Company: IBM
Date: 2019-02-13
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

IBM Cloud Support Engineer - Get in, get experience, get out ASAP.
Pros: * Liberal vacation/sick day policy :

5 sick days off, 2 weeks vacation, 4 days personal choice holiday in addition to the observed holidays in your region.

* Free cloud account. 

As a Cloud Support Engineer (in whatever functional block/technology domain), you will have the ability to provision infrastructure and lab things out for free. This means that you will have your own lab in the cloud to experiment and learn as much as possible. This is by far the best benefit as otherwise you would be paying thousands of dollars for the opportunity.

* Direct exposure to insane amounts of enterprise technology.

If you want to become a system admin, this is the perfect place to gain the chops to do so. You will be exposed to NFS, iSCSI, virtual networking, high availability protocols, load balancers, CDNs, the full 9 yards. You can learn to be a VMware guy, a Citrix guy, a Storage guy, a Juniper/Cisco guy.. whatever you want. Exposure is accelerated based on the functional block you are placed in, which is the tech that your team will focus on.

* Free snacks and drinks in the break room.

If you love stuffing yourself with junk food and chugging Mountain Dew, you will enjoy it.
Cons: * Zero career growth. 

Your career will die here if you let it. 

IBM loves to pretend that you have a future with them. They have its managers hold these things called 'Career Conversations', and these serve as just ways to fool you into thinking that they care about your career growth when in fact this is not the case. It's just to try and inspire hope in you and try and keep you around for another year or so.

When you apply for jobs internally, you will never hear back from the managers, and the job postings will just sit there more months and months without closing. Preference for actual hires is given to external people as opposed to internal people.

* Zero useful training. 

They try and train you but it is all reading based as opposed to  experiential, and what you will end up dealing with is never what you read about. 

In this job, you are essentially being thrown out to sea. If you swim, good. 

You will -always- have to learn new things on the fly. 

* This job is essentially a call center. The 'Engineer' title you're given is just to impress customers.

This is a stressful environment and people will be calling in all the time, demanding that you treat -them- as special, and to treat all their issues as a Sev 1.
God forbid that you work in either the Network or Security functional blocks - you will always be overworked even when the other blocks have downtime, and will be dealing with WebExes day in, day out.  

* No recognition at all for your personal progress and learning efforts. 

You could become a GOD OF TECHNOLOGY still no one would blink an eye, least of all management. If you are expecting to be rewarded for going above and beyond, this is the wrong company for you.

* No raises. 

Whatever you are offered in the beginning, that's it. If you are even offered a COL adjustment, take this as a hint that your direct manager loves you and bothered to even fight for it.

* Insane amount of scope creep.

In theory, this job is supposed to be 'Support', and the customer manages their own environment. 

In practice, you are now the underpaid and overworked systems administrator of thousands of different companies, especially if you are dealing with a VIP. If that customer so much as hints at being unhappy, the technical account managers will come in and harass you until you make them happy, even if it means that what you end up doing is far out of the reach of the terms of service.

* Management does not understand your pain or what you are dealing with.

IBM is saturated with managers and middle managers who have no idea about the tech their teams deal with, and just exist to serve as an additional link in the chain. When you explain something technical to them or why something didn't work, their eyes glaze over. 

What you have to understand is the following: 

If you just want a job where you can clock in, cruise and clock out, this is the job for you. To survive in this environment, you have to be emotionally dead inside.

You can't care about anything or take anything personally, because this is the environment that management cultivates even if they refuse to recognize it. 

The customers are the priority always, even if it means that your quality of life or mental sanity takes a hit. You have to learn to tune out the angry customers, the lack of career progress and apathy by management. They do not care about how good you are. You are a meat puppet to them, make no mistakes. 

Management does not care at all about talent retention or paying you what you are worth. They will hire some college kid with no clue what SSH and DNS are to take your place.

This is a great place to start your career. This is a horrible place to let it end.