Samsung

Lots of different projects across the company to work on. Samsung owns more different businesses than you can imagine. If you find a project you are interested in, you can have the opportunity to work with world-wide data and implement this project in millions of devices across the world. Great benefit package for expats: flat provided, free meals, free transport, etc.

Samsung does not have any clear plan to grow and overcome competitors, so from time to time, you encounter illogical business decisions. There's a lot of respect for all kinds of formalities: if you are older and have some certificates, you are likely to always have better performance grades, and your actual performance doesn't really count. HQ is a company for Koreans – all good learning opportunities and resources are provided in Korean only. Work emails are in Korean. If you don't know Korean, you will probably know all the news at the very last moment. If your project looks unimportant to the VP, you can have no work tasks for half a year, and that's okay. The situation is changing for the better, but it's far from perfect. So, I can recommend Samsung only to mentally stable people – still, the work is interesting, and living in Korea is great.

Have the strength to risk. You talk about lots of good things – about becoming more of a software then hardware company, about becoming a "start-up", etc. Still, there is almost no action because you fear to risk. You need to have some loud, risky project that will blow up the business. Small changes don't count anymore.