Company: IBM
Date: 2019-05-11
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Great opportunity to start, harder to grow
Pros: I worked at IBM for close to four years and had a lot of wonderful memories there. Some of the perks:

- Amazing benefits. Even after 2-3 years there, you will go a long way towards retirement.
- You meet so many people. Met close to 200-300 in three years, definitely more than most companies.
- Lots of opportunities to travel for trainings and different events on their dime.
- Fairly flexible promotion process - if you do the work and make a good case, can get promoted in close to 6-8 months, depending on the manager and division
- Household name. It will do wonders for your future career just by having it on your resume.
Cons: - Very dependent on where you work. If you're in consulting, you could be doing anything from leading Blockchain or Watson projects to leading a project that will rarely get noticed by management.
- Some managers there have been promoted because they've been at IBM for 10-15 years and not necessarily because they're good managers. Does not bode well for turnover with younger staff.
- It's a huge company without a core product - If you ask Google, Facebook, or Amazon what they're known for, most will have a consistent answer. Very few people can properly articulate what IBM is known for. (Cloud? Technology? Services? Computers?)
- You'll do a lot of things at IBM that are not transferrable to future opportunities. Design Thinking and Agile are all done the "IBM Way" and they'll give you certificates and badges for completing classes on "IBM Essentials to Blockchain". Something that feels good in the moment but worthless when you're looking at the market.
- Huge company. Good luck meeting your boss's boss. After two promotions, I was still almost ten levels removed from Ginni Rometty.
- Until you specialize, you're mostly stuck. Generalist consultants don't go too far at IBM, outside of Project Manager roles.