Utter Rubbish - Software Engineer Lenovo Employee Review

Job growth is non-existent. Lenovo almost always hires externally to fulfill its needs. The obsession with directional change mentioned by many other reviewers here is true, and when that occurs, many of these new hires find themselves responsible for a position not even close to what they were hired on for just a year or even six months prior. This definite is a sign of a company that does not have an actionable nor sustainable long-term vision. Of course, this is what senior management is responsible for and has failed to deliver on much of the time since the acquisition from IBM in 2005. Senior management is obsessed with changing direction as a response to failing to meet goals that were unrealistic to begin with. During my tenure at Lenovo, I saw a culture of 'yes men' as opposed to any real leadership. I say 'yes-men', because the vast majority of "leaders" are male. While there are some females in management, the majority of them are in lower-to-middle management. Lenovo's culture is also quite toxic. Bullying, negative gossip, and ostracization is frequent. This is actually encouraged by management with what they term "visibility." Indeed, it is more important to be seen and heard by the right people than actually do an excellent job and help your team or division succeed. If you can argue your way out of a poor job performance or blame someone else convincingly, it is believed. Many have learned to game this culture and work their way up the ladder. Some are moderately competent in their roles, whilst many lack even the fundamental skills necessary to succeed. The way around this is to either: 1) Pull rank and say "I know better because I'm a higher band" and then ultimately blame the impending failure on something else, or 2) use your internal connections to find a way around the person who is in a lower band to push your agenda forward and explain it in such a way that people in senior management (who have no clue as to what's going on besides how much money is being made and spent) to agree with you and take your side. I have seen many well designed plans thrown out the window in favor of ludicrously complex designs because of political posturing and power-plays. This, of course, makes it significantly harder for the people actually doing the work to successfully complete the requirements, so the answer to that is to have them work 12 hour days and weekends for weeks or months at a time. A VP I used to work for heard about how hard our team was working for months on end and his response to this was "I don't care, as long as it gets done." If you complain about being worked to death, you WILL be made fun of publicly by someone who out-ranks you and finds this type of humor acceptable. This workload isn't an exception to the rule, this is how it is 70% of the time at Lenovo. Layoffs occur multiple times a year and have for many years now. Management leverages globalization as an argument to tell you that you don't deserve job growth, a shot at a promotion, or to be paid better despite those of us that pushed through the hard times, make our respective teams succeed and have a significantly larger workload than many people at higher bands have. Several people in my role or similar have been told that management can get two engineers from China or India for the same amount of money we are being paid at Lenovo. While there is some truth to this, I would ask how this is a motivating factor to get me to work even harder at a company that puts more and more responsibility on its current workers and gives a 3% raise for the lucky ones, while external hires have more visibility, less responsibility, and generally a 10%-20% larger paycheck. Sadly, Lenovo is not one team. It is many internal divisions competing against one another for funding, indeed, survival. Divisions use one another to meet quotas, get ahead, or finish a product, then have to convince upper management how much they did themselves. The ironic thing is, many of these divisions are so interdependent so by trying to make one another look bad, this form of "leadership" is only really hurting the company as a whole. The only other companies I have seen use this model is organised crime. Lenovo also uses a bell-curve rating to force their employees into categories of 1, 2, or 3; 1 being excellent and rare to achieve; 2 being the norm for many hard working, competent people (2+ being higher on the 2 scale, 2- being lower, but not quite 3), and 3 for people who aren't doing their job, or more to the point, people that management does not like. Since bonuses are a large percentage of employees' salary, we are forced to compete against one another for the '2' positions. The '1' ratings are reserved for people with more visibility and who are favored, generally quite subjectively, by management. As an added bonus, this is a zero-sum rating system. For every 1, there must be a 3, for every 2+, there must be a 2-. This, again, forces people to work together in the short term, but then people that want to make a career here will not think twice about stabbing their co-workers in the back to get ahead.