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recently, ibm's sudden closure of its r&d center in china has caused a lot of controversy. as a former employee of the china r&d center, many groups of former colleagues that i haven't heard from for a long time have become active again. everyone is discussing who is still there, the final compensation, and posting various old group photos.

with all my feelings, i want to write an article to record what ibm is like in my eyes, what a dream company it once was, and why it was destined to come to this point today——

i joined ibm in 2016. this was my first formal job after graduating from graduate school. internally, such fresh graduates are called pure blue.

so many years have passed, and i have seen many different companies.for me personally, ibm is the most utopian company i have ever seen.

- photos taken at ibm

my biggest impression of ibm is that it is not competitive.

at that time, i had just finished my internship at alibaba and had no idea what the style of foreign companies was like.

first day on the jobat around 5pm, i looked back and found that everyone in the office area had left...

later i found that several groups around me were like this. everyone arrived at the company one after another after ten in the morning, had lunch and a lunch break of nearly two hours, and basically left before five in the afternoon. i didn't even dare to calculate the effective working hours every day.

especially the day before holidays, i remember one time before the dragon boat festival,at about 3:00 p.m., my boss (a front-line manager) came over and tapped me on the shoulder: "why aren't you leaving yet? you need to combine work and rest."

me: ah??? there has to be some work involved in the combination of work and rest???

- after lunch, take a walk by the lake in software park

later, after get off work at five o'clock every afternoon, i would ride my bike to rongze jiayuan. the road was empty. it was hard to believe that this was xi'erqi, which was famous for its scrolls.

i am too idle every night, so i learn to cook. after get off work, i go to the supermarket to buy food.i arrived at the supermarket at around five o'clock and saw that it was full of old men and women. as a young person, i felt out of place there.

the old men and women looked at me with disdain: you are so young and you are still wandering around at this time, and you don’t even have a class to attend…

i can only avoid her gaze, this is really hard to explain!

- when i first started working, i had too much free time after get off work, so i learned to cook and posted on my moments

another feature is that there are a lot of holidays.

new graduates are entitled to 15 days of basic annual leave per year, plus 3 days of optional leave. i still don’t know what this means, a total of 18 days of annual leave.

what’s more important is that normally when you ask for a few hours or half a day’s leave, no one cares whether you have entered it into the system, so the 18 days of annual leave are genuine.

even more outrageous is thatyour boss will urge you to take vacation, otherwise it will affect some of your boss's assessments and hr will ask about it.

i can only rest with tears. i hope i can have more than two weeks of consecutive rest in ten days, and have two long rests in a year. i can travel around europe in the first half of the year and go on a self-driving trip to australia in the second half of the year.

i don’t dare to post too many messages on my moments while traveling around the world.friends used to ask: was he laid off? how could he be laid off just after starting work?

i can only be evasive in the comment section. this is really hard to explain, and people really won’t believe it if i tell them!

- a post on my moments about a self-driving trip to australia on vacation

another feature that impressed me deeply was that the relationships between superiors and subordinates and colleagues were particularly good.

first of all, among colleagues, everyone is very polite and sensible, and they truly cut off contact after get off work.

i'm on vacation abroad.i handed over the work before leaving, and no one contacted me for more than ten days...

the second is superiors. i feel that there is a superior-subordinate relationship but not much. i have never felt any imperative statements, which makes me very uncomfortable as i just came out of the internet.

there is a 1v1 with the boss every month,my boss always asks me: how are you feeling recently? are you tired from work? how is your life?

i feel like the boss is my life-giving mother.as long as i can sit at my workstation and catch my breath, my boss will be very satisfied.

normally the workload is not too heavy. every time you complete your assigned work, your boss will praise you a lot, even flatter you like crazy: you are awesome, you have great potential, and you are so efficient!

later, when people always talk about cpu in the workplace, i always say: well, i have experienced it before...

- internal team activities, plus birthday celebrations for employees

but although ibm is great in every way, although it is a utopia, although it is a magical foreign enterprise pension company...

finally left,because every ibmer at the time knew that none of this would last long.

first of all, ibm simply can’t recruit good new people.

in the years around 2000, when ibm was at its best,the average white-collar salary in beijing is 3,000 yuan, housing costs several thousand yuan per square meter, and the starting salary at ibm is 8,000 yuan.

the entry threshold was extremely high at that time, and basically all the recruits were graduates from universities such as peking university and tsinghua university. in addition to their abilities, they also had to have a good image and temperament.

theni was standing downstairs of the company building wearing my ibm work badge, and people were coming to introduce me to a date.

a former colleague told me:i had just graduated and couldn’t spend all my monthly salary. i had too much money and didn’t know what to do with it, so i could only buy a house…

in recent years, ibm's starting salary is still around 10,000 yuan, and the salary increase is slow. at this time, domestic internet companies have increased the starting salary for graduates from good schools to 300,000 yuan per year, and the salary increase is very fast.

ibm's salary was already unattractive. at that time, there were basically only two types of graduates from our school who chose to work in foreign companies:

one is to get a hukou, the other is to have some free time...

second, ibm was simply too slow.

my biggest feeling when i joined the development team is,one month's workload at ibm is not enough for one week's work on the internet.to exaggerate a bit, it is not enough to work in a day in some internet companies.

the software i was responsible for at the time took half a year to develop and half a year to test. in the internet industry, if such a project is not launched within a month, everyone will be blamed for low performance.

it's friendly to the employees, but this kind of friendliness is unsustainable because the market won't wait.

that feeling is,the dancing elephant said it wanted to transform, but it took all its strength just to turn around.

as for closing the chinese market, there are definitely some reasons that cannot be elaborated, so i won’t go into details.

- the few remaining photos of the work area

even if they were not laid off, many ibmers chose to leave on their own initiative.

some time ago, i attended a gathering of former ibmers and found that many of them realized many of their dreams at ibm after leaving ibm.

just cdl cloud team,after everyone left, they created a listed company and several unicorns with a valuation of over one billion dollars, and the core founding team was basically from ibm.

everyone sighed and said that the people were basically the same ones from ibm, but these things would definitely not be accomplished within ibm.

later, ibm actually gradually restricted everyone's development space.

just like this layoff, everyone’s permissions were shut down one day in advance, and the half-hour meeting was over the next day.

the breakup came too hastily, as if the other half suddenly filed for divorce unilaterally. he/she already has many problems that he/she cannot solve and is no longer willing to communicate.

although he/she is the first love of many people and may be the best partner in many people's lives, and although there are many beautiful memories.

but unfortunately, i can only say goodbye.

source | xi'erqi life guide (id: shelchilifeguide)

editor | litchi