Company: IBM
Date: 2013-04-18
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Be very aware
Pros: IBM is a highly participatory environment. Everyone seems to be included in everything which tends to make meetings massive and frequent. There's a deceptive lack of structure and formality about most things so you're free to do your job with a great deal of latitude in how you do it. There is still plenty of older hands who know how to get things done vis a vis the organization
Cons: You will probably never see a pay increase, ever. It's possible you'll get a token bonus of 1% every decade but other than that, no. There's always some excuse; the economy is bad, the sector is bad, the industry is bad, you're too far above the midpoint, someone missed their numbers, blah blah blah. Which is fine, except you still have to go through this silly review process where your goals and statements were handed to you by first line management and then you have to write a term paper defending every trivial item on it. There is essentially NO job movement. None. You have to be able find your own replacement to move even laterally and that person has to find theirs and so on.

Organizationally if you wind up in a staff role or servicing IBM's own business to itself you can count on spending most of your time in meetings talking about meetings to plan meetings which will be intended to gather information on which to discuss further meetings. To sum up it's "Office Space" meets the Soviet Union.