Employees on all levels are treated as disposable and interchangeable. Personal accomplishments are devalued and not properly rewarded. Very poor working environment, plagued with distrust, fear, and poor leadership.
Engineers are treated very badly. Many experienced and high performing engineers were recently randomly demoted and given substantial paycuts without any explanation, and in some cases replaced by much younger and less qualified colleagues. Leadership communication with employees is very impersonal, one-directional, insincere, and condescending. Outsourcing of all functions, including some core engineering development, is becoming more prevalent, even where quality of outsourced work is substantially lower, while being very expensive. Technical experts are randomly appointed, often with very little or no experience in the area of expertise, while the actual experts are equally randomly misplaced in roles that require completely different skills and experiences.
Human resource department provides only hiring and firing services, and provide virtually no value to employees. Career path and employee development is routinely reserved only for the few preselected employees, and it is not part of the company culture and operating principles. Work/life balance is severely impacted by high internal turnover, frequent rework caused by poor decisions, and highly stressful work environment. Individuality and creativity are being increasingly supressed by implementation of standardized processes and methodologies, regardless of how flawed and inefficient these processes actually are.
While most agree that a major re-organization of HD Engineering was overdue, it was planned very poorly, and executed even worse. Consequently, the new organization is very unstable and likely unsustainable.
As a result of years of poor engineering leadership, Harley-Davidson has become a terrible place for engineers who want to perform at the highest levels. Instead, it has become an environment that fosters mediocrity and obedience at the expense of passion and ingenuity.
