speaking for the embedded department especially:
- zero room for growth without working even more overtime. You want to switch teams? Good luck, you'll need to prove you know everything about their job while doing yours at the same time, with no flexibility on your current expected output. "Come earlier or stay later" they suggest, even though you already do that for your current role.
- Want a promotion? The career roadmap for the role asks for much more than employees actually do in their current roles, where the top-level is supposed to be an engineer who is good at literally everything - the most empathetic, humble, kind, public speaking, biggest expert in multiple technologies, jesus qualities, and insane work output. No room for error there. Performance reviews have managers bringing out counter arguments that are basically "you did this one thing imperfectly this one time 4 months ago".
- work that is done to optimize the current tech or remove process blockers is generally only accepted if you work on it after-hours. Otherwise it will be held against you as evidence that you aren't performing well.
- if you don't get the salary you wanted when you signed, have fun trying to get a raise. My coworker worked their a** off for years, and then I started at a MUCH higher salary then them despite having less experience. And it's not that they didn't try to ask for a raise. It was just the same BS answer every time they asked
- on a company level, uppermost management is constantly stressed and highly emotional, prone to public breakdowns. It creates this undertone of drama and a cycle of...well, craziness. If you drink the Kool-Aid you might be in for a wild time.
- also someone else in here mentioned HR gossip: I can confirm this is 100% true. I went to my HR Business Rep for my team about a personal issue, and soon after I heard from a friend who got hired that the recruiter told them things from my "confidential" conversation. My HRBP was completely unprofessional when I confronted her about it, denying that my privacy was violated and asking why it mattered if people knew.
