rating. Normally average people do not get more than 15K -20K (15%-20% part from the variable pay.) Unlike other companies...they pay 80% -100% from the variable salary and even 110%. So in the CTC, they show big package, but pay much less than that. So ur actual in hand salary will be : Total salary - variable salary - performance bonus. i.e., ..u will get only fixed salary as annual package in hand and not more than that. You can almost neglect the variable salary and performance bonus from ur package as they are paid almost nil at end of year.
    • Variable pay is paid only once a year in March. So who left the company after 9-10 months, his/her variable pay will be lost. Unlike other companies where variable pay is given quarterly. So u can almost neglect the variable pay from ur package which will not be paid to you.
    • Very-Very Low package : While joining , company gives very less hike (normally not more than 20% -25%). u r very lucky if u got more than that. But hike is very -very less here and that too not paid well.
    • Appraisal : Appraisal is almost nil here. Maximum 2%-3% after 1 year and that too with best rating otherwise for average rating, not more than 1%.
    • Work field :well in IBM, u will be recruited for some other technology and will be put in another technology. People with SAP skill set are working on excel sheets here. People with automation testing experts are forcefully dumped into maual testing. This practice is very -very common in IBM. So technical u r very much risky here. Do not join here..if u r techie guy. ur all skills vl be ruined here.
    • No Process : there is no process for anything at all in this company. u will be lost here for everything. U will run here and there miserably for any help and end in losing everything.
    • HR :-ha ha ... I was here for long time and i have not seen HR in this company. no body knows who is their HR and no comm from their side also.
    • Performance bonus : this is a part of ur package (3% of CTC) but will not be paid more than 0.5 % at all ..does not matter how well u have performed.
    • there are lot of other hell things in the company.....a jungle of politics..... here everything is in ur people manger hand.
    • If u resign before one year, they will make ur notice period from 1 month to 3 months and again u have to fight back for this. Officially notice period is 1 month for first 1 year in company but they will increase that to 3 months whenever they want (before completing 1 year) ..generally with in 7-8 months of period
    • The iteration rate of company is more than 40%. From here only u can imagine, how dissatisfied are people from this company.

    I highly recommend NOT TO JOIN this company, not even by mistake. U will ruin ur carrier here.

    Advice to Senior Management: 1. Pay variable salary to employees as mentioned in offer letter. 2.Provide project to people in their skill set rather than throwing them anywhere. 3.Pay proper package as per market standards

