Company: IBM
Date: 2019-11-14
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

The trouble was not worth the resume entry
Pros: Generic benefits of working for any big company. Name recognition, lots of training materials of varying quality, large network of people who may or may not be willing to help you at all
Cons: I’ll address the most probable rebuttal first: Client Innovation Centers are not a complete representation of IBM, but any company that creates and enables a facet of their organization with this many issues should seriously reevaluate.

They do not pay enough for the work you do. This is not just a subjective claim, simple research on the job title at other companies tells you you’re getting underpaid. 

You do not get the experience/flexibility in experience they claim you get. If you stay with the company for 20 years you may be able to get the exposure you want. But the first 5 o so years, you have virtually no control over what you learn. You can be as motivated and outspoken as you want, but they will put you wherever there is a need.

Management is patronizing and disrespectful of our reasonable complaints of being underpaid and (contractually) overworked. 

The job I accepted listed 50% travel, but the CIC is at the whims of their big clients, so you will probably travel 100% (every Monday - Thursday or Friday). Somehow though, the fault comes back to you as the little pawn of an employee for not reminding everyone higher than you of your travel limits. 

During Christmas time of 2018, we were asked to forfeit our “use it or lose it” vacation time because “IBM is not doing well in Q4 because of consultant vacation time.” This is the epitome of disrespecting work life balance. Do I think the CEO would have agreed with this, had she been there? Probably not. Does that matter? No. How did a game of bureaucratic, corporate telephone result in multiple managers in multiple different meetings asking employees to not take vacation during the holidays to see their families? Horrible tone at the top.