Company: IBM
Date: 2015-11-21
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

A legacy company
Pros: If you are at your 40s, don't expect growth for your career, like to have easy, lazy workdays and have the mindset: "it's not my fault". IBM is the best for you.
Cons: Legacy of IBM is not in the business, product or strategy, it's in the people. IBM campus are filled with 40-60 yo employees, managers, executive who have been working with IBM for their whole lifes. There is very a small percentage of new hires and employees with 3-4 years of experiences who are the only actuall productive part of the company. The new hires and young engineers are the main force to create any products, since they are inexperince, lack of of guidance and so building bad products until IBM buy companies that have the same products with much better quality. Beside mainframe, websphere, IBM can be considered as a high-tech Best Buy, or Target, not a innovation company as the its marketing and executives claim. It's true for all business divisions, at Software Group, juniors engineers are the main coder, at GBS, junior consultant come to customers and make them mad because of the lack of skills.

Trust is built at IBM from the history, not for the current skillset and performance. Even the same applies for executives. It was a very sad day to see Lance Crosby left the company, he was the only hope to get IBM Cloud up to the level of Amazon. But the CEO chose someone she has been working with for awhile instead of someone can actually bring fresh air and innovations to the company. 

Existing employees are so laid-back, they like to work more on Powerpoint, and join meetings than think and be productive. Managements = process, executives only 'execute', not much of thinking, and the CEO is talking about 'bets'. Any new strategy is a bet for her, so she is herself not confident about what she is doing and where the company is going.