Experiences at IBM

Perseverence and networking. IBM is a results company, therefore, make sure that you not only call out your responsibilities, but your results. And emphasize not only what you have done, but what you have achieved.

Having internal contacts

I worked for a year at Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock on the NSSN (new nuclear attack submarine) design and construction process. The data model I created for Navy ship construction is apparently still in use there, after more than ten years.

There are two or three stages - an HR screening, a hiring manager telephone interview, and maybe another telephone interview with a trusted colleague of that hiring manager. They ask no untoward questions - it is all about what skills you have that fit the job requirements.

My "major" (which I sort of made up) was statistical ecology. My "minor" in mathematics led to an MS degree for work with statistics and computers. I did a database design project for a class, then worked on database designs a lot for the next ten y4ears, then got an IBM contract job as a database administrator in Oracle on HP, that being an aspect of the Defense job I had had just before that. My Life Sciences degrees, three of them, have been of little or no interest to IBM, or to anyone else, ever since I got them.....

I was unemployed and would have taken whatever was offered, by anyone offering it.

four months

The smart co-workers and the fat paychecks.

IBM internal e-mail and intellectual capital intranet sites.

IBM is unusual in that the largest stockholder is the Employee Stock Purchase Plan, and that is only 5% of outstanding shares. The company is run purely for the stockholders, purely to make money, purely to pay dividends, which they have paid every quarter without fail for about 90 years.