Low pay: pay is very low, and many people are lied to in order to get them hired. The CEO gives each manager 3% raise money for all of his/hers employees per year. Oversimplified, if you get 4% your coworker just got 4%. They use a lot of H1-Bs and foreign workers to keep salary costs down.
Distracting working space in Westminster: The building is attractive looking but very distracting due to its open arrangement. Culture on all floors is interrupt when you feel like it, and meetings are plentiful and rarely produce any work. Management seems to ignore that meeting culture is prevalent and ineffective. Most meetings do not have an agenda and if they do, the results are not implemented.
Poor management: I have worked in a lot of different places in Trimble, and all of them have had too many cooks in the kitchen. Management seems to suffer from changing goals every few weeks to months, with no clear leader and seldom management is held accountable. Management and Marketing control most of what the engineers do, and usually do not listen to common sense. Much of management lacks basic technical skills and domain knowledge skills. Most of software development is done trying and failing to adhere to agile. The amount of managers and marketing people is overwhelming, especially in some departments. Software engineers will have 2-6 people in between them and the customer, never meet the customer, and be subject to the current infighting between managers and marketing. The company is very slow moving. You may get to work on current technologies but expect it to take a lot longer than normal - closer to government work than private sector speeds.
People: Many in middle management or similar positions have worked for the company for far too long. It seems like many people strive for job safety by creating difficult solutions, not documenting hardware or software, or making special, non-standard solutions to easy problems. It is also very hard to get good people hired. Trimble doesn't pay very well. Combine that with a very long interview process with internal recruiters that are not technical at all and that means there are rarely good candidates to choose from. Indian teams are utilized very frequently for software and tend to do very poor work. Indians that are brought over on H-1B seem to be much better and quicker.
Morale: Layoffs happen fairly frequently and are handled very poorly. Management will announce it once it has happened but will not go into any details. You won't know who was laid off or even how many people. Layoffs happen, in most cases that I have seen, when the business sectors are still highly profitable but below wildly inaccurate estimates.
Horizontal integration: Trimble has many different businesses, and none of them talk to each other well. The verticals keep to themselves and many times design the similar/same solutions, hardware, and software for different businesses. Acquired businesses do not seem to be absorbed very well and tend to operate as separate entities with a few notable exceptions.
