- Very poor foresight by upper management
- No long term vision (especially in Optics division where I worked) seems pretty same when talking to employees in different groups in US
- Poor operations methods - can't imagine the quality of million dollar equipment coming out of these shops that have such poor product development methodologies.
-upper management (in Germany) doesn't really care about employees in US(atleast my experience).
I moved cross country to take a position in Houston and within a year they shutdown the whole Optics R&D group because a project was dead ended (again I blame upper management for not getting enough insight and giving proper direction). The CTO didn't want to loose face before the board I think, so it was down to laying off people. There were a lot of employees in Germany who were also on the same project but none were laid off. The decision however was to terminate all Optics R&D employees in US (employees from the dead project were laid off immediately; employees working on another project in US were given a deadline to finish the project and hand it over to the team in Germany which already screwed up the previous project and then they too will be laid off). Luckily the job market was good here and I got another position within a few weeks and I quit.
- upper management shows some sort of preference for their German employees.
The project that dead ended was mainly due to upper management giving preference to opinions of relatively inexperienced engineers who were part of the German R&D team over the more experienced US team. Decisions were often taken and implemented before the US R&D team knew about it. Priority was always given to the opinions of the German R&D team. And ultimately the US R&D team got axed.
