Elsevier reviews

BUs have very different cultures. Some are really well run. Some have terrible leadership. Some BU executives run the business like a high school clique and only promoting and keeping their friends even when data shows that others increase revenue and productivity more. Institutional knowledge is often overlooked. It is often lost in layoffs or people leaving because they are unhappy. Their is a sense that leadership in certain BUs don't care long term strategy and underpinning their base while growing new areas. They care more about getting a photo with famous people. Lay-off numbers are often hidden by laying people off a little at a time. Certain BUs are arguably anti-American and Americans are the first to be laid off (partially due to higher salaries and because they are not protected like European workers but also partially because there are certain groups who really don't like working with Americans). Career Opportunities can be very limited based on the BU that you are in.

I think the word "disorganized" sums up the whole company. With the amount of profit they have you would think they would invest more in improving the organization, but it's the opposite. They reliably make obscene amounts of profit, so I guess there is no incentive to improve, as there is no need to work hard to compete or increase profit. Lots of things are wasteful, inefficient, duplicated, poorly communicated, confusing, disorganized. Often they can't staff needed positions or pay for needed services, seemingly because of bizarre internal accounting rules, and managers seem to twist into pretzels to maybe make a deal to get people they need to do critical work. Silos everywhere, reinventing-the-wheel everywhere. Training includes the bare minimum needed to protect the company/executives, but often people barely know how to do their jobs, and aren't taught to do them uniformly (virtually identical groups across departments do things very differently). Engineers don't get onboarded to the hundred-plus standards they are required to follow. It takes years to accomplish a menial improvement that a medium-sized company could probably do in a few weeks or months. Acquisitions are getting better, but are mostly inconsistent with no real effort to onboard thoroughly.l. IT is pitiful; wait weeks to get your laptop after you start, poor desktop management / software rollouts, they still do password rotations (?!), they don't do developer-specific support even though devs make up a large percentage of the employees. The company basically seems like a machine that prints money and buys companies without caring what the result is (they don't seem to have a plan for what to do with the companies they buy). Business units' divisions work against each other and C-level doesn't seem to care (or at least isn't stopping it). Products have virtually no consistency other than all using the same hosting provider and the same marketing logos/themes. Very little code re-use or collaboration. The products that do make money are mainly legacy tire-fires staffed by people with no interest or need to improve (it's making money, why fix it?). A lot is propped up by pockets of amazing but overworked, overstressed staff. People don't take vacation or improvement days because they're afraid they will be even more behind on work than before. A good amount of employees are unskilled, redundant. Lots of contractors, treated like second-class citizens even if they put in better or more work than full-time employees. When employees bring up concerns in town halls, management doesn't commit to specific improvement or change. Ideas are ignored unless submitted as a business case. Finding, storing, retrieving information is haphazard. I think someone read Conway's Law and decided to build a company around it. The best people seem to leave within a year or two out of frustration.