Company: IBM
Date: 2015-07-14
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Designers: Avoid the Apple + IBM team at all costs
Pros: Flexible work from home schedule.

If you are a Lead designer, your decisions may make it into the design. Good luck convincing the Cupertino team.

Possibility to fly out to Cupertino a few times a year for "design workshops" where you spend a few days with IBM's Cupertino team sketching and chatting about a new qualified app concept.
Cons: Very slow pace; I've been there almost a year and have only worked on 3 projects. They were drawn out for 6-10 weeks, but the bulk of the work was done in the first week or two. All the other work was busy work tweaking tiny things or changing things based on the whim of a few people.

Incredible structure and culture of micro-management; the structure of this team has made it to where 2-3 people who have little to no involvement in the day-to-day of each project drive all decision-making and are able to override anything and everything with no reason whatsoever. No, you will not work directly with Apple, you will work with these 3 who are stationed in Cupertino a few miles from the Apple campus.

Complete focus strictly on UI, no focus on experience, content strategy, information architecture, prototyping, testing, research, or anything similar. Most of the apps look very nice, but have an incredibly convoluted flow and serve little to no purpose for true users of the apps, because we do no research, focus solely on UI design, and if someone wants to change the flow or add features that would help users, they are shot down. The word "simple" is thrown around arbitrarily to mean "show less screens", but when the whole app is only 3 screens for an enterprise level solution, most of the features a real-life client would want are missing. 

Because so little work comes in, you will find yourself idle for months at a time. Even people that have been at IBM for a long time say this is very strange and more work should be coming, but it rarely does. The work that does come in is quite boring as most of the decisions are made up-front by small teams and once those decisions are made, there's no changing them. We've also fallen into a routine of making cookie-cutter apps. Almost all of the apps look and feel the exact same and there's little to no room for anything new or innovative. Very disappointing.

You will be designing what they call "starter apps". This isn't an MVP, this is about the equivalent to 1/5 of an MVP, which is essentially a 10-15 screen Keynote presentation (yes, the only design tool you can use is Keynote) and we call that an app that we try to go sell. Most of the apps are unsellable because they lack so many features, and there's a big, visible struggle between what we call "simple" and what's "sellable".

The vast majority of the apps we create are the same app recreated over and over again. Not to mention, most of the ideas we have for apps are things that already exist on the app store and have a large number of downloads or sales. This makes us fall into a pattern of recreating the wheel and templatizing everything to where all the designer's job is is to copy and paste from an old Keynote. 

This role has a very production line feel to it, so avoid unless you're a relatively junior designer looking to get experience or you just feel like having IBM and Apple on your resume.