Company: IBM
Date: 2008-06-11
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

IBM, a nice and enjoyable place to work
Pros: You feel pretty comfortable and appreciate it. When you start working here everybody is trying to give you pointers so you avoid some issues. Sometimes you don't know the answer for something, that's no problem because everybody is ready to give you some guidance and if that person doesn't know, he can always point you to the right direction. The pay is very good compared to other companies, around 1800 USD free of taxes and the benefits are very good too, you have life insurance & medical plan for you and your family (wife and kids). Also you have a special card for buying groceries every month, the card has around 150 USD to buy stuff.
Here they have a program named Thanks! Award where you can send thank you notes with a gift to another employee, you can receive a maximum of 3 per year. And the gift has an IBM logo, there are backpacks, hand clocks, pens, mouses, Flash memories and some other stuff too.
If you don't have a car there is always the free shuttle from IBM.
Cons: The place to work is very far from the city, so I have to drive around 30 to 40 minutes to get here. Also the traffic is a problem since the entrance is for one car, so entering or exiting the company is kind of hard and takes time. Ironically the computers that we have are not cutting edge, I have to work with a T43 and it's slow. Also you must use their own programs so SameTime takes a lot of RAM and keeps crashing even if you blink in a way that the program didn't like.
Nobody gives you a clear description about working at home instead of the office, and sometimes you just don't know the protocol to do stuff like having a free day etcetera.