IBM

I worked in IBM Romania. Initially, the only pro for me was the job location. After 10 months, they moved to a very crowded area, difficult to reach.

Too much politics. Evaluations were not that objective.

Work schedule/planning was fuzzy without a defined goal. For example, one month I was doing one technology – programming cloud automation with Chef. Then suddenly changed to Salt. After another month, suddenly changed with other things: IT admin, VM, or Puppet tech.

Servers/IT administration and DR in general were very problematic. Sudden architecture changes in IT caused days/weeks to recover setups for developers, etc.

Productive work was always undermined by management politics and poor low-level management of infrastructure and scheduling.

Never-ending, super long meetings.

Upper and middle management in CMS Division, Ro., didn't even care if we had a phone on our desk. I asked for some more RAM for my PC, which used to crash (because of many dev. resource needs – ECLIPSE & co. dev. env.), and never got a response or a formal agreement. I had to eventually buy RAM personally.

We usually did work on Agile technology, so we were on the phone with global support. However, two people at a desk shared one single desk phone.

Also, the salary level was low for me in IBM Romania. At the time, there was not an extraordinary issue, but there were critical, major differences (80 to 120%) between engineers in the same team.

Try to do less politics and more focus on the job and the technical part of it. Define clear goals and strategy, followed by a clear implementation plan for every team. Be more interested in what professionals need to get the job done. I was enthusiastic to start working for IBM, and then very disappointed when I noticed everything was a mess.