Company: IBM
Date: 2018-06-29
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

A big ship that's not going anywhere
Pros: - Flexible work schedule
- Good healthcare benefits
- Some very competent people who are fun to work with
- Early career advancement can happen fairly rapidly if you are remotely competent
Cons: - Fire drills every other day, including on weekends sometimes. Most are unnecessary and completely avoidable
- Org changes and product direction changes every 3-6months, making it impossible to deliver anything worthwhile
- Leadership micromanages to the extreme with CEO calling out product direction without any sort of due diligence. Lots of failed initiatives as a result of this.
- No clear roles and responsibilities. Result is everyone is talking and everyone thinks they are right. No one makes a final decision. I.e. ton of talking with no resulting worthwhile actions. Specifically this manifests in workshops being held every other week with 95% of them being a total waste of time, feedback falling on deaf ears, and the same organizational and product issues persisting forever.
- Vast majority of leadership is incompetent. They lack knowledge about the market, about running a modern day digital operation, and about running a financially sound business. The number of useless efforts and the resulting waste of capital is appalling.
- Turnover is massive. It is not uncommon to hear about 25-50% of teams leaving in a period of months. 
- Guidance and enablement from manager was non-existent. "You get to go figure it out" is not valid advice when someone has specifically reached out to you for help after trying various tactics on their own.  
- Career growth is unstructured, unfair, and not transparent. After having delivered the biggest project on the product team that had previously been to the graveyard several times before I picked it up, I saw someone who had delivered the most insignificant projects promoted to a key leadership position and then I had to convince the management of my worth over a period of 1 yr to get my promotion. After that advice on career growth included gems such as "you need to think about how to expand your scope". The proposals I came up with were met with suggestions of manipulating teams  or people to roll their scope into mine. It seemed after a certain level, advancement equalled duping people into giving up leadership of their scope and handing it to you.
- Manipulative, deceptive, rude culture.   
- Pay is lower compared to competitors.
- Communication and soft skills are largely lacking. Tech skills are generally there at least.

Bottom line - If getting stuff done that has an impact on the business in a civil way is important to you, this is not the right place for you. If you are looking for a decent pay check and don't mind being manipulative, being accosted by  co-workers, and spinning your wheels to no avail, it's not a bad place to be.