It looks to me like most of the new - mostly younger - employees are at IBM only short term - however long it takes them to get some knowledge and experience and move on to better things. Nobody I talked to in my department sees this place as their long term home.
Is this true for the entire company?
I constantly see LinkeIn updates from IBMers with new internal certifications, who cares, do something useful with your time like go see a customer, solve a problem for someone, sell anything.
Lack of loyalty works both ways. Younger employees see layoffs, infighting and low moral. When another offer comes along, they take it. Who wouldn't? The pay will likely be better. Working conditions will definitely be better.
Training ground? I have worked for IBM twice in my career. Never worth mentioning if you ask me. No one cares - unless they are looking for examples of how not to do things.
You may get a chance to join Red Hat now.
IBM doesn’t innovate anymore. They purchase innovative companies sometimes.
I feel sorry for young grads coming on because they see IBM as a “stable” company.
Whether it's a training ground depends on whether IBM can teach a young professional something they don't know and wouldn't get anywhere else. From the technical prespective I don't know what that could be.
It's true for almost every company. Lifetime employment went the way of the dodo bird in the 1980's. Now it's no longer even about planning to work for 3-5 companies over the course of a career as they used to say, it's about planning to have at least 3-5 entirely different CAREERS with twice that many employers over the course of your life. You have to constantly be learning new things and preparing for the next twist. Not arguing that this is optimal but it is reality.
You have a very smart and tuned in department. The days of making a blue career are long gone. If nothing else, after 5-10 years your income will be so far beyond the market that you'll have to leave. But it's more than that. It's dead end technology building dead end products. No innovation going on anywhere anymore. That's career death unless you go to a customer who is stuck using it. Some clueless vp sent out an email recently pushing the internal IBM career certification, not aware that it is a total waste of time, since it means nothing outside the company...and no one plans to stick around.
Its been like this for at least 25 years on the consulting side
It's a generational mentality shift. The current generation entered the work force and experienced companies continually driving for "efficiencies". Sure, there were a few big names with good employee retention and culture, but by and large most were not that way. So, many of those workers, the current generation, were taught by this that the companies don't care about them or their career. This meant that they had to take a more active role to make any progress; which meant job hopping. Keep in mind that due to technology shifts, this is probably the generation with the shortest attention span as well.
Now, I do see more and more companies pushing culture, and because of it I do hear more and more colleagues looking for a good fit over pay, but this isn't going to be a quick transition. It will take years for companies to retrain the thought process of the current generation to trust them, and for management to get onboard in rebuilding that company image.