Disclaimer: I was working at the Osram Innovation Hub in Berlin The supposedly “start-upish” part of Osram.
It all started already very, very chaotic and should have been a huge warning sign for me in the beginning. You know these articles you read about what red flags you should see in an interview process - they got them all. Unprepared interviewer. Three to four people interviewing the candidate at the same time. Whiteboard “coding”. Asking useless knowledge questions which the interviewer had to look up himself on wikipedia. An unorganised overall process (I had to go there 6! times for this and that) and then a Job reassignment before I even started and another one shortly after because they are always short on people no matter where and the management likes to shuffle the people around quite a lot to make up for it.
The team is a mix of 6 consultancies, a dozen freelancers and roughly around 10 internal employees, located all over Germany, Europa and the US. The mood was very bad when I joined and almost 6 month later most of the internals that had been there when I joined, left the company again. In total we lost roughly 20 employees in a year while never really having more than 12 at a time. A few even left again only a few weeks after joining. Which tells you already how bad the interview process, the mood and the management is.
On top of that there have been several budget cuts and hiring freezes due to things happening in Osram in general. Even though the management tried to assure us many times how important our work is and that this is the future of Osram, they stabbed our back with budget stuff more than once and slowed us with weird requests to please some hierarchy. That basically was more nails in the coffin to get any reasonable team setup there.
The strategy also changed a few times for clear or unclear reasons. Over all real leadership was completely missing there. More than once there was no clarity on what to do and where we were heading and the lack of inspirational and engaging leadership was frustrating. Intransparent decisions over and over and the treatment of the externals (which made more than 2/3 of the team) did not contribute to getting this up to speed or even getting any reasonable team spirit up.
I cannot recommend that company to anyone even though there have been bunch of talented individuals there inside of the teams. I guess with more independence from the corporate part and a good leadership that thing could have taken up. That kinda was what I was hoping for at least and made me stay. But after being there for more than a year now I surrendered to the ignorance of the management.
