Your typical enterprise company with a 'keep the lights on' attitude
Pros
- Nice benefits & perks, like health/medical insurance, sports membership cards, commute allowance, community lunches, free snacks - Flexible - Great social community full of nice people - Nice office locations - Offers nice ways to improve your soft skills (trainings, workshops) - Some really talented people are still at the company - Shared services like HR, Facilities, and Finance are super helpful and supportive - You can work on some widely used products. It looks good on your resumé.
Cons
- Leadership is disconnected from reality. They negate the bad reputation that surrounds some products, and make it seem like there is no negative feedback whatsoever. - Transparency is only expected from the lower end of the hierarchy, but leadership makes decisions behind closed doors and reasoning is not propagated downwards. - Since the company has a bunch of products doing different kinds of things, and serving different audiences, it is very hard for the company to have one concrete goal or mission or vision, that should be embodied in everyone's way of working. For this, apart from some very bullshitty walls of texts, it is very hard to get a grasp of where the company is headed, and what the goals are. How are people supposed to be valuable contributors if there is no consensus on what the company's mission is? - It is not a requirement for leaders and managers in the Engineering organization to have any kind of technical expertise or experience, which makes them uncapable of adequately understanding and addressing people's problems of a technical nature. - You can most likely 'fake it til you make it', the only skill you truly need in order to succeed is to sell yourself as someone who knows what one's doing, and be a good communicator. People conducting your performance reviews won't ever realize. - Sometimes called a startup, but has been a general enterprise corporation for long. Processes are reaaally slow, hierarchy is everything, bureaucracy is increasing. - One of those companies who do Agile for the sake of doing it. It often gets overlooked, because people conducting it never realize the real values it could give if done correctly. - Claims to be customer- and human-centered, but actually is all about revenue and cost optimization. If there are people with the same role in different locations, and those locations have different average salaries, instead of giving people a uniform compensation based on their role's market value (regardless the location), they would instead lay off all but the ones in the cheapest location.
