Company: IBM
Date: 2020-06-17
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Nice People And Benefits But Annoying Management
Pros: Salary is a bit on the lower end for the area. Not enough for a decent 1 bedroom apartment on my own.
Work/Life balance okay, could be better. I managed to work remotely every other Friday. But I think this really depends on your project manager.
Start times were flexible. Some people on our team got in before 8am others come in after 9am.
I worked in the CIC which is separate to mainline IBM. Its basically just Java/JavaScript roles with a few others so not much opportunity for other stuff. But I managed to work on a few new technologies. So it depends on your project really.
People there are really nice. Get on with them all and a really good culture.
Cons: Management really started to annoy me though. I joined as a graduate and I thought there would be a project lined up but I ended up on the bench for 3 months doing loads and loads of online e-learning. The free courses on udemy were good but most of the time you didn't get a choice of stuff to learn either. They want you to learn whatever the current/upcoming projects will use. Including salesforce. After a while it gets stressful though because you get asked everyday what did you do to find/apply to a project. There were hardly any available though and you run out of projects to apply to then they get mad that you didn't apply to any that day. They then started trying to get people who joined as developers to be testers and thats when things started taking off. Loads of the graduates just started leaving, because theres nothing to do. Don't get me wrong you can just keep learning and learning and still get paid but after months of e-learning people started to hate it. Because you aren't on a project either your salary wont be going up. You can only get a promotion after 6 months on a project. So thats time wasted not getting promotions and stagnating. I managed to get a project within 3 months of joining but others were still on the bench for several more months and most graduates have left now.

Then because loads of graduates weren't on projects the overall average utilisation of people in the CIC comes down and thats when management decided to prevent people taking time off for the next 3 months just to reach their targets. They punish their employees when its management's fault for hiring too many graduates. I worked there for over a year and did good work for the client, so much so that they expanded the team. But be warned management doesn't seem to care about your contributions or any of their employees, just their own bonuses. While your salary is low for a tech job.