IBM

IBM employs very smart software engineers.

I started my job right out of college at IBM, with high hopes, unfortunately.

• Pay was far below average, with raises only going to the 'top performers'.
• My manager was non-technical, had 20-30 people under her, and honestly had no clue what most of her employees' jobs were. When review time came, she skimmed through what we wrote about ourselves and rated everyone as 'average', aka no bonus + no layoff.
• Lots of layoffs, which caused a very negative attitude around the office.
• The work was boring. Being right out of college, it's fun to work with new technologies; at IBM, you're forced to use old technologies like Java and Dojo for web.
• It's very hard to get into a leadership role unless you've worked at IBM for a long time.
• No free coffee or anything for that matter. Honestly, how hard is it to offer your employees free coffee?
• IBM's "agile" is a joke; it's really just waterfall.

By working at IBM, I learned what type of company to avoid.

Start innovating and investing in your employees.