Nokia

An amazing place to have kids and enjoy work-life balance if you can put up with the BS.

Friendly colleagues and good culture.

Good software practices were cultivated.

Some of the tasks I carried out there were very interesting, and I learned a lot from them.

The process is God in this company.

Expect to spend most of the time writing tests in a proprietary language.

My manager had almost thirty people under him, so expect little to no contact.

"1 in 90" meetings happened once a year, and my impression is they happened to check this item off some checklist. (Though, accounting for so many people under him, my manager did really well; very relaxed, no micromanaging).

Expect checking off upper management checklists and caring about pointless statistics.

I found a lot of my work too repetitive.

Huge (capital H) amount of domain knowledge necessary. Non-transferable, unless you want to jump to the competition.

At the end of my time there, the CI infrastructure was not performant/malfunctioning to the point of seriously slowing down development (and just being a pain overall).

Company motto used to be "Connecting People," but the message from upper management was constantly: "Regaining/Maintaining the leadership in our domain!" It does feel like the vision died and now it's about money and being better than the competition, which is just sad.

Running a company this big is a very complex task. I'd be kidding myself if I thought I had the panacea.