Company: IBM
Date: 2017-05-09
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Challenging for all the wrong reasons
Pros: Work at home (though rapidly disappearing), some select areas of genuine innovation and distinction. For now, relatively strong brand. Pretty solid employee benefits, but few perks.
Cons: IBM is an inward-looking organization, and a slow-moving one but with a few fast-moving areas. Every quarter the message from leadership is, "We fell short overall, but our positive results in x, y, or z show that our transformation strategy is working. We all must execute better going forward." Lay offs follow and it's up to the survivors (increasingly hardened operators) to spin even more plates, or appear to, before the axe falls again. IBM spent over a billion dollars last year buying its own stock to keep the price up, and laid off tens of thousands as part of that winning strategy. It's been doing this for many years.

In my experience, every year the volatility and toxicity of the environment grows. Top and bottom performers get smart and leave or are laid off, and what's left are the very senior IBMers and a vast middle management culture, though at this stage the wolf at the door is starting to eat them too. I guess that's the IBM version of "Scrum" and "Agile" (though teams of competing IBM experts would want to argue with me on my use of terms--may the expert with the best positioned senior director win).

My advice: work for a different company, one that cares about its employees' careers and isn't playing a vast and very long shell game.