Company: IBM
Date: 2012-09-04
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Very ethical, predictable and risk-averse company. Good values system, fair treatment in all relationships, big business
Pros: A completely ethical and fair environment that gives the employees the necessary safety and predictability to focus on the job to do. Flexible on hours and workplace. Welcomes diversity. Possibility of working on large, multi-million dollar projects and products. Most senior business and technical leadership are experienced professionals and great people.
Cons: Publicly owned, very traditional and risk-averse, it's a company focused on cost-savings, integrated vertical business processes and global cross policies and operations. In summary, to avert risk, it's a very slow-moving, traditional and predictable organization. It would take 20 people just to change a light bulb, another 20 to bill the customer and 5 others to audit the whole process.
The result of this is that there is very little room for individualism, risk-takers, good use of intuition and real-time response to an dynamic market.
"Innovation" in go-to-market routes, products and disruptive strategy is mostly done through acquisitions, despite the large investment in R&D (which sometimes is watered down due to our slow time-to-market).