IBM's comp isn't very good at any level, but they also don't hire much in super-high cost-of-living areas. Here in the Boston area I've only started making more

IBM's comp isn't very good at any level, but they also don't hire much in super-high cost-of-living areas. Here in the Boston area I've only started making more than any of those entry-level salaries in the last few years (I'm 32) but don't live somewhere where buying a house is a pipe dream. The real reason IBM has trouble attracting talent is that they have no idea what they want to actually be doing, from a technical perspective. They are a sales organization, and that's all that they are to anyone in a position to make decisions about anything. I took a bit of a pay cut to go to IBM--I needed to get out of consulting because it was impossible to get a bank to verify income for a mortgage--but it wasn't drastic. Even setting that aside, though, IBM was the worst mistake of my career. I left in five months because the job was so stressfully do-nothing (if that makes sense?) that I could literally feel myself becoming a worse person, not in a "technologist" sense but that of a human being, by being ground down by that culture.