IBM

• They have some, if you are lucky enough, interesting projects.
• There are offices everywhere.
• The 401k package (in the US) is not bad.
• There are good people working there; not everything is bad at all.

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 has 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 points of view that are headaches:

• Nothing is centralized. Teams around IBM use different tools and processes; it is like anarchy.
• Management is not transparent at all. I had the luck to have a manager who was really good, but the others I have encountered were full of lies and smoke.
• If you are in the Research department, this probably doesn't apply, but there are a lot of people hired who don't know anything about Agile methodologies, pipelines, or DevOps. I have been working with teams where everything was manual. They didn't have anything automated, no version control, no documentation for people once they start in the team. It was just people "developing" without asking themselves, "Why am I doing this?" or "What can I improve?" They don't care about quality or documentation, and this was not a new team.
• The CEO used to have some monthly sessions where he explained and answered questions that people asked. Don't let them lie to you; most of the things he said were lies. The funniest part is when he answered questions like, "Will there 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 emails with papers. I recommend hiring a lawyer because these guys retire the money from your 401k when they shouldn't. When you reclaim it, they admit 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 at the Glassdoor reviews (of course), but try to avoid this company. If you plan to retire here, I guess it is a good company to do it, but if you plan to learn more and grow, forget about it.

They have to stop promoting people just because they were there 20 years.

Management is REALLY poor, not transparent, and with a lot of lies.

They have to put more focus on delivery with quality and in automating processes.

Come on, it's a technology company. Improve the processes a little bit and stop doing things the old-school way.

Stop prioritizing feature development above quality.