Company: IBM
Date: 2009-06-17
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Flexible but frustrating
Pros: Lots of a vacation: 15 days plus 4 "personal choice holidays", so basically 19 days of vacation to start with. The schedule is also flexible, if you need to work from another city or work from home to receive a delivery, it usually isn't a problem. Likewise, there are no set number of sick days: if you are sick, you don't come in. This also leads to you tending to work while you are out sick or on vacation (just a quick email check...), which skews your work/life balance a bit.
Cons: Upper management is completely disconnected from the "grunts". We are told to do things simply because they come from "higher up" than our first or second line manager, but these things are being done everywhere from Los Angeles to Smallville, Kansas. The country, states, and cities are not one-size-fits-all, but our performance is measured as such. Our pay, however, is not, so you need to balance time between the BS that doesn't help so that you keep your job, while still managing to finish what you would otherwise have gotten done so that you continue to get paid.