Siemens

Smart people solving real-world problems with good work-life balance.

Siemens, especially its R&D divisions, is full of smart people who are top experts in their fields. For starters with an engineering background, it's a great place to learn technology and business. It also has a friendly company culture with nice and helpful people. If you are interested, you can learn a lot about how a big corporation functions and pick up quite a few people skills. Work-life balance is great. It's very internationally diverse, so you can meet people from all over the world.

Benefits, slow pace, processes.

Like most big corporations, there are too many management layers, but it's been improving. Benefits are only OK, and first-line engineers definitely deserve more.

For the four years I've been here, I've seen two major re-organizations. During each, many people left for other places. Yet, there didn't seem to be much change that addressed employees' concerns.

Each year, financial targets are cascaded all the way from the CEO down to each employee, and the employee's voice has been hardly heard or cared about. There has been almost no support to guide personal career growth.

Lately, there's a lot of focus on processes, and it's very distracting. Employees get projects assigned and have to fill in time cards for every hour to record where they spent their time each day. Managers will chase after you if anything has gone over budget or is slow – this is just plain wrong for an R&D environment.

Please treat first-line employees fairly with better benefits. Listen to their voices. Empower them to be creative. Have dedicated people take care of processes.