BMW Car IT reviews about "colleague"

- Intransparent communication from management. Information like team structure changes and personal departures are often only communicated shortly before becoming active, although they have been decided long before - Lots of politics, with many Yes Men in lower leadership roles, very shy of taking responsibility - Slow progress in organizational, management and project topics: lots of announcements and updates, with realization often taking years - Very long time-frames for product/project development - new projects often are started years before planned public release - Agile working mode is often not really achieved: scrum master role is generally not filled, plus the long term waterfall planning and project structuring on the AG side limits the agility often - Bad processes, tooling and BMW-specific technology in a lot of places. This makes many basic tasks and integration very difficult, and the problems always have to be solved inside the teams, leading to lots of home-brewing and "not-invented-here" solutions - Lots of buerocracy, on all levels - Many demotivated, less talented colleagues especially on the AG side - Not a lot of autonomy in the bigger picture, the big decisions are all made inside the AG in Munich. - Post mortems or lessions learned generally seem to be avoided, leading to lots of churn and the same mistakes being repeated constantly - Weird and annoying Ulm-site rules like "last two people in one office wing have to leave together" - Many qualified people seem to leave after not too long - Management of external contractors can quickly become a big part of your job as a developer, depending on the project - Worse compensation and contract conditions than equivalent roles in the AG - No works council, no "Tarifvertrag", no 35 hour week - Very limited bonus system

* Developers from the parent company (BMW AG) actually have better benefits (35h work week, better bonus, protected by a union, ...) * Parent company treats Car IT as a premium supplier, not as a real part of the software department. * Many colleagues are bored and demotivated, which leads to uninteresting and non-productive work environment * Parent company is plagued by bureaucracy and does not understand the importance and potential of software in the vehicles (slow change in processes, bad/lack of QA for the software department, hiring cheap external companies for support and expecting high quality software, ...) * Being locked-in into collaboration with toxic partner companies and their abysmal tools. * Automotive industry is slow paced and far from the peak of software development.

Supplier management increased over last years.

* Relocation service that the company offers is horrible. And you have to pay for it if you leave sooner than after 3 years. * Company car is expensive * Average salary, almost no benefits * Some German knowledge is needed * Slow HR. Expect to wait a few weeks/months to get a reply

Car IT is pure subcontractor of BMW. This concept obliberates all freedom and makes most of the work boring and annoying. Chaotic environment. The distance and frequent trips to munich does not make it better.

Nothing interesting to work on, the projects are more in the direction of software integration than software development. There are little to none career opportunities as all the important roles are given to people from the parent company there is little to no decision making authority within Car-IT. Salaries are average due to company policy to pay slightly above the average. This results in the company being able to only keep the average and below average employees (plenty of them to go around), which in turn means the overall quality of the codebase is pretty bad and there are not many opportunities to improve oneself. Salaries are significantly less than those of the colleagues from the parent company and the salary growth does not really match the growth promised when hired. The 'CEO', department leads and team leads are utterly unimpressive. They completely lack charisma and leadership skills and always give the impression they only care about their own careers. Team meetings, department meetings and company all hands are always boring as there is a serious lack of public speaking / presentation skills. The management usually fails to impress and motivate the technical staff. Infrastructure is a joke: we often experience network outages, we have only a handful of meeting rooms, basic supplies like whiteboard markers are always missing, etc. Overall the feeling is we really don't know what we are doing. Processes are horrible, there is a lot of management overhead, line management is involved in project management, in parallel to the project management hierarchy and everybody will try to micromanage teams.