What are IBM like to work for?

jesus_thats_gre

Hi Lads,

Has anyone experience of working for IBM in Ireland? Not really sure what I want to know, just curious of the peoples general opinion tbh.

Cheers

mick.fr

I would not be able to say much as I have not worked with them directly.

But I have meet a few people who have worked for them and they are living or have been raised on another planet.

IBM is not what is used to be anymore.
IBM does not innovate anymore, IBM went trough financial difficulties for the past 10 years, selling different parts of the company years after years because they are not flexible enough and have not been able to evolve and adapt itself to the market.

IBM does funny TV ads (positive point but who cares).
Years after years IBM is losing market shares in PC sales.

IBM support sucks, IBM hardware and solutions are too expensive, too monolythic, too rigid. You are simply paying for the huge and unjustified amount of employees. Does not worth it.

Personally I see the company like a giant wall where behind it we you would have some guys with blue suits and no future.

DublinWriter

They treat their employees very well, AFAIK from the handfull of people I know who work for them both here and in the UK.

However, the company tends to be insular and a culture in itself. The IBM'ers I know tend to indentify themselves very much with the company and are solid company men/women.

As the previous poster said, IBM aren't exactly high-profile anymore, but they havn't gone away you know! They still undertake some cutting-edge R&D and while they sold off their PC business and the mainframe and mini has almost been wiped out, they still make a lot of money from the thousands of patients they own.

Despite recent financial trouble, they're not going away anytime soon.

Dingatron

mick.fr got it spot on. I haven't worked for them but I deal with them almost every day(UK and Ireland). Sometimes I think they are a firm of lawyers and not an IT firm at all. Everything rigidly by the book and I can imagine life in the office would be a barrel of laughs. Not too tar them all with the same brush but their support from personal experience is a disgrace. Hardware is fantastic tbh but it'll cost ya! I believe they pay well and they run loads of training courses which the employee's can attend for free. Costs 2-5k for 5 days training. You would learn a lot and if I was younger I'd consider spending a year or two there to train up but they also take your soul.:eek:

Johnny Storm

I heard from a friend who works there that its very bureaucratic.

Dingatron

Very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very. Think I've made my point!

cwynnes

No offence to the ppl on this board but ye havent got a clue have ye? i think ye are only guessing.

mick.fr: the reason IBM is more expensive than the rest is quality, you pay for quality, i have an IBM myself and i will happily pay over the odds for another one, the build quality is great, very reliable, its in a league of its own, IBM is very popular with businesses because of its superior quality,

Dublinwriter: IBM sold their PC business to Lenovo, and if you have research into Lenovo you will find that IBM own a percentage of that company as it is.
The IBM mainframe is still big, and very popular, they are the market leaders after all

And now for my 2 cents, having worked for IBM before, the truth is they dont treat their employees well enough, ive heard and seen too much about their employees getting screwed over when it comes to promotion opportunity,
The pay isnt very good either, im not going to mention figures but the area i was working in it was clear the employees just didnt really get what they deserve

DublinWriter

cwynnes wrote:

The IBM mainframe is still big, and very popular, they are the market leaders after all

The mainframe is dead. Mini's are even deader!

There was a time most largish companies ran AS/400's and the 360 range was the king of the mainframe heap.

The whole main/mini marketplace shrinks year on year.

IBM will eventually retract back to being a purely red-dwarf R&D outfit. I can't think of one other thing they excel at or any significant marketplace that they dominate.

LoGiE

It seems the two people bashing IBM the most haven't actually worked there, the OP asked has anyone experience of working for IBM in Ireland not what you've heard there like to work for. I worked in IS for 12 months and found it a very positive experience. They have a good training program and are strong believers in promoting from within. As far as money goes the graduates starting point isn't great but it gets better. On hardware I agree they are more expensive but as another poster mentioned the build quality is superior imo. (I work in an environment with both HP Servers and IBM P series servers)

IBM does not innovate anymore, IBM went trough financial difficulties for the past 10 years, selling different parts of the company years after years because they are not flexible enough and have not been able to evolve and adapt itself to the market.

I don't think your seeing the whole picture. Yes they've sold a lot of the manufacturing side of there business, but they've bought dozens of companies to bolster the services they can offer. The entire consultancy arm of PriceWaterhouse and Copper for instance.

BostonB

What has this got do to with their product?

mick.fr

cwynnes wrote:

No offence to the ppl on this board but ye havent got a clue have ye? i think ye are only guessing.

mick.fr: the reason IBM is more expensive than the rest is quality, you pay for quality, i have an IBM myself and i will happily pay over the odds for another one, the build quality is great, very reliable, its in a league of its own, IBM is very popular with businesses because of its superior quality,

I am not guessing, this is based on facts and my 10 years experience in the IT industry.

