Company: IBM
Date: 2008-10-03
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

IBM - Itty Bitty Minds
Pros: This is a good company to have on your resume, if you're nimble, able to travel (and probably single, unattached), and land on a good/interesting project, you can gain a lot of varied experience in no time.  If you stay here, change jobs no less often than every 18 months.

Client facing projects are varied and complex, lots of opportunity for good on the job training.

You can travel extensively, to the extent that you really don't even need a permanent address.

I've got a cushy job, and can coast, which works for me.
Cons: Where I work, there are lots of Indian IT workers... that's ok, they are a nice bunch in general, but they are a strange breed.  They are technically intelligent as a whole, and work very hard.  But, they don't work smart, as if that has no value to them; partially a byproduct of the hard work ethic, I think; they'd rather work through a problem than eliminate the cause of the problem.  That way, they can work through it again, and again, and again. Management loves that approach, which means that you can forget about working in an environment where efficiency is valued, and you'd better be prepared to work your @$$ off over roadblocks, and in roundabout, inefficient ways.

There is a culture of sending memos to the entire department or team if one or two people are doing something wrong - "If you are not turning in your timesheet daily, then the Company suffers because of ABC.  If you are not one of these individuals, thanks for your great effort!".  I wish they'd just deal with the problem children, and leave me out of it.

Also, IBM buildings are frequently Class A in the public areas, and left to slum behind the scenes.  In Fairfax, they eliminated coffee, paper plates, plasticware, etc.  Cheap like George Costanza's parents.

Professional development is pretty much limited to computer based training, and "look it up on the internet".

The 401K plan gives lots of investment choices, and but there is no money market to park your cash in.

The internal job site shows same jobs as external website... so you don't really have an edge.  And the organization of workers can have the unintended effect of pigeonholing you...you pick a "career" or expertise at IBM, and work and train in that field.  It is reminiscent of a factory's organization.