I will start summarizing that IBM has been by far the worst company I have worked for in my career. I have worked in different companies in different countries and I wanted to try IBM because, you know, "it's an amazing technology company" that have created a lot of different patents. But once you started there you will notice that everything is still working old school. Then is when you notice IBM is not what it was in the past. These are the main point of views that are headaches: - Nothing is centralized, teams around IBM use different tools and processes, is like an anarchy. - Management is not transparent at all (I had the luck to have a manager who was really good, but the others I have... lies and smoke). - If you are in the Research department, probably this doesn't apply, but there are a lof of people hired who doesn't know anything about Agile methodologies, pipelines, DevOps... I have been working with teams that everything was manual. They didn't have anything automated, no version control, no documentation for people once they start in the team, just people "developing" without asking themselves "why I am doing this" or "what can I improve". They don't care about quality or documentation, and this was not a new team. - The CEO use to have some monthly sessions where he explains and answer questions that people ask. Don't let them lay to you, most of the things are lies. The most funny is he answered questions like "There will be layoffs in IBM?", he said "we are not going to do layoffs in the following months". Well, more than 19.000 were laid off two weeks after. - They bury you in paper and bureaucracy. Once you leave the company expect to receive 100 mails with papers. I recommend to hire a lawyer, because these guys retire the money from your 401k when they shouldn't, and when you reclaim they said you were right, but you have to notice it. Whatever, there are a lot of things that can be improved in IBM. I feel sad that a company like this, that was amazing before, now is like this. Recommendation: if you have other offers, take a look to the Glassdoor reviews (of course), but try to avoid this company. If you plan to retire here, I guess is a good company to do it, but if you plan to learn more and grow, forget about it.