Their xSeries PC Server line is not badly designed I agree, but all their other products are not IBM. Dell are selling the same re-branded tape libraries etc.
So I prefer to pay Dell because they are cheaper than IBM, plus enterprise support at Dell is far better than IBM.

HP Proliant servers are far more better than IBM xSeries anyway, and cheaper as well. So what is the point to buy IBM servers?

Technical support at IBM is a joke. Mainly done from India.

IBM Device Drivers, firmware updates etc...is a real joke.

the_syco

During my brief stay at IBM [rant]cut short by a f**king "little" test[/rant], I saw that it's not bad, fairly ok enviroment, and they seem to support their employee's socials, which is always a good thing. Their support ranged from not only different languages, but also supported different companies. I don't know about support for IBM products, but working for IBM support seemed good, and the people I call shadowed seemed to enjoy it.

Just, eh, if you get a job there (and aren't foreign) "the" test matters (the foreigners never had to do "the" test). Thats all I'll say about it.

Stheno

I worked in IBM from 1997 to mid 2000, enjoyed working there, the hours could be long, and it was fairly bureaucratic, but then again most large companies are.

Pay was ok, not brilliant, but I enjoyed working there, got plenty of training and fairly structured career progression.

IBM are coming to the forefront again in terms of their services offerings within the industry, according to some recent articles I have read.

Stark

What part of IBM are you thinking of working in? IBM Ireland is huge and they have all sorts of departments there.

jank

The mainframe is dead

Making a bit of a comeback afaik.

I read something interesting in the business section of the times last night.

It was an article regarding microsoft and the outlook for the company in terms off its new big releases like vista, loghorn etc.

Anyway the line that stood out for me is that "Microsoft do not want to become another IBM"

A lot can be read into that line. IBM were the kings of the IT world now they are seen as old and out of touch. They need a apple style revolution... where is Bill Gates when you need him?

mick.fr

jank wrote:

where is Bill Gates when you need him?

Billou is gone for good now.
He just resigned from Microsoft.

Yeah Steve Balmer would be nice, Apple's got too many cases on their back right now. Being sued by everybody. So yes he might be available pretty soon.

Steve please come over to help IBM lol...

Billou call me if you need some ideas on how to spend your billions :-)

DublinWriter

jank wrote:

A lot can be read into that line. IBM were the kings of the IT world now they are seen as old and out of touch.

All empires rise and fall.

Don't forget that IBM practically made Microsoft by letting them develop their own DOS for the PC. Even the invention of the PC by IBM was done by a left-of-field team who were allowed to work in their own autonomous unit away from corporate HQ back in the late 1970's.

But Microsoft is still at the very top of its success curve...their massive inertia means that they can turf out any old piece o' crap (or acquire it) and sell it to the corporates. "No one gets sacked for buying IBM" has now become "No one gets sacked for buying Microsoft".

At the desktop there's only so many times the big corporates will spend millions updating the dancing paper-clip. At the server, NT is only starting to have some of the managability and security that Novell had 10 years ago.

Open Source hasn't gone away you know. I've seen some of the most beaurocratic and conservative IT public-sector shops in the history of the state openly deploy RedHat at the server-end very successfully after struggling for years with the likes of IBM AIX and HP UX and paying vast amounts of money for the privilege.

The big Microsoft-killer will be if Open-Source makes the great leap forward onto the corporate desktop. I don't expect it to happen any time soon, but here's hoping.

jank wrote:

They need a apple style revolution... where is Bill Gates when you need him?

I hope you really meant Steve Jobs. I has the misfortune to listen to Bill Gates speak for all of 30 minutes at the Windows 95 launch in the RDS in 1994. I never heard a more boring, nasal, uninteresting speaker in all my life.

Gates, by all accounts, was a lucky stiff and a below-par programmer, in the right-place at the right-time, surrounded by the right people and had more breaks than Evil Kenevil.

Raskolnikov

"the Test"?

damnyanks

DublinWriter wrote:

All empires rise and fall.

Don't forget that IBM practically made Microsoft by letting them develop their own DOS for the PC. Even the invention of the PC by IBM was done by a left-of-field team who were allowed to work in their own autonomous unit away from corporate HQ back in the late 1970's.

But Microsoft is still at the very top of its success curve...their massive inertia means that they can turf out any old piece o' crap (or acquire it) and sell it to the corporates. "No one gets sacked for buying IBM" has now become "No one gets sacked for buying Microsoft".

At the desktop there's only so many times the big corporates will spend millions updating the dancing paper-clip. At the server, NT is only starting to have some of the managability and security that Novell had 10 years ago.

