Company: IBM
Date: 2014-08-23
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Not a good place to work
Pros: Nothing comes to mind. There seem to be a few good people here and there but they are disappearing fast. But this really depends on who you are: 

In IBM, the higher you are the better life is. If you are an executive  this is the right place (this include Indians who are US employees assigned to India) - good pay, job security, profit sharing, overseas assignments etc and you are treated like a god.  Don't think that you will work your way up through the rank and file to the executive level - most of the executives have not. So, if you have a fair bit of experience, negotiate your band and salary package well.

The other category are campus hires: My advise is - choose wisely your team, technology and job role, if you do this you will he happy. Lot of campus hires get stuck in roles which have absolutely no market value and no future. This is a good place if you want to learn for 2-3 years and then jump. Don't expect a detailed training and induction plan on the lines of Infosys.

The other category of people who may be happy are the vendors of IBM especially the canteen and facilities contractors - they earn good money for doing very bad work for IBM - the food is very bad, the facilities are terrible. The air conditioning is so bad that many meeting rooms are stuffy and suffocating.
Cons: Its very difficult to list down the number of cons, there will be no end to it - I will edit this some other time. But it should suffice to say that nothing really works in IBM the way it is expected to. 

Both employee and manager empowerment is low, everything is controlled by someone sitting in US with spreadsheets adding to high decision cycle time and decisions which are totally not relevant to the reality on the ground. 

Being productive in IBM is an uphill task. 60-70% of your work will usually be some reporting work (e.g: incident metrics, change metrics, SLAs etc) so that someone (in the management) can look at it analyze and ask questions.Another 30% of your time will be in meetings where you will have to answer questions on the reports which you made using 60-70% of your time. You will have to work on the remaining time you are left with to meet your objectives.

Employee development is not in the back seat - it is in the last seat. Remuneration is low, salary hikes are less - so negotiate well before you join.