Pros
Decent pay, good benefits, nice office in Morrisville, and generally speaking, most of my peers and immediate team were great to work with. Lenovo parties and events are interesting, and raffles and occasional special employee sales on hardware are also nice. Once you get into vision, employee motivation, management, retention, work/life balance - I'd say it's highly BU/org dependent, but that leads into the cons. It's also possible that you get lucky, as I worked with a lot of solid individuals that I enjoyed working with, but things really fall apart at mid and upper management in many cases.
Cons
Silos Possibly with good reason initially, Lenovo let each brand and Geo more or less run things the way they wanted to. This makes some sense during acquisitions or expanding product lines, but eventually needs to centralize again on things like standard services to customers, which software and systems are in use globally (except for China; literally worldwide = worldwide - China for various initiatives, policies, standards). Often you would find different groups effectively "competing" against each other with similar initiatives, or with unclear expectations as each brand believes they are "priority one," or will go off to build another silo'd solution (why would anyone EVER fund such things?) while Sr. Mgmt. doesn't produce a top-down cohesive plan or vision - compounding this sort of issue further, costing money and time, and diluting customer experience along with internal effectiveness. Reliance on IBM at any cost IBM obviously had the better lawyers in various agreements, to the point they make it nearly as expensive, or moreso, to move away from many long standing agreements with them. Everyone knows the high relative costs there, but when new initiatives come up not covered by existing IBM agreements, inevitably some will try to push IBM as a solution provider, instead of looking into more cost effective and efficient options. The reliance on IBM increases Lenovo's cost of doing business, which they decide to counter via random layoffs vs. smart business. You also might be wise to point out the obvious inconsistencies and costs of partnering w/IBM, depending who you may be speaking with. Work/life balance We get it, we're a global company, but there are ways to schedule meetings that limit the recurring evening (US time) meetings to 1-2 nights/week, instead dog perpetual ad-hoc until you realize you have several hours of meetings every night of the week, on top of your normal work days. Management This may well have some dependency on where you work, and for whom. Some Directors are solid, along with some Executive Directors, but often there's a never-ending cycle of "emergencies" that really aren't, often times created by some managing upwards/brown-nosing far more than considering team capacity, dwindling levels of motivation, or in some cases, putting personal "achievements" and reputation over the best interests of the company and team. Throw in random initiatives that shouldn't exist at all coming in from China or other groups, and the possibility for chaos is fairly high until upper management sets a solid top-down vision and clear responsibilities across the company, IT and other teams.
