Pros
The GE brand is well known and still seen as a "great American company" by many. Pay is at or slightly above average in the market. Some company benefits are good, others not so much.
Cons
Where to begin? There are many different businesses within GE but from my experiences the company solely operates for the benefit of its shareholders and is maniacally reactionary to quarterly numbers. Not an uncommon critique for a large, publicly traded corporation but having worked for others in my life, GE takes it to an entirely new level of absurdity. The constant threat of layoff looms and business decisions are not made with long term growth strategies in mind (no strategy or plan lasts longer than 2-3 quarters). Often the layoffs purge the actual "doers" from the ranks while leaving ineffectual middle managers and yes men/women to the GM role in place that have created the environment where goals are not being met. From the business's GM roles down there is a tendency to be arrogant and out of touch with the markets they serve and no one appears to stay in these roles long enough to fully implement anything or be held accountable for anything the try to implement. Sr. managers, VP's and Execs seem to only ever be looking for the next highest position they can move to within GE and take little to no time to understand the business they represent or the people (yes, we are people) that labor under them during their short, inconsequential time in those roles. Our sales leadership roles are filled with people that come off as if they have never sold before in their lives. In my role I have seen 5, soon to be 6, managers that have quit, been promoted for some unknown reason, or were forced to leave or were terminated. These people have offered no value to the regional sales force and are only ever concerned with reporting and forecasting in Salesforce while hounding salespeople relentlessly and wasting their valuable time with mandatory calls and web meetings to beat them up about, you guessed it, forecasting in Salesforce. Most salespeople I have met at GE are experienced and passionate about the industries they sell into and work long hours (mostly due to the mountains of internal inefficiency and bureaucracy) but are met with a inefficient, nightmare of an internal process to deal with once their hard work brings an opportunity to the company. The process to have a proposal and SOW generated and pricing approved is the most painful thing I have ever had to endure in sales. There are too many people in attendance in these pricing meetings that you must explain yourselves to that have no earthly idea what you are selling, nor do they have any understanding of the industry you are selling into. Opportunities that take GE's competition days to respond to take GE weeks if not over a month (no exaggeration) to turnaround and once pricing is approved it is guaranteed to carry so much risk and overhead that you are many times 2x - 5x the competition pricing. When you do have the opportunity to provide a BAFO, if you haven't already been dropped from consideration for the high price and gigantic, risk laden scope, you as a salesperson get to go through the same process and be flogged again by the same people that didn’t understand what you were doing to begin with. This process will also take sometimes weeks to accomplish before a revised proposal can be sent to the customer. I have been in the software business for over 15 years now and my business within GE has no idea how to move at the pace the market or customers demand and it costs us deals. It’s painfully apparent that GE has very little idea how to run a software business and has the archaic licensing model and dated quarterly license focused sales mentality to prove it. There is a pervasive arrogance and dismissive attitude shared by the "old guard" types at the company (Sr. level managers and Execs) that think the company's brand and reputation means they should not have to work to earn a customer's business and that it should always be a "no brainer" to go with GE, regardless of actual business value our solutions provide. I often hear these types say things like "we're GE, we shouldn't need to do that" or "we're GE, we will set the terms of the agreement, not them" internally. These "leaders" can have this attitude and say these things because they are completely insulated and rarely, if ever, customer facing and are never held accountable for anything; that's for the outward facing people doing their best to create and maintain the relationships to feel the brunt from the customer and from the business if deals are lost. I could go on all day here but in summary, there is a complete and utter lack of leadership and GE is skating by (or at least trying to) on reputation in my business that demands agility and innovation. If the consumer ever really knew what "the business" really prioritized, how it operated internally and how little their needs and concerns as customers mattered in GE's decision making I firmly believe they would never consider doing business with GE.