Pros
o Free snacks, drinks, monthly cake, massages, etc (as everyone mentioned) o Pretty decent benefits in comparison to previous employers o Lots of infrastructure, which is great for seeing how things tick on a large scale o Very flexible with scheduling o Definitely has some incredibly smart people to learn from o Fast-paced in regard to technology, always adopting the newest hardware o Relatively stable o Accepting of alternate lifestyles o Wide range of software and hardware o Great documentation o Very low turnover rate There are probably many more things I can't remember.
Cons
o Poor past decisions for infrastructure design which were seemingly based on cost o Lack of power as a company; IBM always calls the shots, right or wrong o Heavy office politics, mainly in IBM o IBM looks down on the company as if we're beneath them o Constantly forced by IBM to make bad decisions, even if the entire company disagrees o Any customer with access to upper management in IBM gets whatever they want, no matter how insane, unethical, or unhealthy for the company it is o Large departments are out of touch (eg. Sales, support, internal) o Product additions are not announced to anyone -- You often learn about new products after a customer tells you o Lower level support management believes that we should go the extra thousand miles and provide what is in essence managed services o Lower level anything (support, build technicians) are treated terribly, paid terribly, and generally unhappy o No matter how much of a backbone someone has, IBM will break it o Future is very uncertain o Processes for anything IBM-related are incredibly convoluted, outdated, invasive, and downright painful o Separation between IBM employee tools and Softlayer employee tools o Less and less response to feedback from both customers and employees due to IBM policies o Office theft is a real thing -- keep your desk locked Fun fact: IBM used to have a similar cloud division. Used to, because some of the management running Softlayer now, ran it into the ground. TLDR: