GE reviews

Poor leadership. I know that GE was known for great leadership, but those days are currently gone. There is a lack of long term vision of where want products to go, what customers want to serve, and how to get there. Long term projects struggle for years with little leadership engagement, and then leaders become surprised when crunch time comes and deadlines are missed. There is a lack of communication between leaders of different organizations, locations, etc. Professional confrontation that is sometimes required to resolve an issue is always pushed down to the engineer level for resolution, leaders are terrified to (professionally) confront another leader for fear of bad labels... in other words, there is a big incentive to keep things swept under the carpet. Incredible amount of bureaucracy. Simple tasks that used to take an educated decision by a few smart engineers with some involvement of some more senior engineers now require multiple levels of managers, consulting engineers, chief engineers, technical leaders, etc. Chief engineers have a very confrontational tone as well as have difficultly in accepting new ideas but at the same relentlessly push their new ideas even though not completely thought through. PowerPoint culture. Inordinate amount of time spent in PowerPoint. In theory the idea is that the PowerPoint slides summarize your work in order to communicate progress, risks, etc. Instead, all of the good engineering work that was done has to be force fit into a presentation tool so that the disengaged leadership chain and levels of bureaucracy can try to understand the basic concepts of what is going on. If you are good at PowerPoint you can go far in GE, but if you want to continue to sharpen your engineering skills you will otherwise find that they will become rusty mostly due to this. Difficult to get through to real customers. If you had previous industry experience, will likely be more comfortable in ability to make decisions, understand what is going on, and push for what you think is right for customers. Otherwise, customer's needs are filtered and passed down through multiple layers, ultimately leading to lowered customer expectations. Additionally, a culture has developed amongst those with less direct industry and customer experience, where they have become leaders that are setting direction for product offerings, design decisions, etc but clearly are missing the mark. This in turn also leads to the previous comment of rusty engineering skills, where the rank-and-file become out of touch with industry standards, customer expectations, etc. Additionally, things such as attending a conference or sitting on an industry standards board are reserved for a select few. Lack of team mentality. This is something simply have to accept in a 'meritocracy' such as GE. You are constantly conscious of your yearly EMS (yearly personnel review process), where more or less have to create a resume of accomplishments every year. On the surface it makes sense to put down your accomplishments to refresh the minds of those who determine pay raises, but it is clear that once it goes up one or two layers in the chain of command that any great individual or team efforts become less significant in lieu of name recognition. Hopefully didn't come across as too negative. In general probably on par with other large corporations. However, currently falling behind our competition, leadership is currently on a down-slide, but as in everything in GE this can go in cycles and has the ability to improve if becomes a recognized problem.