Pros
- Willing to invest in exploration of new business trends - Can work there for life if you don't mind never advancing - Pay is relatively high compared to market, mostly because they don't do anything significant with stock/equity
Cons
- Run by Executive Board that generally disagrees on everything or seems to actively avoid making decisions - A select few -- very few -- employees are given the lion's share of new and exciting opportunities - Horrible at promoting women and initiatives to improve the representation of women have token executive support - Everything is done by committee, so anything delivered is watered down and not compelling - Most people spend their day in endless meetings to "align" with several other groups doing essentially the same thing - Many people will join your committee to work on a cool project, but only 5% of them will actually do any work - Works Council in Germany -- essentially a union -- advocates for German employees and has approval authority over promotions, re-orgs, etc. Employees in other countries have no such leverage - American employees will work long hours, European employees generally will not take a meeting after 4p in their timezone and think nothing of asking the Americans to attend meetings at 5a or 6a in the US - Management will bicker over spending $50K on something while wasting Millions on projects that are going no where - Love/hate relationship with Silicon Valley - Will hire you to do a job that you soon discover is actually already done by 3-4 other people in the org - Employees -- even relatively senior managers -- have very little decision-making authority and are actively discouraged from making decisions