Pros
Wonderful people - respectful, empathetic, supportive, and smart. The design org in IBM Cloud is doing well and has high standards. Culture is generally growth-mindset-oriented and collaborative instead of cutthroat. Good work life balance, though there is now an unnecessary 3x/week RTO mandate. Pay and benefits are not top tier but are decent enough. Great opportunities to grow and evolve your role. Managers I've had have all been great too; they care about you as a person and want to help you grow even outside IBM. No shortage of mentors at IBM either. Leadership is accessible and human (CEO office hours ad All hands with Slack Q&As) and is for the most part transparent. Senior leadership takes feedback seriously and acts on it. If you can design at IBM, which focuses heavily on enterprise design - you can design for a lot of other things. Good opportunity to take ownership and lead projects from the start. Work itself is usually the right level of challenging but doable and I'm always learning. The design org is fairly mature and I don't take the incredible Carbon Design System (and its supporting teams) for granted. Overall, an excellent place to start your career as a UX designer if you want some structure and mentors and are ok tackling complex enterprise problems.
Cons
Lack of diversity and minority representation in senior leadership, so there are not many to look up to higher up. Design work is not the most exciting or relatable to the average designer. You have to enjoy ambiguity and be ok navigating around politics / red tape especially when it comes to talking to actual users, which can be frustrating. We also used to have Design researchers embedded in each team... that is no longer the case :( Product management is often not empowered to drive features or lead products based on talking directly to customers; they often hear indirectly from CSMs or sales which means a game of telephone and a lot more "design a vase" instead of "design a way to hold flowers". Makes good user-centered design harder too. We all often have to make do with proxy users. 3x/week mandate is unnecessary especially since many cross functional teams aren't co-located anyway. No annual salary raises due to inflation. Recently, lack of clear company direction or strategy. Seeing a lot of US layoffs (RA's) and moving design roles to India or Budapest, likely to cut costs, along with RTO. We say we're invested in Cloud and AI but I see key roles getting cut like our very important documentation team, and as a result, usability suffers. For example, we now have various AI related services and teams that are doing similar things but are not talking to each other.
