Company: IBM
Date: 2008-06-03
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: current

IBM is a very good place to work
Pros: IBM has a very structured approach to personal and professional development. A significant amount of resources are used each year for each employee for professional and personal development. If you spend a little bit of time finding out what opportunities are there, you will be rewarded with significant opportunities for career growth.

As an example, career development is a formal part of your Personal Development Plan. This means that at the beginning of the year you can, and should, find out where you would like to improve either your current professional skills or add new personal or professional skills. This includes things that are not necessarily directly tied to your current career. Now, if you do not go through with most of the training you plan for your self, that counts as a negative in your yearly review. In other words, you have a significant incentive for actually going through with personal and professional development.

The second thing I like about IBM, particularly after working for start-ups for 10 years, is that IBM has a significant amount of formal process in place for your day to day work, no matter what position you have. This means that you know where you are at all times in any project, and you know what is missing and from whom whatever is missing needs to come. This visibility is great compared to what the situation is like in most start-ups where your visibility into progress on products and projects often is severely limited.

I also, of course, like the three weeks of paid vacation I get and the IBM health and pension benefits, though no longer as good as they were back in the day, are still excellent compared to the industry as such.
Cons: The main negative about working for IBM is tied to one of the positives. Formal process means that you have much better visibility into where you are in the overall delivery situation. Not only that, but since you continuously have to contribute information about your progress, you also get information on the overall progress, so you get a very good view into where you are in the big, and IBM is BIG, machinery. The downside of this is that process, particularly formal process, takes time. Pair this with the fact that IBM is geographically very dispersed, and you will find that you spend a lot more time on conference calls in IBM than in most organizations. This can be an impediment to progress in you "real" work. Once you get used to it you get used to it though.