Company: IBM
Date: 2020-10-21
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Great work life balance, decent pay, methodology laggard
Pros: Generous and flexible vacation and parental leave. While the pay is less than most silicon valley tech giants, I feel it is competitive and fair, especially considering the workload for an employee that "meets expectations".

For someone that is a go-getter, it is not a hard place to impress management, build a network internal to IBM, move around to new roles that better suit your interests, and generally excel. There is also a culture of acceptance that there are people who "just do their job" for their entire career, and while this seems like a negative thing, I think this balance of proactives and stagnants creates for a harmonious work environment unlike the vicious/toxic environments that are so present at many other highly competitive tech companies.
Cons: IBM loves to build tools in house, while they have recently started to branch out, there is always "a tool that IBM owns" that was written back in the stone age that is free and they force their employees to "make it work". In some cases management finally broke down and moved to industry standard software, but in most cases not.

IBM is also so old, there's a "way things have always been done" and changing that is near impossible. Then the big changes that management starts from top down, the old world employees don't fully adopt or don't understand, making any real progress very painful.