Company: IBM
Date: 2015-03-14
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

IBM Design: a place for people who like talking about design
Pros: Decent pay, good vacation and benefits, great work/life balance. Your peers are generally friendly and competent, but the best people are leaving and nepotism is rampant. Which brings me to...
Cons: If you're being recruited to IBM Design, you'll probably be told about all sorts of amazing projects you can work on at IBM. You will be wined and dined and told how you are going to be part of a major movement to bring design to the forefront of this formerly iconic company. If you accept their offer, you will participate in a 3 month long Design Camp which is supposed to prepare you for working in one of the big projects at IBM. At the end of Design Camp comes "Deployment," which reminded me a lot of the sorting hat scene from Harry Potter. Basically, the senior leadership locks themselves in a room for a week and secretly decide your fate (I kid you not, they even put big pieces of paper over the windows so nobody can see what's going on inside). At the end of it all, they read off people's names and which projects they are being deployed to as part of a big public event. You have NO input on where you will be placed and, unless you are really good at sucking up to the leadership, most people get put on horribly dysfunctional teams working on boring projects they certainly didn't mention when they were recruiting you.

Once you are on a project it is virtually impossible to leave before you've put in a full year at the company. At that point, people are faced with the choice of schmoozing their way into a better project or leaving IBM altogether (I chose the latter and could not be happier). 

IBM Design, which was started with the goal of changing the culture at IBM, is really just a microcosm of what's wrong with the company in general:
-Rampant nepotism and favoritism in hiring and project placement (I've seen people review their own friends in the hiring process)
-Total lack of meritocracy (people are judged not on their design talent but instead their talent to talk about design)
-Seniority and cliques being more important than skills and talent (those who stay for more than a year or two are either totally risk-averse, more interested in being schmoozers than designers, or completely delusional)

The only "culture" being created at IBM Design is one of sycophants and charlatans.