Company: IBM
Date: 2009-04-24
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

IBM research is a good place to be... but...
Pros: IBM Research has a lot of smart people, working on a variety of projects. Its easy to find a project thats deep and interesting enough fairly quickly. Folks with non-trivial expertise in almost any technical area are not too hard to find. There is a strong focus on getting your research to make a financial impact - this can of course be a pro or a con depending on your POV. High level of independence to select approaches to selecting problems/projects and also in choosing approaches to solve them.
Cons: Although the project you're working on may be making a large impact (within and outside the organization), apart from a couple of your peers and your immediate manager nobody really cares or seems to notice your contributions. Its very very easy to just get lost here - this is similar to a complaint I had while in academia.