Company: IBM
Date: 2009-06-18
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former

IBM
Pros: At its best, IBM is (was?...) a great place to work. You have the option to learn a lot, to stretch out of your comfort zone, to move to new jobs fairly easily, to work with great people, to do cool stuff. The level of knowledge and expertise available in the company is absolutely phenomenal -- the challenges are finding the knowledge, then 'drinking from the firehose' once you've found it.
Cons: At its worst, IBM can be mind-numbingly large, very slow moving, and often just plain stupid. It also appears to be moving in the wrong direction in terms of how technical people are treated. I worry that the "Pros" described above really only apply to the "Old IBM", the software, research, and (ever-shrinking) hardware divisions. The "New IBM" -- that is, Global Services, GTS etc., now more than half the company, and by far the majority of technical folks -- is a very different company. IBM Global Services has a crushingly unrealistic utilization metric, and a tendency to view technical talent as plug-compatible drones. Just hire what you need when you need it, fire them when you don't. As far as I can see, in the services side you *don't* get a chance to learn a lot, to stretch yourself, or to move from job to job easily. You are on your own to learn new skills.