You have been warned - Project Manager Siemens Employee Review

1.0
Nov 22, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Company provided vehicle takes about $50 per 2 week pay check. Siemens uses good project tracking software. You will be given as much responsibility and work as you can handle and then probably a little more. This is a crucible, no job after this will stress you out as much or challenge you to satisfy the customer under more challenging conditions. If you can handle the stress, you should have some impressive resume items. You have complete autonomy over how you run projects and your schedule.

Cons

PM position: Long 12-14 hour days where you will be expected to drive all over the bay area. The parts warehouse is understaffed so Project Managers and Techs will need to deliver parts unless you plan 3 days in advance. They only make one delivery a day regardless. Management at the end of every quarter will ask you to lower your project budget so that you can declare profit. When you explain that you will need the money for the project you are pressured into doing it anyway. Then, when you come in 15-20% under budget you are criticized for not making it 30% under budget (note all projects are bid to be be on budget). You will be given technicians who have insufficient experience to do the work because technicians are overworked and leave. Technicians will not be devoted to your project, they will be shared between other projects. Company Credit Card in in your name so if you don't file expense reports immediately, you will need to pay your bills yourself to make sure they are paid on time. People are overworked in general. Right before I started, someone died of a heart attach in the office. Another person in finance fainted while I was there and had to be taken to the hospital. If you look around, no one looks healthy or rested. There are always 3-5 emergency jobs that are going poorly and require all of the best technicians. This leads to new projects being understaffed to meet schedule and skills. Foreman/clients notice that and complain to which you have no real answer. You will be assigned night and weekend projects in addition to your normal projects. You will occasionally need to be at job walks at 6AM.

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5.0
Jul 16, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Employee/family oriented, great support, plenty of opportunities for growth

Cons

Finding the best work/life balance

3.0
Jul 10, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I was given lot of responsibility (relative to how low stakes our projects were) without that much experience, which helped me grow quickly. I had opportunities to learn a lot through my projects and time to learn a lot outside of my projects because the timelines were very laid back. You definitely get the idea working with German Siemens employees that you would have to be really bad at the job to get let go, and you don’t need to worry about the company going somewhere. It’s a great safe career option if you just don’t want to work that hard and don’t care if the company’s success has anything to do with your work. You can learn a lot if you want to, but you have to apply yourself voluntarily because the success of your projects barely matters.

Cons

Flip side of the coin — work on my team felt super meaningless. We set our own timelines, and nobody really argued or wanted to work fast. All our clients were internal, and our contacts within the customer team often showed very little interest in the projects. Trying to get requirements out of the people literally paying you for a project was like pulling teeth. The success of my team was so disjoint from the overall success of any higher level of organization, that I was often reminded that “our team is not revenue-producing” to encourage me to use the full budget for every project I led (so that we wouldn’t appear too profitable and have our profit targets increased by management the next year). I had maybe 7 different managers in 3.5 years, sometimes multiple at a time, and only 1 of them actually knew what work I was doing. The company in general seems to be kind of a lower-to-middle-level management mess, with layers and layers between the people on the floor and the decision-makers. I also got the idea that my management was a bit of a boys’ club. I ended up leaving the company because I was constantly fighting for raises. I was contributing way above my pay grade, and management was aghast at the thought of giving one person two raises in a calendar year, even though I was clearly underpaid. My salary went up 47% + equity when I left for a smaller company where individual software developers have an impact.

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