Company: IBM
Date: 2016-04-13
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Great people
Pros: Excellent 1st line managers who really care about their people.
IBM Encourages movement across teams and projects, which keep skills and motivation fresh.
Flexible working hours, and very open-minded and supportive about work/life balance.
I joined for long-term stability - which I got, but I believe times have been tougher since I left.
Cons: Annual peer reviews are overly beaurocratic and often a bit insulting - IBM seems to promote the team environment, but come annual assessment everyone is pitched against each other. I was even once told "you've had a great year, but I've got mark you as unsatisfactory, as I've got to draw the line somewhere".
Tough times have seen a slash in all budgets, so very little in the way of rewards and off site team building. No education budget is tempered by highly skilled workforce doing skill shares.
Once you get beyond the 1st line of management you often hit a wall of egos. In a long spell, I wasn't always impressed with 2nd line managers and above due to poor lines of communication, and the directors of engineering tended to throw their weight around unneccessarily.
The work isn't always shared equally across teams - I noticed that often 90% of the work done is by 10% of the people.