Company: IBM
Date: 2009-01-05
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current

Little chance for pride in what I work on
Pros: At least in my organization, there are few impediments to working from home, where I tend to get more work done during busy periods than I do at the office. (However, I'm discouraged from working at home more than twice a week. Managers have told me that, because of a lack of office space, there are people who patrol our work areas, on the watch for absences of over two days and supposedly eager to transfer unused spaces to other people.)

Also, you can show your appreciation for people who have helped you out by giving them a Thanks! award. This award allows those people to choose a gift from an internal site. Although the items all have "IBM" sewn, etched, embossed, or whatnot on them, some of them are useful.

Finally, my health insurance served me very well recently. My service provider paid out large claims promptly and never second-guessed the opinions of my doctors. I can't say more about that without the risk of identifying myself.
Cons: We are given much direction about the sorts of goals that we should be seeking; however, we must meet those goals on top of completing grossly understaffed projects. For example, near the beginning of every year, we're told what our organization's strategy is going to be. Higher-ups give presentations that span the entire strategy, while senior staffers present on substrategies meant to ensure the success of the larger one. Every year, the strategies seem to encompass more than they did in the previous year. Yet, we have many fundamental problems in our processes that lead to poor quality in what we produce. The yearly blasts of strategy never address these problems, instead tending to aggravate them because they ensure that we will continue to look elsewhere for our self-respect and job satisfaction than in producing quality products and decreasing the aggravation that leads customers to call our support line.

Moreover, the goal of our management team seems to be to push more features into our products more quickly, and not take time to address a growing accretion of defects, shortcomings, and other insufficencies.