Company: IBM
Date: 2008-06-24
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former

Good place to work if you can tolerate bureaucracy
Pros: I can't say anything about the other areas of the company, but the research division (where I was working) had a very laid-back, academic atmosphere. The research staff members I worked with had a ton of freedom in setting their agendas, choosing what kind of papers to publish, etc. and seemed quite happy overall with their jobs. Lots of opportunities to collaborate with people inside and outside the company; many were involved in projects with Stanford, Berkeley, UCSC, and other universities in the area.
Cons: First, the bureaucracy was horrible, worse than I ever could have imagined. It took me almost two months to get my first paycheck because someone entered my address incorrectly into the payroll system. Nothing is handled locally- you have to call some faraway place to get help, going through layers and layers of people who are either incompetent or uncaring. I had the same problem with the IT support- I couldn't get into my email and was forced to spend 2 hours on the phone with a poorly trained, unintelligible support guy in India until I could finally talk to someone who was able to fix my problem.

Second, the workplace had some serious deficiencies. The onsite cafeteria served nasty, low quality, unhealthy, overpriced food. The "gym" was about the size of a broom closet and had only two machines. These and other things made me feel that the company didn't care about the happiness of its employees and was willing to cut perks for the short-sighted objective of reducing costs.