IBM

I am working at IBM Lab. (All tasks are not related to customers directly.)

• Very flexible working hours if you have a good manager. One day for working from home in a week.
• Lots of free time to learn new skills or take care of your family.
• Low pressure with very specific technical skills you need to learn; once you master them, you will be very relaxed.
• Relatively caring about equity between male/female/LGBT.
• The brand is useful for finding another job; the company looks good to outside people.
• Acceptable compensation for most workers here, because you have too few things to do.

Management teams are very slow and inefficient. Management teams' power is held only by a few high-level managers (VP, product owner); others don't have the ability to change things. Your skills will become very weak if you only focus on the company's tasks. Colleagues are relatively lazy. They might have families and tend to reject learning new techniques. Even if they learned, those mature projects won't adopt them. IBM is a company mainly for maintaining mature projects until those products sunset. Most of them don't have enough skill for developing their own products. The environment is NOT good for any young engineer; it is too stable and lazy. Contributing to open-source projects and participating in outside conferences (such as CppCon, RubyCon, PHPCon...) is not encouraged. Managers only care about value/visibility here. Maintaining projects or creating cool features are considered stupid here. There is too much formality in Scrum and Agile. Software engineering is fake here. Bands below 8 have no power here; you cannot decide anything. Stupid job rotation. Your colleagues might have no skills or domain knowledge for new products.

Make more opportunities for low-band engineers.

Being smart. IBM is big; however, using patents to protect yourself and buying mature products won't make you great again.