IBM

Salary is a bit on the lower end for the area. Not enough for a decent one-bedroom apartment on my own.

Work/life balance is okay, could be better. I managed to work remotely every other Friday. But I think this really depends on your project manager.

Start times were flexible. Some people on our team got in before 8 a.m.; others came in after 9 a.m.

I worked in the CIC, which is separate from mainline IBM. It's basically just Java/JavaScript roles with a few others, so not much opportunity for other stuff. But I managed to work on a few new technologies. So it depends on your project, really.

People there are really nice. I got on with them all and there's a really good culture.

Management really started to annoy me, though. I joined as a graduate and I thought there would be a project lined up, but I ended up on the bench for 3 months doing loads and loads of online e-learning.

The free courses on Udemy were good, but most of the time you didn't get a choice of stuff to learn either.

They want you to learn whatever the current/upcoming projects will use, including Salesforce.

After a while, it gets stressful, though, because you get asked every day what you did to find/apply to a project. There were hardly any available, though, and you run out of projects to apply to, then they get mad that you didn't apply to any that day.

They then started trying to get people who joined as developers to be testers, and that's when things started to take off.

Loads of the graduates just started leaving because there's nothing to do. Don't get me wrong, you can just keep learning and learning and still get paid, but after months of e-learning, people started to hate it.

Because you aren't on a project, either, your salary won't be going up. You can only get a promotion after 6 months on a project, so that's time wasted not getting promotions and stagnating.

I managed to get a project within 3 months of joining, but others were still on the bench for several more months, and most graduates have left now.

Then, because loads of graduates weren't on projects, the overall average utilization of people in the CIC comes down, and that's when management decided to prevent people taking time off for the next 3 months just to reach their targets.

They punish their employees when it's management's fault for hiring too many graduates.

I worked there for over a year and did good work for the client, so much so that they expanded the team.

But be warned: management doesn't seem to care about your contributions or any of their employees, just their own bonuses, while your salary is low for a tech job.

Don't treat your employees like numbers or punish them just to reach your targets.