Career stagnation
Pros
Good pay and benefits, fairly flexible schedule.
Cons
Micro-managing. Boxing: you are put in a "box" in the sense that you are expected to work on the same domain for years on end. Unwillingness to allow development teams to have ownership of their product domain, thus leading to employees feeling dis-empowered, demotivated, lacking passion for their work, and rampant (justified) cynicism towards management initiatives. This is a 9-to-5 environment where nobody really cares much about what they do, they just do it because it pays the bills. Zero innovation unless you work at the Gemenos, France office because every new idea must be vetted by Corporate managers, and when good ideas are presented they are often taken and repackaged by Corporate R&D, leaving engineers at satellite offices with no recognition. Extremely difficult to move within the company if you're not a "yes man" who never questions the status quo. Very high employee turnaround due to the reasons above and intense internal politics and bureaucracy. You may thrive in this environment if you are a social butterfly who's good at navigating the bureaucracy and play your cards right. But then you're probably not a great engineer. And the problem is that the top is full of the aggressive corporate ladder climbers who got there by stepping on their peers, and those people will be your managers. Expect unreasonable deadlines, nonsensical requirements, superfluous projects designed to pad some project manager's resume, time consuming tracking of developer time down to the hour (yes, even full-time salaried software engineers must produce detailed reports of how they spent their time), among other nonsense. Being a French company, everything of French origin gets precedence: French nationals enjoy very generous expatriate contracts to work overseas, a disproportionate amount of internal third-party software solutions are of French origin despite the fact that they are often considerable inferior and more expensive than leading providers. One last thing that really bother me is the extensive use of open source software internally without any kind of contribution back to the FLOSS community. When Gemalto can't find a French company to provide some service, they will grab an open source solution, customize it, and deploy it internally world-wide. All while not allowing employees to make any contributions to those projects as a matter of company policy (some exceptions exist, mostly employees who have developed solutions in their own personal time).
