IBM reviews

Management lies, and as a first line manager, I know ... Indeed my management chain requires me to lie to my team: people I trust and respect. Lies and misrepresentation are the IBM family values, particularly for personnel issues and also for business metrics. That is the biggest downside - you never know when you're getting the straight story. For example, the PBC system is a ranking system. A first line manager is told what their "skew" has to be - the company advertises that a first line manager can use their own judgment for differentiation between team members, subject to some oversight to ensure equity. In actual fact managers are told what to do and are required to lie to their team members so that the executives can make their metrics. There are many other examples - and I see them every day - it always comes down to managing the metrics, rather than the results.

1. Cliques mean good opportunities go to friends and families, impossible to break into the "Club" 2. Lot of dead weight 3. Professional development managers are (typically) not great achievers and don't know how to motivate or manage high-performance employees 4. In practice, technical excellence is not given high priority; is fundamentally a sales organization 5. Easy to get stuck in a silo and feel like Rip Van Winkle in a couple of years