Company: IBM
Date: 2012-02-12
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former

Great "On the Job" University, Tops Down Re-Organizations Create Insurmountable Chaos
Pros: Highly recommend for new professionals just starting out. You will attain an IT PhD at IBM. If you succeed, you will have had to learn how to be self-sufficient, work outside the box, learn skills and expertise they don't teach you in college, and have the opportunity to work in many different fields or aspects of IT. Be prepared to wear many hats. While there is no funding for individual education activities, there is plenty of access to other education resources - online campus, self-paced resources or via company intranet combing through different organizations, departments process and technical information.
Cons: In my opinion, constant crazy re-organization and re-process engineering leaves big gaps in resources, services. Major dictatorial decisions impacting mission critical capital, resources, programs or services are made high from the gods above--even account or dept. executives are out of loop--so employees must be able to change on a dime, relearn functions, processes and contacts. Maintaining customer sat and relationship becomes near impossible in this environment. Keep ideas, opinions, emotions in check as speaking up will only land you in big trouble. Key people, employees and contractors, go missing with no advanced notice or backfill planning--the survivors have to keep swimming against the tide. Or worse, it's like being on the Titanic and watching your co-guests fall-off the sinking ship. Budgets for customer travel, education, professional development for North American IBMers diminished year over year, sometime frozen in Jan for whole year, making new business, customer relationship maintenance, and professional development virtually impossible.