Company: IBM
Date: 2017-01-31
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Good not great
Pros: -The designers, PM's, Managers and Front-End Devs are very smart and very welcoming
-Beautiful studio
-Great healthcare (I have the best plan with only $350 deductible)
-Great work/life balance (varies from team to team)
Cons: -High turn over

-The pay. I found out with 10+ years of experience I get paid 20K more than a college grad. I got a bonus last year ($1500) and none this year. Pay raise of 5% which wasn't bad as a general statistic but terrible when you look at my base pay. IBM is investing in college grads by trying to pay them more... news flash they leave anyway and then so do your Senior/Lead designers because you pay them an embarrassing amount. You blew your wad on the new shiny toy out of college that bailed 1 year later. Congrats.

-The back end devs are determined to kill the world of good design. We cannot make a wonderful experience and have it be implemented in a reasonable amount of time. By "reasonable" I mean small CSS changes take 2 months and CRITICAL features to help us even half way compete with competitors like AWS take a year. It's filled with old dinosaurs developers who think that they can design and we are just worthless people that wear skinny pants.

-Offering Management (OM) is mostly useless. I have met one or two that were amazing at their job, the rest cannot understand what their job actually is. They are not art directors and they are supposed to deliver to us the main goal of what the design is supposed to be based on actual market research. Most of them have zero clue what actual market research is or what is valid.