Company: IBM
Date: 2017-01-05
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Dying empire bogged down in political struggles
Pros: * Good support to come up with patents. Can get bonuses in return for filing patents
* Benefits are still good (in the UK) - health, dental, car, bike, buying extra holiday
* Finally, Macbooks instead of terrible Lenovo thinkpads
* Somehow IBM's name still has value - good for your CV if you work there, but make sure it's less than 2 years
* Can work with global teams, which is a great experience
Cons: * Constant rounds of lay-offs, re-orgs and "strategy" changes
* Highly political environment, e.g. developers with zero talent can get shockingly far career-wise
* Different divisions have no incentive to work together and are largely clueless what other divisions are doing, basically fiefdoms of senior management
* Experienced hire quality is hit and mostly miss
* Loads of dead wood and contractors
* Opinions of technical employees are pretty much ignored. You need to be management, sales, or brand/marketing to have any say
* Bad people stay, good people leave
* Many, many layers of management. The top is truly clueless, the bottom ones can be really good but have no real power
* Huge team sizes
* Innovation comes from other companies that have been acquired...
* ... and is promptly squashed by bureaucracy. This is known as blue washing
* IBM's own technology (e.g. servers, cloud platform [BlueMix vs AWS/GCE/Azure], issue & project tracking [Rational Team Concert vs Jira], source code management [Rational Team Concert vs git]) is truly awful and horrible. They are losing so much developer efficiency through pride. Let your devs use the best tools, and admit that those don't have IBM on them.
* Speaking of best tools, the hardware is offensive. Old keyboards, tiny monitors (<1080p), terrible mice, etc. Not asking for start up level extravagance, just the basic tools to work efficiently.

For all the shouting about "agile", "scrum", "devops" etc there's a contractor or some incapable developer with an agenda working hard to maintain their status. For every good developer, there's one mediocre and one terrible developer. For every good technical decision, there's two bad political ones. For every spark of innovation, there's rules to snuff it out and 10 deadbeats trying to get their name attached to it.