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Sam Palisano rarely took my calls while I worked for them.

I too worked for Sam, as IBM bought a company that I sold for and when they did my stock options at $ 4 were worth $18 so I've got no complaints about IBM.

You are correct, while I had access to all of the senior executives at the company {we were a billion dollars company, not peanuts, but just about 1% of IBM} that IBM bought, access to senior execs at IBM was, because of company size, very limited.

I do miss the thrill of the deal, but retirement has many benefits, like any time is tee time.

I only worked for IBM for about 5 minutes. It was one of those situations where my division was outsourced to them, I changed employers, and kept the same desk. Frankly, my opinion was generally negative - their "Global Services" division (what I worked for) was too bureaucracy-bound to accomplish much. Seemed like it was where IBMers "ended up", rather than aspired to work in.

No matter, while I was there they cut 10,000 people from Global Services (they could have trimmed a whole lot more, IMHO), and I found out about it a couple of days later from Yahoo Finance. Scared me enough so that I beat feet out the door at the first opportunity.

Wound up at the aforementioned small company. Like it, so far. Good thing is that it's never the same day twice, bad thing is that there's no place to hide. If a system breaks, I need to fix it, period, because there isn't anyone else.

Retirement is still a good ways away. Meanwhile, this is a decent gig. I usually get home in time to have dinner with the family. Pay is OK, but they don't ask me to work too hard, either. As IT jobs go, and with experience in working at some real meatgrinders, I can't complain too much about what I've got.