BMW Car IT Reviews

3.4

62% would recommend to a friend

(43 total reviews)

Chris Brandt

100% approve of CEO

62% positive business outlook

BMW Car IT has an employee rating of 3.4 out of 5 stars, based on 43 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The BMW Car IT employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

43 reviews
1.0
7 Jan 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

No pressure, no stress, good work/life balance.

Cons

Nothing interesting to work on, the projects are more in the direction of software integration than software development. There are little to none career opportunities as all the important roles are given to people from the parent company there is little to no decision making authority within Car-IT. Salaries are average due to company policy to pay slightly above the average. This results in the company being able to only keep the average and below average employees (plenty of them to go around), which in turn means the overall quality of the codebase is pretty bad and there are not many opportunities to improve oneself. Salaries are significantly less than those of the colleagues from the parent company and the salary growth does not really match the growth promised when hired. The 'CEO', department leads and team leads are utterly unimpressive. They completely lack charisma and leadership skills and always give the impression they only care about their own careers. Team meetings, department meetings and company all hands are always boring as there is a serious lack of public speaking / presentation skills. The management usually fails to impress and motivate the technical staff. Infrastructure is a joke: we often experience network outages, we have only a handful of meeting rooms, basic supplies like whiteboard markers are always missing, etc. Overall the feeling is we really don't know what we are doing. Processes are horrible, there is a lot of management overhead, line management is involved in project management, in parallel to the project management hierarchy and everybody will try to micromanage teams.

2.0
9 Jan 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

* casual, friendly and multicultural environment, good collaboration and team work * using nice tools/practices: C++11 & 14, boost libraries, git/gerrit, good automatic test coverage; some teams use CI * possibility to improve, the company occasionally sponsors in-house training courses, conferences or other forms of training * company car leasing

Cons

* the company is structured similarly to an outsourcing company working for the mother company and sometimes your are treated by the colleagues from the mother company as such * not very exciting/innovative work, most of the projects are either re-implementing functionality already available on the market in previously released models or integrating products delivered by 3rd party suppliers * though the company is very international, sometimes you will struggle to find information in English on certain topics * the development process used is a modified waterfall model with a lot of planning up-front * average salary plus not many perks; usually software companies offer coffee, refreshments, team events, sports club membership, etc. There are no such perks here: you have to pay for your own coffee bill and there is only one company event per year * my personal feeling is that management does not appreciate the technical staff at all, to them we are just some numbers

4.0
31 Jan 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Management really puts an emphasis on personal development, targets are not just oriented on business goals measurable in money. Naturally, this might differ between teams, but line managers also get trainings in this area. - Of course there are sometimes stressful project situations, but in general the company allows you to maintain a healthy work-life balance. You are definitely not expected to make the workplace your home, and it's generally possible to do your job in the set 40 hours per week (and take all your 30 days of vacation - team leads regularly remind their employees to "book" these days for the whole year). - While there are definitely areas where company processes etc. can be improved (the Ulm site is only a bit less than five years old, and the company has grown rapidly over the recent years), this is also an opportunity to advance your career by filling the gaps and assuming responsibility. - A little while ago, the company has started a change process that deals with employee satisfaction as well as company strategy. "Ordinary" (non-management) employees can and do actively participate in this process. This process has already yielded the first results which address several of the negative issues stated in other reviews. - Payment becomes definitely competitive if you stay for a while. - It's possible to apply high quality standards.

Cons

- Other reviews have pointed out a customer-supplier relationship with BMW AG. This applies in particular to older projects, where BMW Car IT has smaller work packages and less responsibility. - HR tries to keep starting salaries low when hiring people. If you don't negotiate well you might get the feeling that you were taken advantage of. So be prepared to come with a realistic salary expectation and arguments for it. - Company processes are sometimes overly bureaucratic. - Applying agile software development practices is possible to some degree, but don't expect shiny fancy stuff like DevOps, or a really agile approach for the entire product. That being said, when the industry as a whole starts moving into this direction, BMW Car IT will likely embrace this change.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 43 Reviews

Glassdoor has 59 BMW Car IT reviews submitted anonymously by BMW Car IT employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if BMW Car IT is right for you.