Company: IBM
Date: 2012-10-29
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Underpaid and overworked
Pros: Flexibility to work from home.  Good medical, dental, and vision benefits.  Plenty of vacation time and holidays.  Discount on purchases of IBM stock.  401K matching.  Some really great people.
Cons: IBM favors self-service so it is difficult to obtain IT help; they prefer to let you spend three days fighting to upgrade your computer than maintain an IT staff at each site to assist people.  IBM also requires salespeople to do all of their administrative work (including preparing quotes, submitting orders, and even drafting legal contracts) themselves rather than providing administrative and legal support to assist salespeople so they can concentrate on selling.  

Raises are extremely low or sometimes even non-existent; even taking over all of your manager's work when he leaves the company is not considered a reason to increase your pay.  Resource actions occur regularly, and even obtaining the highest rating on your annual evaluation cannot save you from them.  The higher your pay, the larger the target on your back at RA time.

The bureaucracy of such a large company is extremely frustrating, and heaven and earth must be moved and 39 approvals obtained to make an exception to "policy."  In the past, IBM may have stood for "International Business Machines," "Identical Blue Men," and "I've Been Moved," but now I would say it stands for "Immense Bureaucratic Miser."  A task that would have taken me 5 minutes at my last job will take me 5 days at IBM because I have to involve three other teams and seven different systems to get it done.  In addition, many IBMers are quicker to respond, "That's not my job" than to help close a sale or resolve a customer issue.