Pros
Good pay and good benefits
Cons
Single most toxic culture I’ve ever experienced. Sr leadership has surrounded it self with sycophants, and as a result blowing smoke upwards takes priority over everything. Everything is skewed to make dear leader happy. Metrics are fudged, achievements are invented out of thin air, and shortcomings/mistakes are hidden all to make sure that the big boss is happy. You never, ever raise bad news, which is very much necessary in my small department. This has resulted in a culture where managers and directors do not actually lead anything. They don’t have any vision for the teams, they don’t collaborate with their peers, they don’t distill information from their various meetings into useful action items for their teams. They don’t do anything leadership related at all. In fact, it’s gotten so bad in my neck of the woods, that leadership doesn’t actually run any meetings. They delegate major, manager level activities and decisions to heavily siloed non-managers who have no time to collaborate because everyone is expected to be on every meeting. Like I said, managers don’t actually do anything. They sit quietly in meetings, occasionally chiming in with useless, off topic comments, and we are meant to infer some kind of grand vision from the drivel. Also, if you want to advance in the company: you are going to be expected to file for patents, even if your position has absolutely nothing to do with IP or engineering. So… good luck with that. Oh, BTW, because filing for patents is sanctioned, and there is a modest financial incentive, some of your team is going to entirely abscond from their responsibilities to go generate patents. That’s right, there are several members of my team who do absolutely no work at all. All they do is file for patents. Nothing that is going to be developed by the company, just ideas that Lenovo can set on the shelf in the hope of suing a competitor one day. Yep, Lenovo is a full blown patent troll. And guess who has to pick up my peers slack? Me! Apparently… Oh and if you dare to speak out, you’ll have a bunch of people pinging you privately to support you, but leadership will make your life hell. I have no work life balance. I’m expected to be up early AM to work with India, and online every evening to support China. My plate is filled with my regular daily duties, my peers duties because they have patents to file, and building presentations for meetings that my boss should be running. When I tell him that I’m burning out, he tells me to suck it up and keeps adding work. I’m taking a pay cut to leave this place, but at least I’ll regain my sanity because I can’t take it any more.