  • IBM SSR: (Past Employee - 2010) "IBM going downhill - Thanks Sam! You'll be remembered!" Pros: If you like politics in trying to advance and to raise your base salary, but next to impossible to do so, this is the right company for you. Cons: Lower management scared and not knowledgeable of where IBM is going. SSR's treated like dirt. If you are an SSR and not treated like dirt, you have a unique and awesome manager, but managers do not have the power they once did to give to good employees. Seems everybody is the bad SSR every PBC. New hires with little or no experience will likely make more than you after 10+ years of working for IBM. IBM has excuses year after year on not being able to give you a raise or decent bonus due to whatever excuse they would like to provide you that year, even though your performance, company performance, etc, is great. You are much better off going to another company that does similar MA repairs that will treat you better and 10-15k more a year on your base! Advice to Senior Management: Keep up the bad work and IBM will be a ghost from the past. We need to unionize to prevent Sam from the greed and horrible job he is doing
  • IBM Manager in Dublin, County Dublin (Ireland): (Current Employee) "It used to be good, but now... Pros: Career opportunities. Opportunities to learn. Structure to learn thousands of job's to choose from. Cutting edge world changing projects. The people. Good direction from Management. Flexibility and good work/life balance. Structured appraisals process. Slackers identified and marginalised or booted. Some really good people managers. Good structure with local management. Cons: It's all about shareholder profits. Sam makes no sense. Politics hampers innovation Too many people there to steal your thunder and cut your throat while doing it Trust diminishing within. Senior leadership live in ivory towers - disconnected completely from the coal face. Entirely scorecard/numbers driven, the bean counters are in control. Bean counters are not human. Austerity measures poorly implemented - stifles creativity and demoralises. Too much reliance on process. Poor compensation compared to others in the industry. Poor rewards, pittance for being a 1 performer 5 years in a row. Takes ages to get any changes made. Some really bad people managers, cause attrition of really good people. Coveting of information that could make change (politics driven.) Poor communications at times (left hand right hand stuff.) Bad change management. Did I already say Exec's live in ivory towers?. Advice to Senior Management: Executives get out of your ivory towers. Put the bean counters back in their boxes. Keep coaching for performance. Identify and fire the slackers, don't wait for them to infect the solid contributors. Pay for performance, over an beyond your competitors. Recognize the hard workers if you want to keep them. Watch your competitors, because they are watching and pinching your best people. Ditch the 20th century way of appraisals, we've moved on now. If you have a good idea, implement it, your often late to the post because of processes. Halve the processes, they are not needed. Invest in a proper management development program and be consistent. Make the first day for a new hire so amazing that they will sell their soul to you. Kill the acronyms already.
  • IBM Anonymous: (Current Employee) "I have worked hard with little advancement." Pros: At IBM you have the ability to work with numerous Fortune 100 Clients as well as the ability to learn new technologies. Cons: At a company you tend to feel like a number and not a person and many times executive decisions tend to be about the bottom line and not what's best for the personnel.
  • IBM Consultant in Washington, DC: (Past Employee - 2009) "Don't practice what they preach." Pros: Good benefits, pay is OK, but not great. You could have the opportunity for travel (which appealed to me). As a result of working for IBM, you get discounts on a ton of stuff, like AT&T / Verizon phone bills, Audi cars, Hertz #1 Club Gold, 1800Flowers, etc. Cons: Executive and senior management pays only lip service to innovation, despite the fact that it is a core "value." As a consultant in the federal sector, you will likely have very little professional contact with your Service Area Manager ("SAM" - direct line manager). Consequently, s/he will not have a clue what you do each day on your project(s). When time comes to distribute bonus money (if there is any), managers are bias towards those of their employees they happen to work with on a project or work closely with daily. Cut-throat culture favors an "it" crowd, similar to high school. Award fees and biz dev bonuses end up only going to those who are in-the-know, and are invited to work on proposals. If you're not in this crowd, forget it. There is no process for keeping employees abreast of new business or biz dev efforts. Staffing is extremely difficult. They have Resource Deployment Managers, who are in charge of matching resources up with projects, but they're overburdened with administrative duties and they're working from the same database of positions that everyone else is. Also, it's not mandatory that an open slot be posted in the database, and most are not, as they are filled through word of mouth. So again, if you're not in-the-know and very well-connected, you will have trouble getting staffed, regardless of your skill set. Advice to Senior Management: Increase transparency and take better care of your employees. Implement new, more transparent, more progressive approaches to staffing engagements, and stop treating your employees as just a utilization figure.
  • IBM Director in New York, NY: (Current Employee) "Going down the drain." Pros: - Looks good on resume; - International exposure; - Learn a lot from the business model; - Flexible working hours. Cons: - CEO pay package increased 30% in 2010 while the company laid off American workers and cut bonuses and benefits; - IBM employment in the USA has dropped from 160,000 in 2000 to about 95,000 in 2011, while job growth abroad has risen to over 300,000; - Management is completely secretive and treat employees like the enemy; - Everyone looks after themselves and doesn't care about the company; - Extremely competitive environment internally and promotions require approval from circles of executives two levels up to make sure new club members won't rock their boats; - No merit recognition. No merit bonuses. No meritocracy at all. Advice to Senior Management: The last 100 years of IBM history had major benefits for employees and society. The next 100 years will only benefit wealthy shareholders.