Open Source hasn't gone away you know. I've seen some of the most beaurocratic and conservative IT public-sector shops in the history of the state openly deploy RedHat at the server-end very successfully after struggling for years with the likes of IBM AIX and HP UX and paying vast amounts of money for the privilege.

The big Microsoft-killer will be if Open-Source makes the great leap forward onto the corporate desktop. I don't expect it to happen any time soon, but here's hoping.


I hope you really meant Steve Jobs. I has the misfortune to listen to Bill Gates speak for all of 30 minutes at the Windows 95 launch in the RDS in 1994. I never heard a more boring, nasal, uninteresting speaker in all my life.

Gates, by all accounts, was a lucky stiff and a below-par programmer, in the right-place at the right-time, surrounded by the right people and had more breaks than Evil Kenevil.

Steve Job's is just a sales guy. IBM, Microsoft and Apple were all very much in the right place at the right time. Thats part of being a major success.

chavezirl

Hey,

First and foremost I do not speak on behalf of IBM and my comments are my own thoughts and not those of IBM. This is my first post on boards.So go easy on me.

I won't enter into the discussion as to where IBM is in the market place. Needless to say IBM is one of the biggest companies in the world.

I am a currently working for IBM and think it has a great environment in terms of personal development and access to cutting edge technology. There are great opportunities in IBM to excel like anywhere else. Working on new and improving technology.

I would encourage and have done so for anyone seeking a career in Technology to apply to IBM. It offers a great environment to work in, with great people, all seeking to drive innovation in technology.

Hope this helps

Just to add the guy was asking what it is like to work in IBM, not the price of servers or the service they provide.

TheNog

I worked for IBM for nearly 6yrs in the MicroElectronics building. For the frist couple of years it was ran by American managers and was a graet place to work in. We were very well looked after with good bonuses, social nights and the pay was alright. Besides that they really put a great emphasis on people working together and we had the best craic. After that the Irish managers took over and gradually they brought the place down. Your bonus could be lost something so bloody small, social nights were done away with and they dampened our spirits. People left in droves and that was when they started taking in foreigners. I don't have anything against foreigners at all but they were taken advantage of. When the SSD building was operating they gave all the temporary employees a christmas card which contained their P45s. Thats the truth. I left it about 3 years ago and was glad I did. I could see that MD was slowing down and eventually closed a couple of years ago, SSD closed down before that. I have some friends still working in the campus in Lotus and apparrently that place is worse than MD was before it closed. Don't know much about Server though. My cousin works there and he goes on trips around the world and loves it.

So it really depends on what job u are going for. My opinion is that IBM will not be here for long. I'd say that they will move out completely within the next few years, if they last that long, to a country with a cheaper work force.

Stark

A guy I used to live with worked for customer support in IBM. He said they treated him like ****. Zero benefits and they didn't give him a single payrise in the time he was there despite bringing new people in on higher starting salaries. He since moved to doing technical support in other companies and hasn't looked back.

I'm working in the software development lab myself (what used to be Lotus). It's a decent enough place to work for, the people are amicable and the work is interesting. The lab is gaining a reputation for high quality development which gives some hope for its future as the penny pinchers eye up India (unfortunately some work has been moved over there). The other hope is that India will get too expensive

On the bad side of working there, the benefits are nearly non-existent and the facilities are ****. You won't get so much as a free cup of tea in the place, such is the mentality when it comes to spending money on staff. As you might guess, yearly salary increases are abysmal and most people leave after 2-3 years to get a competitive salary. Having IBM on their CVs does look great for them though.

mick.fr

TheNog wrote:

I don't have anything against foreigners at all but they were taken advantage of.

That's because they were not french, what do you want nobody's perfect...

TheNog wrote:

When the SSD building was operating they gave all the temporary employees a christmas card which contained their P45s. Thats the truth.

That's insane lol

mick.fr

chavezirl wrote:

Hey,
First and foremost I do not speak on behalf of IBM and my comments are my own thoughts and not those of IBM. This is my first post on boards.So go easy on me.
...
I would encourage and have done so for anyone seeking a career in Technology to apply to IBM. It offers a great environment to work in, with great people, all seeking to drive innovation in technology.

Just to add the guy was asking what it is like to work in IBM, not the price of servers or the service they provide.

How much did they paid you to say that ? No just kidding...

Well I am sure you are sincere. As some previous posters said they were delighted, depending of what position they were working on.
All companies have some sort of social issues anyway, not only IBM of course.

Your point about servers, prices etc.. is well fair.
I have to admit, partly because of me, this thread went a bit off topic.

Now my opinion remains the same.