Company: IBM
Date: 2016-02-03
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

The dinosaurs died, didn't they?
Pros: Some very, very smart people hidden in the cracks if you can find them, with candid advice and freely offered mentorship. Huge flexibility if you find the right project and play your cards right with the project management.

Astonishingly, brand name remains relatively strong, although this may change over the next few years and is certainly no guarantee.
Cons: Executive suite very obviously does not care about employees, slashing perks and letting infrastructure languish while paying the CEO massive annual bonuses for horrible market performance. Decisions banning common consulting perks, such as alternate travel, Uber as an approved taxi provider, are taken without employee input and can be reversed, but only after sustained, near-universal outcries, and marked increases in attrition. Cool ideas out of Research division and Watson are brought to market before they're ready for enterprise application, and very basic MBA1 management ideas that would improve the company are rushed or diluted to death.

Tone-deaf evaluation system, often approved by entrenched management with little incentive to provide accurate feedback and no useful answers for very basic career development questions, such as "how do I improve for the next evaluation cycle?"

Entrenched management: without an up or out policy, there is incredible stagnation around the engagement manager level, where talent is particularly thin. Technical skills in basic software, such as Excel and Powerpoint, is incredibly limited at these levels, leading to dumb questions and poor estimates for delivery timeframes.

Generally speaking, good talent finds its way out, and bad talent falls upward, resulting in very, very spotty talent throughout.