Company: IBM
Date: 2009-06-13
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current

Steep Learning Curve for the Inexperienced
Pros: For every 'pro' at IBM, there is a companion 'con'. I think it's a matter of you figuring out if the pros fit your life better than the cons.
- A huge global community
- Limitless resources at your disposal
- Pay is competitive
- Highly developed job performance review process allows for opportunities to distinguish yourself
- Flexibility in hours and work at home policy
- Complex products that provide the opportunity to learn on a daily basis
- Highly developed processes for every aspect of your life as an employee, which gives lots of structure
- Processes attempt to provide a system of checks and balances for common work problems such as work-life balance
Cons: - Because IBM is a huge global community of 400,000 employees, your team will most likely be scattered across the world. You're lucky if most of the people that you work with are in your building.
- The limitless resources is overwhelming and requires time to figure out how to take advantage of (assuming that you know about it in the first place).
- The job performance review process feels like a job in itself. I estimate that 25% of my time is involved in one way or another with managing my results and value to the business
- The flexibility in hours and work at home policy has increasingly blurred the lines between work and life. The pressure to produce is pretty high which has motivated me to work a lot of hours beyond 40. Never less than 50 hours a week, with 60 being common. Also, the work at home policy tends to suck the life out of your working environment if you have many members of a team who work at home on a regular basis.
- The complexity of the products require a huge ramp-up time to get on board. The entire time of which you will be expected to perform at a very high level. The complexity is compounded when you get moved from one project to another.
- The structured processes are great on one hand. On the other, good luck finding the time to research or take advantage of them. Some examples are: mentoring, job shadowing which give you the opportunity to 'try on' different jobs, financial consultants, learning opportunities
- Checks and balances: The manager feedback programs and other such mechanisms to improve your work-life balance are very time-consuming. They are starting to feel like hollow sentiments when you are being pushed so hard to make your results for each year better than the last. Sometimes I wish it could be that being really good at my core job is enough.