Great potential but terrible managment
Pros
The company is able to develop a full product, mechanics, hardware, software and research, completely by itself. The positive side of this is that it is possible to get a wider view on an entire system by interacting and talking to other engineers. All the development teams feature top class engineers and you can learn a lot by interfacing yourself with them. I developed a lot of embedded software and I never had a problem from the hardware team. Is not easy to communicate with other teams but when you succeed in being given the possibility, you can learn a lot. The group really care about health and safety and the impression (from the office) is that emploee's safety is a great concern. Another remarks is that the company seem honest: no tax elusion on bonuses, no money obtained from European projects used for other means than originally stated etc. The embedded team is top class and all embedded code is in a good state, although the technologies used are slightly old
Cons
There are a lot of things that are wrong in the company, such as the documentation scattered on multiple repositories or the total lack of information given to the lower level of the chain of command (the engineers), I will focus on the most problematic only: people and management. Most of project managers have near zero understanding of how software is developed or works and they seem to be proud of it given some comments I received and the lack of effort in improving themselves. The project managers work like an Indian caste: only mechanical and hardware engineers are allowed to progress into it, software and research engineers are excluded. You will have to waste a lot of time to explain to managers that you cannot deliver in a 2 weeks sprint the whole design and implementation of a fundamental machine feature and, most likely, nobody will ever bother you asking about it. The flexi-time (option of stacking overtime to claim it as a day off) is effectively used against the employees. If you take a two hour lunch break you get an additional penalty for the time wasted even if the cause of this is a company lunch to celebrate the launch of a new product. There is no work from home policy hence nobody asks for it to prevent going into trouble with the flexi time, and you will have to go to work even in case of a tornado to prevent again issue with your flexi time or, more likely, you won't go and pick up a fight the next days over the negative hours. Performance bonus is assessed in a totally subjective manner which simplifies to "do the senior managers like you?". There is no way for a person to have a career progression, if you are born software engineer you die software engineer, you will never be allowed to expand your expertise or change department unless the senior managements want you to do so Training is never given and it is considered as a currency by the managers. It is not infrequent not to have a license for a tool you use, whether is a library or the source control tool. Training it is expected to be performed by yourself on the internet The flagship application software is a career killer: is a ball of code implemeted using Microsoft libraries and other ancient stuff. The company has a much better application software framework but transition to it is very slow since the senior manager seem to have a vague idea of the problems in software The CEO is invisible, appears only on emails to complain about the profits of the company and that people are lazy regardless of the very positive financial outlook and all the hard work that the sales people are doing to keep the machine running. You will hear something from the head office only when you are requested to comply to some technology that they use, even if this means that your work will be inefficient as a result. As it is, I would recommend this company only to someone who is moving from a different business and wants to get into software development
