Company: IBM
Date: 2016-04-03
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former

Advice to Enginners (esp from Acquisitions)
Pros: - Working from home
- Compensation/Retention is decent
- You can gain some useful experience for a year or two before things will start to get stale and the poor management starts to grind. 
- If you want a remote opportunity that is pretty stable if a bit unrewarding with decent comp levels, coding at IBM could be OK for a year or two.
Cons: - Hugely bloated and directionless management structure above immediate line management has no idea what it is doing, especially related to modern Cloud and Engineering projects. It's just a case of jumping on the latest buzzword. Projects are essentially dictated by executive edict, often before any sort of feasibility study is done or realistic scoping, meaning corners are cut to meet arbitrary deadlines at a cost to clients and internal Engineers who simply get burned supporting undercooked products.
- During the Acquisition process you will be told how you can help change/modernise IBM, how they want to pick up new technology and modernise and stay relevant. This is all pretty much BS, they pull you in, plug you into the revenue generating machine, make you integrate with other half cooked platform pieces and then start to just grind away at whatever it was that made your product any good in the first place. Essentially, if you get a retention package, you can make a bit of extra cash, but even in the end it may not be worth the damage it will do to you. 
-  Lack of technical expertise in management and product managers. There are the odd good ones, but they are an exception to the rule. Its pointy-headed bosses all the way. 
- IBM (despite what it says in its internal marketing spam) does not value the time and effort of its employees, providing incredibly poor day to day tools for things like HR, email etc. As an Engineer, you will be burned to meet deadlines and your feedback will be ignored, you are just an expendable resource.  

In short, if IBM buys your company, it will be a slow and painful degradation into mediocrity, you can get some decent compensation and experience out of it if you stick around for a year or two, but after that GTFO for your own sanity.