Company: IBM
Date: 2016-09-20
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

You get out of it what you put into it
Pros: - Competitive pay
- Great benefits
- Lots of opportunities to move around in different areas of the company
- Flexibility with hours (depending on department)
- Lots of work-from-home opportunities
- Much more casual (clothing and otherwise) than you'd think
- Travel if you want it
- Telling people you work for IBM typically results in a "Oh, wow!" which is nice

I've found it to be easy to advance by putting in some extra effort and trying my best to do a good job. This might seem a little obvious, but that's the honest truth and most people don't seem to go the extra mile, so you stand out if you do. I've moved departments three times by making connections, but you don't necessarily need to because there's an internal job search that you can use to find other higher paying or more interesting positions once your foot is in the door. 

This is both a pro and a con, but i'm putting it here..Most of the people I have worked with are life-long IBMers (maybe 85% in my current department). Typically these people stick around because they're comfortable, which you can also do...just stay at your job, collect your 4-8% raise a year until you're 62, you'll be perfectly safe to do that and that's absolutely fine. However, these people tend to have more of a tenured attitude towards their job and are less inclined to be innovative or even effective in some cases, because there's very little incentive. This is not always the case, but it seems to be about 50/50 out of the lifetimers. I haven't found it to be at all competitive, and you're never really at any big risk of losing your job if you're somewhere in software. I've actually never heard of anyone being fired ever...if you're not working out, it's a lot easier to just shunt you off into another department rather than let you go. For me as a young person (young-ish...30) living in NYC, I find the lack of motivation and unwillingness to change very frustrating, especially considering the dynamic nature of the internet and internet technologies.
Cons: - It's a huge company
- There's a ridiculous amount of management (way too much) 
- Lots of red tape in lots of places
- Slower to 'get with the times' in a lot of ways
- It's not got a cool agency feeling to it at all, which can't come as a surprise because it's over 100 years old
- Even the newer offices are designed more for style than for comfort of the employees working in them. The agile spaces are loud and uncomfortable. The old ones are just cubicles straight out of the 80s (which, at this point, I would prefer 100% over the fancy new ones) 
- The culture really bums me out over all