In my over 10 years at Lenovo, I have noticed two types of employees that the management (former IBM employees who are now managers, directors, and executive directors at Lenovo) tend to favor: # 1 other former IBM employees and their families AND # 2 they favor the brown nosers. If you fit in either category, you’re safer than most of the others. I’m not the only one who noticed this phenomenon.
Highlight from thread +19I1wd9O. It seems to me that this is a bitter truth, unfortunately.
Doesn’t matter is you are former IBMer or not.
Your days are numbered at Lenovo.
When I mention this type of favoritism by management to my friends who are former IBMers (now retired from the former PC division), they tell me:
"It used to not be like that until the 1990's"
"They just stopped caring"
"It's not your father's IBM anymore"
The IBM PC division was losing millions and millions of dollars for years before it was sold to Lenovo. (https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/01/4494-2/)
And now, there are some of the same former IBMers at Lenovo.
So be aware and be careful! Or you'll go the way of Microchannel and Token ring!
I was in Lenovo as part of the IBM acquisition. One thing I learned is that Lenovo does not care about their employees at all. You could be King Brown Noser with all your little Prince(ss) Brown Nosers behind you. You can easily tell when a layoff is coming. About 6 months before it happens, managers start to swizzle under new managers, employees get moved under another manager, and when everything is done there is a layoff a few weeks later. In the end, it was the BEST thing ever being laid off. The worst part about it is not having the confidence in yourself to leave or old loyalty beliefs to stay with a company until you retire. If I didn't get laid off, I had no path to retirement. I would have retired, but paid the price of limiting what I could do even after investing 100% I could for 35 years. My new career has a clear path of retirement in 10 more years, $2,000/month pension, 100% 401k match up to 6%, FAR better medical. I make 20% less in salary though, but my take home pay is almost the same. Near 0% chance of being out of work again, work on my own terms, love the people I work with, and a tremendous goal oriented company with quantitative goals that are achievable. None of the garbage at Lenovo to meet unattainable goals. I see old co-workers that are in their mid-50s slaving away, dying inside from the stress and fear. Every quarter working at Lenovo is one less year of life. Get out before they k–l you.
Dark triad personalities became more prevalent the longer DCG continued abysmally failing to deliver anything but a long chain of bad faith promises and farcical transformations.
Those that stay have often had to play some very dirty games to keep themselves ingratiated with the right people and they will hang on to the IBM good ol' boy network for dear life as their "skills" (Machiavellian posturing) would never have earned them as much elsewhere.
At my time at Lenovo, the only thing that mattered was "visibility" - you need to be SEEN, and seen by the right people. It didn't matter how hard you were crushing your KPIs, it was all about how well you played the political game. I was strongly advised this by one of my managers. When I asked him "How do I be more visible?", since I was young and honestly didn't know exactly what he was talking about, he struggled to explain it in the most basic terms. This, to me, was huge red flag: If this is such a hard and fast requirement, why isn't a part of my KPIs, or explained during orientation?
The notion of 'visibility' increases exponentially up the band level ladder. Most people that tote success at Lenovo are the ones that are perfectly fine with the status quo of systemic politics and an unbelievably toxic work culture, working within that system knowing there is no way to change it. By the time I left I was fed up and disgusted with how it seemed like everyone knew how bad it was, but were just there to play the game or wait to be laid off. To me, this is no way to live.
I now work for a much better company making more money, only working about 45 hours a week. The politics are near zero within the company. People like being here and they actually have a notable amount of employees that are aged 50 and up. Better places exist, folks. Don't waste another day of your life at this life-s—ing toxic cesspool.