IBM

The Herman Miller chairs were nice.

Having an office in the center of Astor Place is convenient.

I think the largest upside professionally is probably having the IBM name on your employment history.

They attempted to practice capital-A Agile, which was great.

Just about everything else.

This review is specific to the IBM Lab in New York City. It has gone by different names at different times and might not be a lab anymore. I think they renamed it "Studio" at some point.

IBM is a bureaucratic nightmare. Getting even the most straightforward of tasks done takes weeks (e.g., getting a badge to get into the building, getting your equipment, getting online once you have your equipment). The security compliance policies are draconian, though they certainly have the budget to allow you to comply with them. Without exception, the internal tooling is abysmal, and in most cases, alternatives are verboten. One of the first things that I did was move my entire team onto a new self-hosted chat service and a new self-hosted project management service because nobody was able to get anything done with the IBM versions.

Most of the employees I encountered there were either agency all-stars with varied and colorful experience or under-qualified contractors who consistently delivered sub-par work. It is unbelievable how poorly managed the company is. Many within upper management are long-time IBM staff with no technical background to speak of. Watching them try and chase around the Salesforces and Googles of the world was depressing. I would regularly be on product calls with 30 people in various offices that I would never meet, all needing to sign off on a decision in some way. Most days you did not need to do anything, though; other teams were stuck working eighty-hour weeks going through pointless redesign after redesign during their review processes.

It can be a cash cow if you negotiate your contract right, but I'm not sure it's worth it.

Step down.

The company is essentially a bloated IT consultancy run by management consultants with no experience in technology. Bring in some younger executives with experience running successful startups and corporations in Silicon Valley and focus the company.

Few on my team could understand how anybody in their right mind would pay for your services in 2015, given the quality of the software. Eventually, your legacy enterprise contracts will turn over, and there will be nothing left for you. If you want to survive, you will need to adapt and soon.