IBM

IBM was a great place to work because of all the information sharing and availability of all employees throughout the company. I was amazed to find out that almost 40% of IBM's software developers work remotely. This being said, IBM makes all employees available to everyone for questioning. Don't know Perl? There is an IBM community dedicated to learning Perl where professionals share their opinions. This also applies to many other technologies.

Since I was just a co-op, the project was a "nice to have" feature on a main product line. While the work was challenging, engaging, and fun, I couldn't help but feel that this might not make it into a release. And if it was to be released, it wasn't going to be for a long while, and they'll probably just have to re-write it since a lot of the product will have changed since then.

Political decisions are often made surrounding projects that can make the project direction do a 180. I would be completely open with employees about what is happening at the political level in the company as well, even if it makes you look bad.