Company: IBM
Date: 2019-10-31
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Depends on how lucky you yet. Minimal managerial support.
Pros: There are some very cool projects that are actually useful to the government - FDA records classification, simplifying searching through HHS database. As IBM is really banking on AI to pull itself into the future, you will be exposed lots of AI techologies like NLP, computer vision, some element of creating models for classification and prediction.

The DC office is on F and 14th so very conveniently located one block from metro center.
Cons: The mentorship opportunities are little to none. Everyone who has the technical competence to be a mentor is overworked and overstressed, and you can only really get them to spend time with you if you happen to be on the same project. I have been on several projects where I, with less than one year of experience, have been the lead on a project simply because everyone else is too expensive or unavailable.

While you are exposed to these AI technologies, it is unlikely you actually get to work with them hands on. Most AI in our projects depends on Watson APIs (whose accuracy is definitely not cutting edge), so you're mostly making API calls rather than building a model yourself, so there's little opportunity to gain experience or understanding.

A lot of the projects they deliver to the client also often have pretty low usability because we are severely lacking in front end engineers and rarely talk to the Design team because they're too expensive.