Company: IBM
Date: 2017-06-22
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Challenging but rewarding work
Pros: IBM is a company which takes its 100 year progressive history seriously.  Meeting with your boss and our executives on a regular basis to discuss your career track is mandatory and professional training is mandatory as well. We strongly encourage mentor relationships and peer mentoring. Senior management is available for shadowing for a day, one on one meetings and mentoring.  Our commitment to  LGBTQ issues came on display as IBM joined other tech companies in sending a letter to North Carolina Governor McCrory urging he repeal H.B. 2 in 2016.  We were so proud of our commitment to diversity over the decades we took our entire department to watch "Hidden Figures" to see some early IBM involvement in the civil rights era. We are also proud to have Ginni Rometty as the only female CEO in the DowJones30, and the third female member at Augusta National Golf Club home of the Master's Tournament. 

I work in an analytics department where we come up with Cognitive solutions to business problems.  Our team is incredibly talented and intelligent, but not aloof. Everyone teaches each other on the job, and our ability to tackle data issues has enormously evolved. I love working on an international team with over 10 spoken languages and which hails from 12 different countries. 

We have moved into an "agile" space, no more cubes for us in the last 18 months.  Our team likes the open environment, easy access to windows and standing desks. Getting a conference room is fairly easy when needed.

Summer time is pure  energy as our team of 80 adds 25 interns, most of our social activities occur over the summer as we attempt to recruit future team members.

The team also balances work/life. Most of the younger team members live in NYC and car pool, so they work 8-5 and occasionally log on after hours and working weekends is nearly unheard of, that's your time.   We tend to be a social group, we have a potluck lunch every 2 months which is always well attended. After hours have a drinking club in NYC that finds unusual places to eat in NY. We have a softball team, a soccer team, and a trivia team that all meet weekly. We host a service day and a golf outing each once a year, and bowling 2-3 times over the summer.  We also have a "What's App" group to go out to see movies.
Cons: We discourage work at home, so our team is always in the office M-Thursday, during the summer we've been more lenient on working from home or working from alternative IBM locations in NYC.  Our location is just north of White Plains NY, this is about a 60-80min trip for our NYC members. Get to the office before 9:30am or parking starts to get tight.