Company: IBM
Date: 2016-12-16
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: current

Excellent Work Culture in IBM Tokyo Lab departments
Pros: Ahead of the curve, in the age of Cognitive/Cloud!
Humble, helpful colleagues.
Supportive managers.
Surprisingly flat hierarchy.
Many Extremely (30+ years) experienced and technically robust STSM/DE level seniors.
Heavily focussed on innovation (publication, patents etc).
Open, cooperative and respectful culture irrespective of age, gender, race or nationality.
Excellent pay and bonuses.
FLEXIBLE WORK-FROM-HOME POLICY.
Lots of Paid-Holidays (29 days/Y).
Lots of employee-only benefits via partner companies (specially financial, like loan, relocation, corporate card, free gold card etc.)
Free gym (need improvement though).
Very easy to change projects/teams.
Good mentorship and technical contribution programs.
Everyone speaks good enough English.
Extensive collaboration with teams in the USA and other Countries.
No micromanagement whatsoever.
Lots of technical activities.
TOO MUCH LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES (There are thousands of courses and millions of webinars/demos, all pretty centralized and easily searchable)
Employees are always encouraged to learn new things (even within working hours).
New peer-review and regular feedback oriented evaluation platform and multi-scale rating system (Checkpoint/ACE)
People love to socialize (lots of drinking/dinner party)
MacBook, iPhone, iPad (for some), wifi device given on Day-1.
25-storied riverside tower, no co-tenant.
In-house/building restaurant, cafeteria, snacks/coffee parlor, gym, relaxation center, massage center, Post office, ATMs, Convenience store, dentist, kindergarten, travel agency!
Cons: Too many processes and formalities (boring but good for the Company as it need to comply with laws/regulations across the Globe).
Being a major software company, 60-70% tools and technologies used for product development are IBM products/softwares; some of them are very good, some are not (yet used).
Office/desk infrastructure needs to be improved (slowly moving to all-Mac, better PCs).
Big Global projects have usual communication issue, delays and timezone bottlenecks.
Lots of midnight (US working hours) teleconference.
No free food.