Agilent Technologies reviews

- Sales targets can be pretty unrealistic in many product lines - commission schedule is heavily skewed toward the later part of quota attainment and excellence points/over-quota bonus structure, while lucrative, are largely a rarely achieved “carrot.” Sales targets seem set to regulate salary, not to encourage over-performance. Sales targets are based entirely on prior year’s growth, instead of a running average. - Raises, in general, are low and don’t keep up with inflation/cost of living, so negotiate hard for your starting salary. They also eliminated profit-sharing/company bonuses for field sales employees, and gave everyone a one-time raise to compensate. At the time we were told this wouldn’t affect our year end performance based raises, but they sure did! They also greatly reduced the over-quota bonus structure for the “Product Specialist.” role a few years ago despite the fact that we spend as much or more time interfacing with customers as the Account Managers (who retained a higher bonus) do. - ultra conservative, risk averse business practices, coupled with dated processes and software tools that slow down business transactions and frustrate customers and force the company to be market reactive, rather than forward thinking, often late to new trends and emerging markets. - large contingent of outsourced/overseas jobs (manufacturing, accounting, HR, etc.) means long response times to simple asks, almost all internal business conducted by email. - unmotivated support functions: Great, highly motivated R&D, engineering, production, field sales organizations and service engineers that are often bogged down dealing with delivery logistics, order processing, service scheduling, and recalcitrant management teams more worried about their personal bottom lines than the customers their decisions effect. The teams dedicated to these functions hide behind email nodes and “support tools” that are essentially black holes for the requests to be sent to and ignored, to the detriment of the customer experience. As a result, folks in customer facing roles often spend huge amounts of time trying to circumvent “the system” to get their customers help. This creates frustration and extra work for field sales/service folks, and customers. You’re often left feeling like you’re doing 3-4 other peoples’ jobs for one paycheck!

- Shareholder value is paramount - resulting in many short-sighted and "knee-jerk" decisions and near constant re-organization to scrape a few extra pennies into shareholder pockets. If there is a long term business outlook or objective, it isn't being communicated well. - Ultra-conservative investment in R&D and infrastructure. Huge reliance on dated processes and software makes doing business very slow, frustrating to customers. - Continual erosion of post-sales applications support and service slowly but surely damaging the company's reputation as market leader/trusted industry partner. - Formerly a "standout" place to work, the current goal seems to be trying to be "more like everyone else" in the industry by eroding employee benefits to be "more consistent with other businesses in the industry." This strategy seems to work as one would expect - talented employees leave for greener pastures, mediocre/sub-par employees stay on. - Particularly bad batch of recent senior management decisions in certain business organizations (specifically, sales). Sales performance expectations don't match market reality, and new sales strategy erodes "premium" instrumentation brand position and has everyone selling on huge discounts instead. Excellent managers who energized their teams and drove business are being pushed out and replaced by yes-men and yes-women who toe the company line, keep their heads down, and bring very little to the table in terms of management, support, or enthusiasm for their teams. As a result, many sales teams' morale is in the dumps and successful sales professionals are looking elsewhere to competitors who will set reasonable sales goals and, thereby, pay reasonable commissions.