IBM

Less politics.

Code code code. Build and develop everything from scratch. Real impact in healthcare (industry leader in GxP cloud). Decent new stacks, especially in the Big Data area. Robust & well-built automation platform. Microservice design. Agile & small team. Slack, latest MacBook series, brand new building, open office. Stellar engineers. Many top engineers joined Watson Health from other IBM divisions. This tells a lot. Relatively young and new, fast-paced environment. The project was many times mentioned by Ginni in tech talks. You feel important and have a rewarding contribution.

Feels like a growing startup inside a tech giant. Does not feel like traditional IBM. We hate traditional IBM. We moved on. Join Watson Health.

• No free food.
• Pay is flat. Standard in Cambridge, but far behind Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon.
• Still seeing old-timers, IBM zombies with ThinkPads and Sametime Messenger, roaming around every once in a while. Frustrating.
• The way we conduct all-hands meetings, reviews, training, and paperwork is often very old-school, despite investments in new engineering tools.

Again, the biggest downside is the general IBM outlook. We suffer a lot from this.

Continue to improve the culture and invest more in people.