Work quickly piles on you year after year while your salary slips behind industry average. You typically will earn a maximum 3% merit increase, and that's in good years. Instead, you are dependent on bonuses to make up the chunk of salary that doesn't keep up with inflation. Management totes this as a huge carrot to go after, but in reality, few truly benefit from it, starting at band 10 (the highest non-executive pay grade) and rising exponentially through the executive bands. This is why the rank-and-file are pushed so hard to produce those quarterly results -- so executives can get theirs.
Job growth is non-existent. Those who tirelessly self-promote will succeed here while hard working team players will be pushed to the wayside and given more work to do without even a word of thanks or praise. Lenovo is rife with politics and nepotism and it has caused the culture and morale of the company to decline steadily over the past several years. This also leads into the ubiquitous sport of bullying by the favored members of staff and management, and the highly subjective annual evaluations that management gives you.
Workload is usually unreasonable to start with, and you are expected to pick up any slack left behind if someone is laid off or a contractor is not renewed. Expect many late night work sessions and meetings with people overseas. Weekend work is also common if you're in engineering. Don't complain about working 12+ hour days for months on end, sacrificing health and family time to meet deadlines, because it will be met with biting criticism about how much you cost the company, and that you can be replaced with two engineers from China. Also, complaining about bullying will get you nowhere other than to be called "sensitive" or a "snowflake" and will put you further out of favor. You're expected to take it on the chin and not complain about being put down for your background, appearance, or life choices from someone who "out-ranks" you. It's like you've joined a fraternity filled with ignorant trust-fund types who have only seen privilege and entitlement their whole life and anyone who doesn't fit their ideals is wrong.
HR knows about all of this and does absolutely nothing, other than to offer a perfunctory effort at "culture change", which usually dovetails into their only self-perceived pillar of strength: "diversity". I've heard endless spiels about how inclusive Lenovo is along with vague statistics of how women, minorities, and members of the lavender community are "doing great things", all to make Lenovo seem like it's in touch with the workforce of the 21st century. In reality, it's yet another distraction to keep employees thinking the grass is perfectly green where it is and to avoid taking issue with the real problems plaguing the company. The message here is, if you can become the poster child for something, even if it's completely superficial, you'll go reasonably far here. Shiny, loud, and new is valued much more than competent, quiet, and experienced.
During Covid, it was proven that working from home kept the company going strong, but after things relaxed, it was strongly suggested, then demanded, that we return to campus. It became clear pretty quickly that this was due to Lenovo's "Look at me!" visibility culture, and that truthfully, the company can function just fine without layers upon layers of management whose only job was to attend meetings and to be seen around the office just to be seen. On top of that, the disingenuous buzzword-filled, game-show host personas of most in managers trying to put a positive spin on absolutely everything, including when people are laid off, is nothing short of nauseating.
This leads me into my last point, and that is the constant threat of layoffs. Every year, even in good years -- where the company is literally setting record profits, layoffs happen, usually 2-3 times a year. Curiously enough, it's not always the lowest performing people that are let go. Many times, it's the ones who aren't in the right cliques and who aren't friends with people above the director level. Indeed, many laid off are over the age of 45 since that's when the cost of covering a family's health insurance starts to really look bad on the company spreadsheets. If (when) those laid off need to be replaced, it is done with someone overseas or someone in the US that is much younger, costing the company less to employ that person or, in some cases, people. Quality of work ultimately suffers, but being a publicly-traded company, it's only the next quarter's results that matter in the end.
