Pros
At the worker bee level people work extremely hard and take a lot of personal pride and responsibility in their work. In theory it's a big enough place to move around, find new and interesting areas to work, and make a rewarding career for themselves. Experienced, polished management who often know the details and see the big picture of the part of the business they manage.
Cons
This is the most quintessentially bureaucratic, hierarchical, corporation I have ever worked for (and I've worked in quite a few places). In the technology sector this model feels sorely outdated and full of needless hoops to jump through. Title and rank mean everything here, and execs who have played the game their entire careers have an interest in keeping things this way. There are absolutely no limits or boundaries that are respected. You have to assert your own work/life balance and stick to your guns, otherwise you will work yourself to death. 5am meetings, standing weekly meetings that go until midnight, you name it. Most of my time is spent on internal meetings instead of doing "real work." On an average day I spend 5-8 hours on conference calls, and the flow of emails, deadlines, and firedrills never stops, and must be managed on top of the endless meeting cycles. IBM is cheap when it comes to spending money on its employees. Sharing hotel rooms, unrealistic meal allowances, limited reimbursements for essentials are all part of the game. Business class is out of the question even on long haul trips. You're expected to stay in cheap hotels and take the red-eye home and keep smiling. The notion of having a job for life is gone. The company treats lifers like barnacles at this point, scraping them off the side of the ship during the annual purge. That said, nearly everyone I meet has been around for 10-15 years or more with no plans to leave. This seems like an unsustainable situation - expecting die-hard commitment while regularly pulling the rug out from under employees. Feels like the company is following instead of leading in most segments. That kind of behavior can't satisfy Wall Street's insatiable demands for growth, and the pressure to deliver revenue growth (and not just profits) seems to be on. I joined the company through an acquisition and am relatively new, and I can't for the life of me figure out why people stay. I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel or pot of gold after all the hard work people regularly put in, even for those who have crossed the magical boundary into the executive ranks.
