IBM

The people there are smart and want to make a difference. The name still has some cache, so getting a job somewhere else is easier. Lots of potential to work on interesting projects. Truly global if you like to travel.

Upper management has gone off the rails. Google "IBM Gear box". I was a new college hire with a two-year "2 rating". I was threatened with the gear box along with 9 other random members of a team of 23.

I took the time to leave and found a better job. If the company wanted to cut in my line of business, have the class to just lay us off and pay severance – now it's a maximum of 2 months.

When first-line managers can't tell you what is going to happen, and months go by, then they say "back to business as usual";

• People leave on their own as there is no stability.
• People who stay, individual and team morale is destroyed.

I worked for 2.5 years in a line of business that had been an on-premise offering for ten years and was transitioning to a cloud offering. When I left, dev was still working on the concept of agile iterations and did not have a stable product to transition current customers to or sell to new customers.

Genie talks a great game, but in the trenches, it's falling apart. Watson is 10 years away from making money. We missed cloud altogether. Blockchain is 7+ years away from making money. What then? Rely on services and legacy computing for the next 10 years? As you can see, Wall Street thinks the same thing.

380,000+ employees. Management will not read this. I will say something to those new graduates thinking of working there:

Have a 2-3 year exit strategy, learn what you can, and get the name and move on. There is so much more out there.