Pros
- Huge company with a lot of opportunities in different businesses, geographies, role. Internal change is encouraged. - Strong investment in technology innovation at all levels, Siemens is within the Top 20 global companies for R&D expenditure (not necessarily with best in class results) - Still strong brand image especially in Europe - Top-management at board level probably one of the best in European industrial companies, very smart, pragmatic, forward looking and always on the move - Strong product-oriented mindset - if you are an engineer and/ or you are passionate in technology you will find your space. Management mostly has product background rather than business / sales background - Strong sales footprint around the world, great sales systematic and salesmen at all levels - Good freedom in terms of developing your own ideas and presenting that to the higher management. People keen to make an impact. - Relatively stable work environment - Unmatched work-life balance, many people taking advantages
Cons
- To improve dramatically on diversity and female quotas. Still a German-centric company with 500.000 people globally with significant rooms for improvement in developing and implementing concrete measures to build a real multicultural mindset where everybody have the same opportunities from beginning to the end regardless origin, sex, age, etc. (i.e. Siemens ranks generally low as Employer on Diversity - management working to solve that). - Over 90% of management positions are covered by native-German people at board level, business group level, business unit level, regional and country level. - Organizational structure to redesign reflecting market needs vs trying to reflect internal product-organizations. Resulting in way too many middle management layers (e.g. In the 4 operating companies, each company has roughly 9-10 business units, and each business units has at least 3 business segments). - Management at Business unit level mediocre, generally coming from the old Management Consulting Unit of Siemens and/or the product business - they literally have never met a customer in their life - No open feedback culture. As a team lead, if you speak up to give feedbacks you rather have retaliations / hostile behavior instead of constructive response - Failure is encouraged with words but not openly accepted as a cultural fact, people rather trying to hide why things didn't go well instead of building up together for improvement - Inexistent Performance Management system and Individual Development Plans. Performance review done by your line manager has no link and impact on internal career progression. You have to find your way to survive and eventually to be promoted. - Promotions are driven mostly by personal relationships, years in the company, and nationality rather than results and achievements. - At a certain point, I thought that corporate language was sometimes not english but rather german -Generally, people mood is not optimistic and rather low, due mainly to the lack of trust of top management cascaded into the organization