Company: IBM
Date: 2020-09-24
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

It's a bittersweet experience working at IBM Research
Pros: - Freedom to pursue your interests 
- Work life balance is great
- Senior management and folks in high positions are accessible
Cons: - Hard to climb the corporate ladder, have to constantly please senior management and be in their good books
- Skills/work done/impact only matter if management is onboard. In short mediocre work aligned to business is highly rewarded than cutting edge research.
- Collaboration on the face of it but competition through and through. As researchers you would expect a collaborative environment to progress but usually credit is given to one person who is favoured by management. In short equal contribution isn't valued, the lead gets all the credit. 
- You would be surrounded with people who don't do any work, are content, yet earn the same or even more than you which is highly demotivating. 
- Incompetent senior management. Although company vision and focus areas are top driven, the entire meat of the work is expected to be shouldered by the bottom level employees. You are expected to come up with ideas, define agendas, find usecases, make connects through meetings, write code and deliver on individual threads, do external collaboration, sell your work in the community, publish your work in A+ conferences etc.
- Salary is average compared to similar roles/experience in other companies in India.