Company: IBM
Date: 2020-01-07
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Exactly what you'd expect
Pros: The amount of people that you will meet and interact with (especially working from home) is phenomenal because there are over 400k of them around the world. If you're young enough, this can be a crash course-- almost a business degree and the inner workings of a very large company, from the terminology, the bureaucracy, and networking in general.
Cons: 1) It's an old company and quite a few people are still holding out for retirement, so it’s not the “freshest” mentality. 
2) Lay-offs are extremely common, products are pushed out or sold before they're even built, and my personal biggest issue was that female managers trying too hard to be in the "boy's club" that is IBM. This results in a lot of unnecessary competition and jealousy between females over ridiculous stuff, but it’s really only a problem when that female is your manager. In other words, there isn't a lot of support amongst the females because there are so few and the glass ceiling seems to be on the first floor at IBM. I normally wouldn't even notice such a thing because I’m not a raging feminist, but it was cut-throat there. One or two instances, okay, maybe it's me, but it was rampant. Consequently, by the time I left, I worked for one of the best bosses I've ever had (a man) and was happy to leave on a good note. 
3) There's also a lot of nepotism because a lot of the younger people that do come to work there are almost always the offspring of someone who's worked there for most of their life. The higher up the parent, the better the gig or building address/location (NYC/Austin) for their kid. 
4) If you want to move to another position in the company, there are usually plenty, but you have to network. I held several positions in my four years there, mostly due to layoffs or complete dissolution of my department due to the whim of some organizational consultant, but I rarely landed another position from someone I hadn't networked or dealt with before. They like to do "informational interviews", which is just another way of finding out if they like you or not before they go through any of the enormous red-tape to do an official interview or bring you into their department. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I can imagine there are some people who aren’t really good at networking, but are phenomenal at their job, who don’t get to move up, or on, because the ONE person on the other end of the phone has written you off before you’ve even applied.
5) Used to be able to work from home, but they started changing it when I left in 2016 to making people go into unprepared and ill-equipped open-office spaces. Working from home made people more comfortable, which reflected in their work attitudes.
6) Last, but not least, were the times (too many to count) where I was instructed to work on something that was of utmost importance and urgency, only to be told hours or days later that they had completely scrapped the idea and moved on. It was hard to ever feel accomplished when what you toiled and slaved over for days was thrown out the window. I literally would stay up all night working on something my boss had told me was an emergency only to be told in the morning she’d changed her mind. Calls from Caribbean islands during a cruise were not unusual, either, as she HAD to have my password to get into a system immediately. How is that even okay?!