Company: IBM
Date: 2016-10-27
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Ok if you want to coast, bad if you want to innovate, terrible for career advancement
Pros: * IBM, unsurprisingly, has a lot of moving parts.  It's not hard to find projects to work on here, and they are good about moving groups (well software groups anyways) from project to project.
* There are a number of okay-ish tools to facilitate communication and collaboration
* There are some movements (albeit haphazardly) to adopt a more modern software development pipeline
* If you like to coast and just cash a paycheck without really doing much work, you will excel here.
* If you dig around a bit you will find some really smart people here.
* It's not unusual to find individuals that have worked here for multiple decades.
Cons: * RED TAPE.  This is one step remove bureaucratically from working for the government.
* Erratic high-level management decisions.  That work-from-home culture has effectively been killed company wide here.
* Technical skill and innovation is frowned upon.  A problem-solving individual will quickly find themselves frustrated.
* VERY management heavy.  I have been on many "scrum" teams where there were more managers in a room than developers.  You can imagine how efficiently that works.
* Projects are invariably short-sighted and long, or even medium, term solutions are frowned upon and dangerous for your career here.
* Promotion and even simple cost of living adjustments are doled out based on who the manager is buddies with as opposed to who shows leadership and completes the vast majority of the work.
* Don't really expect any career advancement here, or even the smallest cost of living adjustments.  Typical raises are 0% a year.  Seriously.
* It's not unusual to find individuals that have worked here for multiple decades.