IBMers Are Losers

Let me offer my perspective on the things you mentioned.

1) IBM is cheap

Amenities at my site have stayed largely the same for the 9 or so years I've been here. The coffee and tea has always been free and the pool and ping pong tables haven't moved. Having said that it wouldn't hurt to get more niceties, this company might help itself by doing a better job of appealing to the Google/Apple/Facebook generation, but that's largely a site by site decision I imagine.

2) Incompetent colleagues

In my 9 years I can't say I've ever had a truly incompetent, useless colleague make it past the probationary period. The people I work with are mostly highly skilled, but that doesn't mean they're good at everything, some people are definitely sub-par at some things.

3) Too much structure

My manager has 20-something people to manage and thinks we need another manager. I can't blame him, a manager can't be effective having to deal with that many people, especially with the new checkpoint system giving them more to do.

4) Product Quality

I'd agree to some extent here. Despite the level of skill on our team we're just asked to do too much with too little and we've had to cut corners to do it.

5) You are a cog

I've had 4 managers and 2 team leads in my time at IBM. My team leads were excellent people, especially my first one who took me on as a student. All 4 of my managers have been decent or better; the 2 I've had for the majority of my 9 years have been very good in my opinion.

6) Retention rate

I agree, we've had a tough time with retention. We also don't seem to attract a lot of interest, and it doesn't help that the company seems to have frozen external hiring far too often in the last several years.

7) "Undeveloping" skillsets

Agree, sort of. I've picked up invaluable skills in my 9 years here, things I think other employers would pay the moon for, to be honest, but it's largely plateaued. Partly it's because I've been working on the same thing for 7 out of 9 years, but partly it's because I don't have time to do new things and branch out. The stuff I work on has a lot of room for you to grow, but there's never enough time to do so.

8) Snide colleagues

Can't say I've ever come across this. The 40 or 50 people I work with are largely pleasant, co-operative people to work with. A couple have been acerbic in some cases I'll give you that, but I doubt that it exceeds the rate in the general population.

9) Ruining the OSC (open source community)

I have no idea what you've been reading on the internet, but the IBM people I'm aware of that contribute to open source are very well respected in the communities they participate in: GCC, the Linux kernel, Glibc, binutils, various Apache projects, etc. Some very prominent people in the open source world are IBMers: Rusty Russel, Paul McKenney, Anton Blanchard, Ben Herrenschmidt. I'm probably missing many.

10) Value fresh minds

I wish. We lose more people than we gain and we're always looking. Part of it is that the stuff I work on is very low level and probably scares certain people away.

/r/IBM Thread