  • IBM I/T Specialist in Southbury, CT: (Current Employee) "I've gone from knowing nothing about the I/T Industry to knowing almost everything there is." Pros: Excellent Brand. IBM is the industry leader in technology, business, and strategic management. IBM is smart, they consistently evaluate the market 5 years in advance to be prepared to react to changes and thus to do and therefore, they are more prepared than their competitors. Cons: There is no longer any job security working in the U.S. offices. IBM strategically uses globalization to transfer technical positions to low labor cost countries. Although this is strategically and financially beneficial to IBM, it hurts U.S. employees in two ways: 1) More and more US employees get laid off ever year. 2) Growth opportunities and opportunities to move around in the company are drastically shrinking year after year. Advice to Senior Management Management: Leads with a top-down approach and thus tries to implement change the same way. Employees are resistent to change because of the methods used for implementation. Management needs to involve lower level workers in ideas and changes in order to get better buy-in and get better ideas from the people that know what's going on. Management has good strategic ideas on paper, but unless you talk to the people who do the work, you won't know if those ideas are actually real, beneficial, or a disaster waiting to happen.
  • IBM Anonymous in Chennai (India): (Current Employee) "Just a gift wrapper - the brand name." Pros: 1. Work from home option. 2. Transport facility. 3. Good amount of learning opportunities. 4. Good infrastructure. Cons: 1. Poor compensation. 2. Appraisal system is very bad. 3. Complex procedures for smaller tasks. 4. GDF concept and its audit. 5. Worst cost cutting policies. 6. No free/subsidised food or snacks. 7. Poor resource deployment. Advice to Senior Management: IBM should really treat its employees equal. Not just in the policy. The managerial dictatorship should be checked. Good compensation should be given to employees who have stuck to the company for sometime.
  • IBM Senior Unix Administrator: (Past Employee - 2011) "Never again, even if it pays more." Pros: If you have good technical abilities you will get exposure to large and varied environments. If you have good skills and that includes negotiation skills then you can get decent pay too. There are some nice people there and good managers. Cons: Work is farmed offshore to lower skilled workers, as a result I spent large amounts of time cleaning up major issues created by others. Excessive red-tape and bureaucracy No work/life balance, check-in/check-out mentality, permanents get no overtime and "time off in lieu" is rarely used and never equal to the overtime taken. too many politics and bullying is not stopped in the workplace Advice to Senior Management: Cut costs by reducing red-tape overhead and using highly skilled and experienced employees. Encourage innovation on non-IBM platforms within services as it drives down running costs. Encourage a flexible work environment, that means flexible work hours and flexible work location, both have been done in the past at IBM and it improved employee morale, scrapping it was a mistake.
  • IBM Project Manager in Minneapolis, MN: (Current Employee) "Experienced Project Manager." Pros: IBM has an excellent compensation and benefits package. They are a technologically innovative company with opportunities to learn on the job. Cons: There are no opportunities for career advancement. There are no opportunities for local positions. All positions are work at home only. Advice to Senior Management: It used to be that you were guaranteed a position as long as you performed. There is less loyalty now that your job can be outsourced at any time.
  • IBM Software Engineer: (Past Employee - 2010) "Okay." Pros: Great vacation package, health, 401k. Cons: Promotions and bonuses are based on performance review. The company encourage team work but the ranking system forces everyone to look out for themselves. Diversity is not well supported in some areas. Jobs are being outsourced and too many layoff in the last couples of years.
  • IBM IT Architect: (Current Employee) "Working experience can be very good once you know how to navigate within IBM and workaround poor management." Pros: Big opportunity to work on wide spectrum of technologies and large projects. Working for a market leader. Opportunity to work with very talented people. Career opportunities (see cons as well). Generally good ambiance and team spirit with your peers. Cons: First line management inefficient due to lack of flexibility and initiative. No retention policy EVEN for outstanding elements. Lack of management support for career opportunities. IBM moved from being a very technical enterprise to a pure commercial enterprise. Advice to Senior Management: Management has shifted and is now more oriented towards "business management" only. There is no place for "people management" anymore.
  • IBM Managing Consultant in Melbourne (Australia): (Current Employee) "Good." Pros: Wide range of job roles. Some nice and very smart people at the company. Good to have on your resume! Cons: Thick management, too many people sitting around. Not enough doers. Have a plan to keep long time employees rather than using the place as a body shop. Advice to Senior Management: Listen to employees. Don't just hide behind your computer screens. Get out there and really know your employees.
• Yahoo! IBM Employee Issues: "Re: Corporate mandates" by Paul Sutera. Excerpts: Well it is strange how a regulation-heavy country like Germany, easily more bureaucratic and with more worker protections still managed to expand exports in the last 10 years while the USA lost 36% of its manufacturing base during the business-friendly Bush/Cheney years. I'm not buying that we must deregulate more or face further economic contraction and fewer business startups. That said, the German government and the Chinese government work with industry to ensure that factories stay on-shore and also help clear importation hurdles for their goods.

  I don't think the USA has been at all proactive in trying to hold jobs and manufacturing in country. In fact I think the government was bribed with campaign donations to look the other way while the middle-class jobs were bought and sold, and factories were dismantled in-place and placed on boats to be reassembled in China with millions of US jobs lost.

  Basically the case you are trying to make certainly may be MORE true in a depressed economy. Especially since your biggest consumers are not doing so well. But deregulation is WHY your biggest consumers aren't doing so well because tanked the finance sector leading to the largest recession since the Great Depression. I'm not at all convinced that more deregulation is going to build a factory or a business here in the USA. Local governments meanwhile seem to be slowly getting it.