Company: IBM
Date: 2021-03-03
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Lagging behind other Big Tech firms in multiple ways & dimensions
Pros: — Decent benefits 
— Good diversity
— Nice campus (Hursley, UK)
Cons: — A lot of red-tape and bureaucracy.

— Very few internal opportunities for growth. Moving teams is virtually impossible, which means there is very little talent reshuffling. Most of the graduates leave the moment their graduate scheme is over, which means that IBM loses its best talent (judging from how difficult it is to get the role), and loses the 2 year investment. How's that logical to anyone in senior management baffles everyone around. 

— Moves very slowly and has incredible difficulties keeping up with Amazon and Microsoft. The burden of legacy outweighs the benefits of a 100+ years long experience.

— Looking from inside, I would definitely not bet any money on the long-term growth of the company. In fact, I would short the stock. Warren Buffett seems to agree.

— Too slow to innovate, too slow to fire, too slow to adapt. Simply, too slow.

— Amazon's valuation is 15th times higher (as of February 2021), whilst they have 1/10 of the patents that IBM has. What does that tell you? That you don't win in the market by collecting patents for the sake of collecting patents - what a waste of brainpower and money. You win in the market by being smart about the industries/products you go all in for. During the last ten years, the world has seen one of the longest periods of wonderful market returns in the stock market (look at any big tech company, apart from IBM) - if you invested in IBM, you would have lost 50% of your portfolio, since that has been the absolute return since 2010-2012 peak. Sweet.

— The company's agility is similar to the agility of someone same age as IBM.