Company: IBM
Date: 2008-06-27
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

IBM STG - Great Role, Great People, Middle Management Broken, Morale needs focus
Pros: The IBM corporation offers best in industry flexibility with regards to work location, work at home options, flexible hours and minimal focus on counting vacation days.  The high level of technical expertise and leadership within Systems and Technology group creates great growth opportunity as most senior technical employees serve as passionate mentors accelerating the career growth opportunities for up and coming engineers.  The full systems development ownership ranging from chip design to wafer fabrication to system manufacturing enables a tight interlock between the development engineers and the teams responsible for building machines for our client set.  The "womb to tomb" ownership of a design enables a broad development experience.
Cons: Reduced hiring in the 1990s created long term impacts to the demographics of the organization as there is an obvious experience gap between the 20+ year employees and the 10 or less year employees.  This  experience gap creates a challenge in providing incremental steps in leadership and responsibility for the employees in the organization working on accelerating their career development.  Although the mentoring opportunities are phenomenal, the struggle to gain design ownership and a feeling of key technical decision making is limited.  Employee morale, organization climate, weak middle management, politics, organization complexity, and a feeling of too many executive leaders are additional negatives impacting the progress of this organization.