Nokia

I used to work for the mobile phone unit of Nokia in Finland. I worked for R&D as a software engineer.

The #1 gain for working for Nokia was the people I got to work with. They were intelligent, kind, reliable, funny, professional, determined, and many other positive things. I keep contact with many of them after leaving the company many years ago and consider some close friends.

The #2 pro was the flexible and supporting organization Nokia used to have. It was easy to transfer from another project, and they tried to fill vacancies internally first. I would not say that career development opportunity was great (it wasn't), but if I wanted to transfer to another project at the same level, this was relatively easy.

#3 pro was the interesting and innovative projects they had. Nokia used to be very innovative and had an eye for future technologies and innovation. The old organization NRC (Nokia Research Center) was a good example of the innovative spirit. The company also strongly encouraged patent (IP) filings.

The rest are not in a particular order:

• Great brand recognition
• Product visibility (my family and friends used a Nokia phone and talked about it)
• Good training/development opportunities (they had a large number of internal courses and were also generous to offer language courses etc. for foreigners etc.)
• International career opportunities
• Sense of security of working for a large, international company.

The #1 con was the rapid decline of the organization that started in mid-2000, leading to the eventual acquisition of Nokia by Microsoft, including the former's personnel. Reorganizations and streamlining happened so often with the 'bad news,' i.e., another round of layoffs. This demoralized everyone, and everyone was forced to look after himself or herself. Though the company did support internal recruitment, prioritizing these internal candidates under layoff threat over any other candidates, the turmoil was very damaging to employees' morale and motivation.

I do think that such a decline can hit any IT company. But Nokia did not handle the difficult time well, and it could have handled it much better.

#2 con was the increasing amount of ego and selfish pursuit of one's own goals and needs over the company's, that started to become more visible in the early 2000s. Nokia hired a great number of young, still-in-college engineers during its rising time in the late 90s. They were purely fascinated to work for Nokia because they wanted to create great products. They got to work on cutting-edge missions, traveled internationally, and wanted to become even more successful. Then, something happened: many of the engineers became more political, wanting to pursue their own successes and status, even at the cost of the overall success of the company.

Nokia was practically the only viable option for IT professionals who wanted international, "big" careers in Finland. I think that this created the sadly unique disadvantage that too many of the talented but ego-ridden IT professionals saw Nokia as their devise to achieve glory, success, status, etc.

#3 con was the lack of career progress opportunities. As above, I found it quite easy to get involved in another interesting project in a similar role than my current one. However, if I wanted to go for a leadership path (project managers, project leaders, etc.), these coveted roles were generally passed onto someone the hiring manager already knew. If you were an engineer or software architect who wanted to go for that path, it seemed virtually closed to them.

The rest, in no particular order:

• Not pushing people towards excellence but mediocrity
• Lack of great leadership
• Mediocre financial compensation
• The HQ (Nokia House) is great, but many other offices were not inspiring.

I will leave this one empty, as there is no longer the same management as during my tenure.