Company: IBM
Date: 2016-04-03
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Waste of time
Pros: -I’ve worked with some very talented and helpful people, who were committed to doing great work and mentoring.
-IBM still looks good on a CV. Though I’m not sure if it will for much longer…
Cons: -Staff morale is very low, and it gets lower with every round of redundancies. Have a look on the IBM subreddit to see what I mean.
-Work/life balance can be terrible. Employees often refer to it as the ‘Institute of Broken Marriages’. They’re not joking.
-Bonuses are poor or nonexistent. It’s been hard for high-performing colleagues to accept a 1% bonus when the underperforming CEO was awarded 300%.
-Upper management are out of touch. They only seem interested in sending out mass emails to get people to read their blogs.
-Many IBM products are buggy and unfinished. Often a product will be sold to a client with false promises, and it’s up to project teams to try and cobble together a working solution.
-The training budget is dismal. IBM seems to think that on-the-job learning and free online books are a substitute to proper accreditation. I don’t feel this job has given me any skills that are valuable outside of the company.
-You can spend half of your time wrestling with cumbersome internal bureaucracy.
-It can be hard to get a hold of your People Manager (PeM). Often, your annual review will be conducted by a PeM who has been too busy to get to know you. This can make your performance rating feel rather arbitrary.