From what I can tell, nobody recently hired actually likes working at IBM. No one looks happy when you see them walking in in the morning. Nobody seems to really know what's going on during the day. Everyone seems to take great joy in things like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because they are a brief, if fleeting, break from the confusion of being a new consultant. And EVERYONE is decidedly happy to be leaving the building at the end of the day. In fact, at a happy hour near my apartment today, we ran into 6 other IBM new hires drowning their sorrows.

You see they hire liberal arts majors (I didn't lie - it was quite clear that they were interviewing a PSYCHOLOGY MAJOR from BATES COLLEGE) and then they expect us to know/figure out things like Defense Maintenance Depots, Internal Supply Chains, Asset Visibility, etc.

I don't know these things. The resources I am supposed to use to understand these things are full of more things I don't understand. It's pretty awesome...

Even if you knew a Chinese person was really smart, would you hire them to edit Webster's English Dictionary if they'd never heard English before? Would you ask them to rewrite the definition for "lachrymose" on their 3rd day on the job? I didn't think so.