BMW Car IT reviews about "work life balance"

- Over the years the company's focus shifted from research to pure series development which could also be done by a Tier1. Many managers do not come from an IT background and I personally disagree with the direction the company is going - The company grew too fast without the structures being adjusted accordingly

* 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.

* 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

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.