Company: IBM
Date: 2014-10-23
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Horrible experience
Pros: Diversity, well-known brand, fairly laid back environment.
Cons: An extremely mismanaged organization with years of declining revenue under Ginni Rometty's "leadership". Expect to spend most of your working day making sure that you are compliant to a large number of different internal procedures. Management tends to believe that this is what gives IBM the competitive advantage. If you are a "consultant", expect to spend months and months doing internal admin and eLearnings far way from any project - not a great place to get exposure to interesting work or to build any useful skills. For anyone considering a career in consulting, be very careful and explore your options!

There is never any money to do anything. Trainings are being scrapped, travel is being forbidden.
Expense reimbursement is slow and complicated. Salaries are low and increases and bonuses are long gone. 
Even simple office supplies are often in shortage - and this is IBM in Western Europe!

They say you get to work with the latest technology and the brightest people. All the top performers have left. Expect to receive a used, empty, five year old laptop as your equipment, and extremely time consuming procedures to get the applications you need - nowhere near any leading technology. 

The "management" has no ambition to understand their business or drive it in the right direction. Instead they a spend most of their time creating and promoting blog posts or videos containing very little substance.

The fact is, IBM will never ever survive. Everything is based on short-term penny pinching thinking - creating a very uninspiring working environment.

If you have any ambitions whatsoever, do not join IBM. There is no happiness or positive energy, only people trying to get out. You will regret it. More importantly, there is a real danger that you will be trapped, having aquired few new skills after a couple of years in IBM, hence making it very hard to move to any other respectable employer.