Company: IBM
Date: 2016-08-12
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

Watson is a Great Organization Weighed Down by the Rest of IBM
Pros: - Watson has an excellent design team and I appreciate the recent focus on design.
- My teammates are motivated, have a good work-life balance, and are fun to be around.
- They tried very hard to make the intern program fun and to bring us together socially. There were intern presentations, Main Event night, boat on Lake Austin.
- Pay was very good.
Cons: - Required to use internal dev tools like BlueMix that lower our productivity because they always crash.
- As an intern I came to the office every day but most workers at IBM "work from home" very often. I've heard that it's even worse outside of Watson.
- Pay arrived late, especially the promised Lump Sum Travel Reimbursement, which arrived 2 months after I had arrived.
- Senior management seems disconnected from reality on the ground. For example, there was a two-day intern finale event. They decided that the interns would spend paid work hours bagging rice for charity (which I think could be a great idea). They set a goal for 10,000 rice packets and we didn't pack that many during the scheduled events. The organizers were supposed to help with the whole process, but they didn't seem to care once the Instagram pictures were taken. So the rep from the charity was basically abandoned to pack the last 1,000 and pack it onto a truck.
- Lots of "not my problem" attitude about cleaning up common areas, sharing training data, etc. Most people are just concerned with their individual team.