Company: IBM
Date: 2021-03-27
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Decent place to start a career, but not a good place to stay
Pros: - IBM has a very open and accepting culture. Everyone there is really nice and usually easy to work with.
- Good work life balance. Being out of the office for appointments, children's events, mental health, etc. is very well supported and encouraged.
- Some of the projects are cool, and it's rewarding knowing that many people depend on the software you work on.
Cons: - I couldn't tell you how many people there are that do literally nothing and never get fired. It is infuriating feeling like you could do the same and it wouldn't matter.
- Some very talented people work here, but at the same time, many incredibly un-talented people do too which ruins the company's/team's progress.
- The pay isn't competitive. IBM will always lose it's best talent to companies with better pay, benefits, and less red tape.
- Deadlines are a mess. I'm surprised customers continue to use IBM products at times given the outages and issues that occur so frequently at the end of every quarter.
- Designing for the customer gets lost in the complexity of IBM's systems. There are so many features that seem good on paper, but are really hard to use/missing functionality that a customer actually needs.
- No one will advocate for you in your career progression - you must do so yourself.