Company: IBM
Date: 2008-06-11
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former

Wonderfully flexible, terribly managed, and horribly frustrating.
Pros: IBM is one of, if not the, most flexible technology company to work for in terms of the work environment.  It is common for employees to work from home without any advance notice, or establish a regular work-from-home routine.  For the most part, the company is interested in your results, not when or how you achieve those results.  If you have a very demanding family life, or just hate having to sit in a plain office all day, the flexibility might well outweigh all of the negatives of working here.
Cons: The beauracracy is beyond anything you could imagine: the company gets in the way of your day-to-day work.  As an engineer, you'll need access to source and bug records of many components of a single product, and the permissions for each component are kept separate.  You'll frequently run into situations where you have to wait days for permission to access something you need, even if it's for a product you've been working on for years.  Many of their systems require different logins and passwords (I had close to 10 at my peak), with different rules, and you'll frequently find yourself trying to access something only to find out your password has expired.  For being a company with the goal of making managing a business simpler, the technology within the company is terribly managed.  The disorganization runs throughout nearly every aspect of the company, and you'll find yourself with a different manager multiple times a year while your division undergoes multiple reorgs.

It is an extremely frustrating place to work, and moving within the company is nowhere near as easy as they lead you to believe when you join, regardless of how highly they view you as an employee.