IBM was not a "horrible" place to work for me.

IBM was not a "horrible" place to work for me. I got to work with a lot of very smart, talented folks. And I had several managers that helped me stay on through a series of medical issues that took me out for months at a time. No medical leave and I was always allow to hop back on the merry-go-round when I was ready.

I believe IBM senior management is clueless, inept and cruel. It's not just the missteps they've made over the past decade or so but the fact that history continues to repeat itself...each year just a little bit deeper into some circle of Dante's circle of business Hell. My last manager was a True Believer but having more tenure than he/she did I was never shy about discussing this. I suspect my former manager is now having second thoughts about defending IBM top management as the layoffs approach the front door.

Working for IBM was very good to me...thanks to the advice of my first group of coworkers I had the financial discipline to sock away every penny I did not need to live on. Fancy cars and houses were not on my radar. The layoffs of 1993 and great Pension Fiasco of 1999 drove the need for this discipline home. So I left with the ability to control my own destiny. Not everyone has been that lucky but I count my blessings and will choose my Post-IBM words carefully.

But make no mistake...senior management is clueless and it's the employees and shareholders that will pay.

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IBM is a horrible place to work. It is like a zombie apocalypse struck. The employees are stumbling through, disheartened, knowing the senior management at the helm at inept, talentless hacks, with o heart, no soul and marching inexplicably to the company’s destruction. Fear is everywhere. HR no longer will do its job protecting whistle blowers. The company is violating its own policies, double booking employees, violating the terms of contracts, cracking the whip on employees and cutting their benefits while senior management wallows in rich bonuses.

At IBM you have a day to day existence. There is no hope, the hallways are permeated with gloom and doom. IBM is not an employer you aspire to but rather a company you fall down to. It is a place for the losers and hasbeens in IT to gather. Anyone with a future in IT works elsewhere. I have to last 2 years till retirement, a survivor in a zombie apocalypse.

I dodged RA bullets too - went to work for a 45 people dev shop - we are doing just fine. I missed that personal aspect of working in teams of folks that knew each other. 22 years with IBM. First 15 were just awesome, things started going down around 2004

It depends on what you have to compare it to. Today's IBM isn't much more terrible than, say, 8 or 10 years ago. But if you remember IBM before all this started (with Akers in 1991), you have a very different opinion.

I agree completely with the OP and 2dmz. That's why I'm so angry. I'm still in IBM, regretfully, hanging in there for some vesting and 401k match, bonuses at end of year, then goodbye. It was such a great place to work for a long time, but the current management (I won't call them 'leadership') has completely destroyed it in their greed and cluelessness. Hoping IBM dies a slow, agonizing death (which they clearly are, in the view from within).

I'm with you. I was there for nearly twenty years and didn't think it was a horrible place to work. I had the chance to do some innovative stuff and work some truly brilliant people. The friends I made there will remain in my life for a long time. I was well paid and, for the most part, had fun.

But, as you said, Senior Leadership doesn't care about things like that. All the care about is showing artificially inflated profit and EPS numbers to their shareholders. They do a staggeringly bad job marketing and selling their competitive technology, have gone out of their way to mistreat and drive off top talent and continue to misread industry trends and fail to adapt.

I was lucky. I quit a couple of months ago to work for a small tech company. So I manged to dodge the rampant "RA" bullets that have been flying around lately.

So while our experience there may not have been horrible, what IBM's become most definitely is.

luck you .it is a horrible place

Thread regarding IBM layoffs

IBM was not a "horrible" place to work for me.

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