A shell of what it once was - Software Engineer Ericsson Employee Review

The past years have not been kind to Ericsson. 1. Little to no promotion opportunities. The company prefers hiring externally for any senior position. This is a terrible policy as it allows for little to no upward mobility for existing employees. 2. Awful, terrible management. See item 1. The senior and management resources brought in, have little to no understanding of the company and its ways of working. They are often colleagues and friends of other senior resources... I can name you half a dozen Alcatel-Lucent folks all brought in. This nepotism is destroying the company. They have no vision, no drive, and no interest in improving anything or doing any actual work. 3. Benefits are lacking. The stock purchase plan was canceled in Jan 2017. That's a 7.5% pay cut. It's not canceled for senior management of course, even though they ran the company into the ground. 4. Constant layoffs. This has been ongoing for 2 years now and there it no end in sight. Every few months your team loses 2-4 people. Sounds like a place you want to work? 5. Too much overhead and management layers. See also item 1. Despite promises to do something about this for 12+ months, there is no change. When layoffs come, regular emplyees are let go. It's never the layer upon layer of directors and VPs that are axed. We have VPs reporting to VPs reporting to VPs.... I'm not kidding. With little to no direct reports. How is that even possible? But hey, that's what you get with terrible management. 6. Terrible processes. Need to order something? Need to bring an overseas resource in? Need to find a pen? Need to fix a problem with a tool or time entry? Good luck. I hope you have 2 hours each day for the coming 5 days to beg, borrow, and steal to get the help you need. 7. Pay for anyone not "grandfatherered" into a big salary or hired from the outside Some folks make enormous sums of money. Mainly the countless directors and VPs that are breaking the back of the company (see up)... 300K a year type of money. The rank and file employees, some make great money if they've been here through the boom days of the late 1990s. Other, younger employees who were hired as a regular employee and not a "super important" manager (see item 2 above) are stuck making 70K a year with an annual raise of 1-2%. Good luck ever catching up. 8. No strategy or vision. We are wildly flailing our arms trying to catch buzzwords. One day we have to do "cloud." The next it is declared we're going to be "Agile." Then next week it's "devops" and "the internet of things." Meanwhile, in reality, we've had our own cloud product ECE (Ericsson Cloud Environment) that's been in development for 3+ years and has yet to work or even be sold. Agile exists only in the minds of our clueless managers. Our product catalog contains hundreds if not thousands of products that are obsolete and don't sell. Management makes their fat paychecks and figures they can hang around another 2-3 years doing nothing, and they simply don't care.