IBM

They offer career development courses and certifications, free of charge. You can get to work on some interesting projects and increase your hands-on technical experience.

However, my experience has been that the workload is very heavy, and you don't have enough time to complete courses and certifications during work hours. They do, however, expect you to study in your free time to pass them. If you don't do that, you will have a very hard time advancing from a salary point of view, regardless of how well you do in the actual project you are paid to work on.

My recent experience has been that it's a very political environment. It's full of non-technical managers who do a lot of talking but don't lift a finger to help solve procedural issues for the team. At least I'd expect them to be very good on the soft skills side, but my experience has been that that is the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, in order to increase in salary, it does not matter how good you are or how much effort you put in, but who you know and how well you can package a mediocre result. Some managers are faking emotional intelligence just because it looks good and seems politically correct, but you can see right through it. Don't expect yearly salary increases regardless of how well you perform – they won't even keep up with inflation.

This company used to be something.

Not anymore.

Many good people are leaving.

The technical and analytical expertise of people has greatly decreased while demands for delivery have increased.

This puts a lot of stress on the few good experts to cope with some bad management decisions.

I now see it as a management mess.

If you want something done right, make sure you get the right people for the right job.

And try to LISTEN to your actual delivery people.

Middle management will often give you a distorted image of reality.