HARMAN reviews

Worked as an engineer at Harman for over 12 years. Went from designing great products in the 90's and early 2000's to overseeing the design of crap product by employees in low-wage countries. The current management ('08 to present) is doing everything & everything to show short term success & profitability at the expense of competency and quality. It won't be long until the formerly prestigious brands mean nothing to people (frankly the cats already out of the bag as the general consuming public is very informed these days). If you want to work as an underpaid engineer only to manage incompetent engineers overseas this jobs for you. Workplace attitude was terrible. Mostly because they laid off hundreds of employees and left a skeleton crew and acted like nothing was happening.

Sweatshop! The automotive business in Michigan is booming especially for Harman. I’ve never seen it before in any other company where 1/2 of the staff on so many Fridays at 6:30pm still working. Too many new employees whom are green and need to be trained. Outsourcing to Mexico and India is normally OK but when you have a new customer and a new team with very limited knowledge about the product that they’re designing and selling is a recipe for trouble. Add to that the economical squeeze when Samsung overpaid when they bought Harman. Improper decisions were made. Harman makes speakers internally but had to buy speakers from another supplier because management did not want to expand the manufacturing plant to accommodate for the added business. Needless to say; the customer had to be informed and was extremely unhappy. Trouble. I left for a totally different reason. The workload didn’t match the compensation.