Silo & Pigeonhole Culture, not that great for career progression (matrix organizational structure)
Pros
You get the chance of working on great, big, complex and challenging projects. The company is well organised at corporate/business level.
Cons
- Some people are pigeonholed and do only certain tasks, not alowed to expand knowledge and responsibilities; It takes many years for a graduate to accumulate engineering knowledge. - Senior engineers are not allowed to do project management or own the project as most of the responsibilities are kept at the top. - I constantly had to jump from highly focused problem-solving tasks to the big picture or from project to project and because of that, visibility was next to zero and the environment highly stressful. When you were trying to delegate you had to burn the budget just on training the staff but then immediately bullied. - From trainee technicians to Principal/Senior Engineers you were expected to execute the project managers' design/technical decisions the only difference being in how fast you do it. Because of that, the turnover for Senior Engineers was really high. - Very stressful, low life-work balance and low career progression opportunities due to the extreme boxed/silo environment. - The worst part ever was that everyone was working on everything depending on their availability, training and knowledge didn't have time to sediment and because people had different working styles there were endless mistakes, quality of final projects poor and delivery chaotic. - You had no idea what you'll do next week but were constantly under the pressure to deliver. - The communication was either too extreme or too low and due to high stress, some people were very grumpy and unhelpful, doing more harm than good. - Sometimes departments were acting like in a zero-sum game where everyone fought for resources and power. - The staff was either too stressed, undertrained, underbudgeted, unled and because some felt used as machines, motivation was poor and credibility in management undermined. - If you're technically sharp you never get promoted and your salary never increases; they only consider you a better horse and if you're cheap, you can easily become everybody's horse. - the management was constantly making empty promises and were sugar coating me. - too many meetings and emails were burning the budget.
