Company: IBM
Date: 2015-09-27
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

avoid
Pros: This applies strictly to the GBS (consulting) portion of IBM - both pros & cons.  Things are probably different around the company.

- It is a big company.  Bump in your resume I guess due to name recognition and the marketing that IBM does.  
- Good salary & benefits.  
- Around smart people
Cons: You are literally on an island.  There is little/no support from anyone at the company.  I joined after finishing my mba.  I showed up at orientation where we spent 3 days going through a step-by-step process of configuring wifi, setting up passwords, figuring out how to use the ancient hour reporting tool.  

Again, most consulting firms are like this, but I was shocked to see what went on at IBM and how outreach there was to new hires.  Most other firms have someone who will reach out to you, or a training to navigate the company, or get on projects or a career path.  Here is it is maybe a 15min phone call, filling out some forms and thats that.  

All the while you get yelled at and told you aren't billing hours.  Me and my friends who joined with me were constantly harassed about not working enough despite the lack of available work for us to contribute to.  

IBM is a huge company.  I have been at other big companies but IBM is a maze. The internal website makes it impossible to find what you are looking for.  Everything is a link to another link, etc.  To find what you need you need to jump through 3/4/5+ pages.    Additionally, everything has a confusing and odd name/acronym.  Again, yes every company does this, but not even remotely close to the level IBM does.  You'll waste a ton of time and miss out on important things because you never know what you are talking about.