General Electric

Competitive Hiring Salary.

Employee-driven annual review process, called EMS internally. Basically, each employee is required to do an internal resume of their qualifications, experience, accomplishments for the year, and their perceived strengths and weaknesses. Then the EMS is reviewed by your manager and your manager's manager. Your manager then does a counterpoint to your listed accomplishments (or if you're well aware of your strengths and faults, your manager will just agree with you). Then you sit down privately with your manager to discuss views. It really gives the employee a chance to trumpet themselves to management, but it is really tough when you're fairly humble.

Regular raises, about every 18 months for most employees, every 12 months for the "Top Talent" in the company.

Great Benefits: The usual health, dental, vision, 401k, and vacation, plus discount programs for company products (what does GE not make, honestly?) and partners.

Vast internal job opportunities. With so many divisions and locations in GE, there are a lot of potential places to go within the company.

Ambitious growth of the company that so far has been sustained for a few years now. Sustained double-digit revenue growth year over year is phenomenal for any company.

Recent addition of CTO position over Engineering. Having an engineer administering the technical aspects of the company is the right thing to do. Having an advocate for the technical people in the company is a great thing. Too bad this is a recent development.

At least in the groups I've worked in, my managers have been very flexible with work hours and time off.

Strong emphasis on Integrity, making sure things are done above-board.

It's nice getting instant, positive recognition from people when you say who you work for.

Re-org of the month club. The upper management of the company can't seem to make up their mind about how the company structure should look. In the time I've worked at GE, there has been a re-org on average twice a year. GE is one of the world's oldest companies and one of the 5 largest, yet for some reason, no one seems to agree on how we should look, internally or externally.

"Roof-top consolidation" and Outsourcing. I'm not sure what the problem is with having lots of small facilities, but management hates it like the plague, so they keep cutting facilities. They seem to either consider people disposable or somehow expect their whole workforce to be so loyal that they'll move anywhere from 50 to 2000 miles to keep their jobs. Or they instead will just remove the facility entirely and move it to where labor is cheap, not seeming to care how long it will take to recoup the investment to move the manufacturing, nor the loss of goodwill and respect with their customers and employees.

Lean workforce and getting leaner. Every time I think we're a skeleton crew, they find more flesh to remove. Whether through attrition or layoffs, each time people go, they're not replaced, but somehow we're supposed to get just as much done.

Far more outside managers hired than people promoted within. This is actually double-edged because sometimes outside people are needed to break the status quo, but we need to be weeding out the incompetence, not bringing in fresh supplies of it.

We at least get regular raises, which is better than some companies, but with the 18-month frequency for most employees, the raises don't keep up with inflation. The only way to get a real pay raise is to change jobs.

Minimal upward mobility. Maybe it's just my division, but with so many managers being hired from outside, it leaves no place to go up where I am. I expect I'll have to find a different part of the company to move up to the next rung.

#1. Stop with the re-orgs; just hold where you are and make it work. There is no magic bullet.

#2. The customer should be #1 and your employees #2. Right now, it seems like we're at the bottom of the list behind everyone else.

#3. Hire from within where possible, but PLEASE fatten up the workforce. We can't do our jobs with no manpower.

#4. Compensate your employees competitively, or they may all leave you, and all the tribal knowledge and IP along with them.