Company: IBM
Date: 2017-07-24
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Too Bureaucratic
Pros: Some great services - like an internal market for used equipment, some great training is available, and the company does enough things that one can laterally move around within.
Cons: There's a disparity between HR's work-life-balance statements and the reality of many teams.

There's about 14 levels of management, so most people lose track of customers & competitors and just get lost in the bureaucracy:  really great solutions to problems get sidelined in favor of the most politically advantageous solutions - even if they'll obviously fail.  Most management is so far removed from customers that they consider their competition the guy down the hallway rather than Amazon, Google, etc.

And they've acquired an immense staff of mediocre talent: most of their programmers are not very good, most of their 'subject matter experts' aren't.   Every year they identify top technologies to focus on, and an enormous number of people suddenly re-brand themselves as expects in this technology and all their projects are suddenly re-branded as about this technology.   Anyone that questions this, like "do we really think that sidelining most projects in favor of building marketing in virtual worlds is going to work?  especially after every one of these initiatives over the last ten years has failed?" And they just get blank stares.

And all this bureaucracy pushes out the best talent.   What's left these days are mostly mediocre staff that are over-worked,  afraid of being laid-off, and protective of their turf.