Company: IBM
Date: 2018-06-07
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

Bureaucratic but with good benefits
Pros: Overall, I enjoy working at IBM. The company is big and diverse enough that you can't paint a good picture of it from the point of view of a few employees alone. There are good projects and bad projects to work on, you can work with state-of-the-art tech or give support to old mainframes, work in a cubicle or in an open space, the list goes on. I work as a contractor to one of IBM's clients and I like my job. I have stability, my career path is well defined to the point that I know the milestones I need to reach in order to progress, and they offer lots of benefits and expenses reimbursements. Working from home most of the days is also an option for me.
Cons: IBM's internal processes are still very bureaucratic in my opinion, I at least spend a lot of time filling work reports multiple times due to internal systems that don't integrate with each other, performance evaluations requiring lots of artifacts as proofs, etc. It's borderline painful. I also feel like they have a hard time catching up with the latest market trends, and they try to fix it by creating marketing buzzwords to call attention to them (I'm looking at you 'cognitive'). I find it's hard to feel motivated here, especially if you consider how big of a comfort zone you can find yourself in.