Company: IBM
Date: 2013-07-12
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

A great vision shadowed by bureaucracy and self-important managers
Pros: The company vision is indeed always forward looking.

The consultants are extremely nice, helpful, and intelligent people. At a project site, you're likely to really enjoy the team that you've been designated to work with. There are many higher level consultants that are happy to mentor and help your career. In other words, anyone who is a worker bee for IBM will be helpful and kind.

The diversity of clients is great and the range of work from one client to another is incredible. You will have the opportunity to work with a lot of different people, doing a lot of different things.
Cons: It is a generally ubiquitous notion amongst all of the consultants that we're all subjected to administrative torture here at IBM. There are long, tedious, and extremely confusing administrative processes that every employee has to undergo every year. It takes a severe cut of time out of your work week just to understand how to follow these processes according to protocol. If you don't comply, you'll be in trouble. The deployment managers, the people who are designated to help you through these confusing processes, form a band of unhelpful, condescending, self-important, administrative police officers who slap you on the wrist if you have any "stupid" questions. They assume that you should already know how to navigate the system and are rude if you ever ask for help.

There is completely no respect for the worker bees. It is simply not good enough to just work long hours at the client site and make sure your client is happy. You are expected to put in your personal time on weekends as well to bring more value to the company. During year end reviews, if you have not put in this extra effort, you will not be given a higher rating.

The level of technology that we work with on a day-to-day basis is stuck in the 2000s. This should be a source of embarrassment for IBM, a once leading technology company. Expect to still work with programs Microsoft Office 2003.