Good job, terrible career prospects
Pros
- Get to work on huge/cutting edge networks - Good work/life balance - Nice offices - Fair on call pay scheme - Good IT/hardware/labs - Generally decent (if unfriendly) people - Good place to get an entry level job and start your career. - Generally the work load is not excessive, as they employ so many people (could be seen as a con - this is due to middle management empire building)
Cons
If you work at Nokia, there are 0 prospects for career progression. They actively discourage people switching roles. You CANNOT get a pay rise for switching roles. If you are in a team earning 30K a year, and join a team where a new hire would get 40K, you will stay on 30K. This is the stupidest policy I have ever heard of at a company, and is why most people only work here a couple of years, or forever. There is a weird culture of people joining the company at an entry level, and keeping that job until retirement. If you work there for decades they will eventually give you a pay grade bump and you'll get more money, but this is the only way to increase your salary. This is the reason why I left, and is a shame as it was a good place to work. You can only get a significant pay rise if you stay there for 10+ years. And having said all that, the pay is WAY below average. I changed jobs, and got almost double the salary. Major con is extremely unfriendly office culture. To the point where people will not even acknowledge you if you say hello to them in the kitchen. Teams do not mix at all. Ridiculous internal processes (by the time you get approval to buy something, the quote you got has expired) but probably no worse than other large corporations.