Pros
1. Understanding and supportive team 2. Flexible workplace (work from home, hybrid) for people who could work independently without the need to attend "ThE gOoD oLd DaYs" pizza party.
Cons
This place has more cons than pros. I will never come back to this place. Be it contract or FTE roles, If you really desperate for a job, accept the offer but do leave WITHIN 2-3 years (or less if there's better offer). Just note that there is never ending annual restructuring as long as I can remember. Unless of cos you wanna coast your way towards retirement just like all the boomer in the company (Yes there are the group of people whom are slow to change and keep grumbling about "ThE gOoD oLd DaYs"). The REASON I stick around this long before moving to a better place IS DUE TO THE PANDEMIC (was actively looking to jump ship as far as early 2020 but I'm stuck due to Covid hiring freeze) 1. Salary is way below the market rate, don't believe? check on your peers from same function/specialization via glassdoor, payscale, indeed and other online source and compare within the same industry. Hence the high turn over. Me and my former colleagues get >40 - 60% increment upon getting an offer (either medical equipment companies or other industries) to match our experience and felt we are underpaid in Philips. Yes you read that right, my current TA mentioned to me Philips seems to paid way below than the market rate comparing to my peers. 2. This company is full of insane amount of meeting, I can't believe I spend 70 %- 80% of my day attending meetings after meetings that is either redundant or can be solve via simple email/ team chats. All i get is 'Align meeting?' 'Oh let's have 1 hour session to align?' 'You must attend DM meeting it's important' LOL how about no? *rolls my eye* but well manager not keen to listen to my views. Don't get me start on the meeting session with a team that I believe nobody pay attention to. 3. Some system tools have issues, preventing getting accurate information (Yes I'm looking at you QlikSense ). I felt this companies have more than 100+ separate systems and tool to use, and some tools are either useless to me or not fully integrated properly. To get the big picture of what you're looking at, you will have to do time consuming activity from data extraction from multiple tools to putting it together via excel as it wasn't available on BI tools like QlikSense. 4. When one is facing issues with the system, all we get is "just raise a ticket to IT" yea... the standard 'Just raised an IT ticket' is the operational way of doing things nowadays. Our task/issue to resolved now lies at the hands of a team who don't give a damn about how glitches/bug/issue is affect the business. It doesn't help when one need to argue with EIM (or infosys? there is no diff between them anyway) team insisting of following 'processes', doesn't have sense of urgency and a clue on what to do if its beyond their processes/normal situation. Are we working with a bot or human being? they're paid to provide a solution. I have to treat infosys team like how Amazon treat it's CS team. This will force them to expedite their job. I can't believe I need to do this just to get outstanding issue moving. 5. Continue from #4, Over the years the process keep getting complex and inefficient with more layers and bureaucracy resulting confusing even among EIM (or Infosys) team. e.g. Raise a ticket but after few days the team transfer the ticket to some SME and then this SME hand over to other team here and there with long unnecessary email explaining it's not their scope (or just report a finding without offering any solution), it then transfer again here and there without anyone knowing who is the ownership to dealt with system glitches/issue/request. 6. What is oxygen Friday? It is designated as no meeting day (unless its urgent) where we could spend the time planning, catching up on admin task etc... But there's always be that person with 'who cares..' 'hey urgent' (fake urgent) don't respect it at all and will continue to block time for meetings. 7. Beware of opportunities to grow in the company. Most of the time it means double hatting with laughable increment. 8. Beside annual layoff/restructuring, company will find ways to cut cost but not cutting down the infamous lacked of EQ expensive note taker. Also cutting down headcount on rank and files but somehow adding layers of management in the organization? 9. Some manager are more suitable to be an individual contributor than a manager type of person. I'm sick of getting annual request that I come out with new initiate or process improvement but upon proposing something to improve the process all I get is: "What if this affect other data dependency or work process?" "I'm not keen to prose this and argue with global team" "You won't get approval by global and there's huge red tape so we do what we can with excel" "What you propose is great but there's up system upgrade soon so we just need to wait" REALLY? gee thanks for wasting my time. Either give me all the info I need especially on some other random system that I don't even know it exist, and back me up OR stop asking me for improvement annually. Seems to me the road blocks are either global complex process with absurd number of people or manager not keen to accept improvement cos its not convenience to go through Philips complex red tape. Head butting with manager on this issue goes no where and I conclude I rather bring my ideas to other companies. This explain after 6 month on the job my observation, most of my stakeholder/point of contact whom I work closely with are not keen to propose continuous improvement. Overall: I'm happy I left for better place with market rate salary, agile environment, and having a real manager/mentor.
