General Electric

Core industry. Opportunity to develop skills (mostly for your personal satisfaction and for your next job, unlikely to help you if you are staying within GE). Smart and intelligent co-workers.

Very risk-averse company. Extremely few successful products (FA gas turbines, 1.5 Wind turbine). 90% of decisions regarding new product development end up bad (and most of the leaders who made those decisions get promoted).

Career advancement opportunities are very few within engineering. They like you to be the extremely intelligent engineer with all the right personality traits, who is okay being called "Highly valued" (translation: ~4% raise every 15 months) and has very limited career ambitions. Once you are a senior engineer, you are at the dead end of your journey.

The situation is very different within Finance, HR, and Sales organizations (the number of "executive band" employees in those orgs is 10x the EBs in engineering on a per capita basis).

Insane attitude towards employee travel. They ask that everybody be an industry expert, knowledgeable about competition, customers, etc., but don't want anyone to spend a dime (the situation is different if you are a General Manager, etc. - you can fly once a month to China and Europe for no reason at all, and all is well).

Reliance on metrics which hardly mean anything (e.g., attrition target below 6% - all skill levels weighted the same).

Bottom line: Try to move towards the commercial/sales side of the company if you want to be compensated and treated (respected) well.

Interact regularly with the "Individual contributor" (and do not think that the metrics you see represent the accurate picture). Decrease the importance of HR (not that they do not help anyone; in fact, they hurt the future of the company) and do not act like this is some Detroit car company running on losses. Yes, controlling costs is important, but don't go overboard and do crazy stuff like ban all travel (especially for engineers), etc. (Are you afraid the employee may build some expertise based on interacting with those outside his/her cubicle neighbors?)