IBM

• Free lunch on Mondays. • Decent health benefits. • An abundance of buzzwords to put on your resume, like "Cloud" and "DevOps". • Steady employment. If you are in the right area (new tech or management), you don't have to worry about job security. • Great development workflow - automated builds and tests. • Good release management of new application versions. • Code reviews.

As a "developer," there was hardly ever any development work. They hire developers to do customer support.

Too much focus on arbitrary metrics. This leads to employees stacking their metrics for the sole purpose of appearing like they do a lot of work.

No focus on software quality, even though there are code reviews. It was all about getting a feature in as quick as possible to make a sale.

Management is out of touch with reality and how development actually works.

Management expects developers to be both a customer support role as well as take accountability for customer accounts.

The Cleveland office did not allow working from home for developers for no reason other than the management said so. (This could have changed by now).

Salaries are well below market rate. The bonuses and raises are literally insulting. People who actually contribute get next to nothing, while those who brown-nose the right people get the maximum allowed raises.

There is a large age gap between management and development, which led to management treating everyone like children with a "I know best" attitude, with little to no room for discussion.

Closed to new ideas. The tech stack is old, and any attempt to change that is shot down quickly.

Some of the visions for products are a jumble of incohesive ideas with no clear direction.

Progressing your career in development requires you to create and file software patents.

Lack of experienced developers. There are few senior developers who actually know how to write software; the rest are new college grads.

When your management responds to concerns about the morale and happiness of employees with, "We're trying to run a business here," you have far surpassed the point at which they should be gone. Get a manager who actually cares about the team they are managing.

Management needs to accept that they are fallible. Respect your employees; don't treat them like children.