ABB R&D Engineer Intern reviews

Big organization, inert, dedicated to cash flow due to large overhead and many mouths to feed prevents from being very bold in capturing new business or developing disruption, also nature of industry (maritime) extremely regulated and conservative. Silo thinking. "Good beats best". HR management extremely conservative and elastic. Hiring policy such that high degrees of pressure on head-count result when times are good, so that when times are rough, expensive and involved (in Norway) lay-off procedures can be avoided. Worst of all -- inherently cyclical boom-bust business environment, highly speculative results in lack of ability to grow business organically. Also, corporate culture is still "copper and steel" whereas the nature of the business is more and more software defined, and we live and die by the quality of embedded and control software that we provide and how well we integrate copper and steel machines into systems, and systems-of-systems.

Poor vision in senior management. Driven by a quick fix rule of thumb mentality that causes frequent resurfacing of quality and design issues. Horrific documentation and standard procedures that fall behind 1940’s standards. Most situations involve quality of material and design from poor communication. Although the issues are simple it is often an over clogged funnel of marbles that chokes out the bunch so not even one can be successful.