Honda R & D Americas Reviews

There are so many cons here, I do not know where to start. -In sum, working at Honda R&D is like experiencing the Hunger Games - live. -People pretend to like others for career development purposes in hope of getting promoted. -Most of the managers are Honda are unprofessional at best. -Backstabbing is commonplace. -Brown nosing is the full-time job of the majority. -If sucking up to managers is not your thing - you will have no future here. Unfortunately, achievement is measured by how much you suck up to the managers. -What managers THINK you do is most important as opposed to what you ACTUALLY do. -True hard work is overlooked. -People are very competitive for promotions although promotions, overall, are very rare. Some people can be ruthless. -Staying late (unreasonable hours of the night) is what gets you a promotion. People often compete as to who stays later because, in Japanese culture, staying late is perceived as working hard as opposed to mismanaging your time. -The majority of Honda employees have stayed 10+ years in the same position without a promotion. There are employees in their 50s with "analyst" positions. -On a daily basis, I witness employees back-stabbing each other and speaking very poorly of each other - in a very unprofessional way...not even discretely. -Foul language is common in formal settings (i.e. meetings). -The caliber of the majority of employees is not competitive. Honda is not the place to be if you want to learn from others and grow in the industry. It is a graveyard for the ambitious. -Compensation is pretty low for the overall experience. The management expects very high caliber employees and sets high expectations - but at the same time wants to compensate them significantly below market average. -Honda culture is resistant to change. -Over-paranoid about potential "spies" and leaks of Honda "top secret" documents. -Who still uses cubicles in 2016? -They are the laughing stock of the auto industry - and are not keeping up with the change. -Many expect the company to go out of business or potentially be purchased by another major auto maker. -Turnover is very high. -You will be surrounded either by ruthless or unambitious employees - there are only two extremes. -It's difficult to trust any of your colleagues. -Working at Honda is like having a government job that is stuck in the 1970s. In short, you have been warned. Do not work here unless you absolutely cannot find a job.

Honestly, a person who has only worked at this company for 1 year or less (co-ops included) shouldn't write reviews, nor should they think they know enough to discredit other reviews... oh the naivete! Either that or there's some whitewashing going on despite all the bad news that is leaking out of R&D. Honda R&D is basically a place that offers sub-standard pay for the work they require, promotions are very rare and some managers do their darndest to make sure you do not get promoted, and time-off policies are draconian and unnecessarily bureaucratic. There is an amazing level of politics that happen from the upper echleons to the lowest of rungs. You would not see this until you have spent at least three years at the company, so I suggest any reviews from people who spent less than that to be taken with a grain of overly positive salt. The place also has a severe lack of diversity. By that, I don't only mean racial / ethnic diversity, gender, or religion, but also a total lack of diversity in terms of the type of engineering and research being conducted. The approach is always extremely conservative and never pro-active. Basically, any new idea gets rejected unless it has already been tried in a number of other major automotive companies. The top management members are generally oblivious to new technology (many of them are former aircraft industry folks who have formed a clique and only seem to promote guys from within that clique) and tend to make strange decisions despite being presented with monumental data stating otherwise (cost is basically the largest deciding factor). Politics is quite extreme in this company. There are a surprising number of people with grudges both real and imagined who pull each other's legs and get in the way of completing business. Design an purchasing can never get along as well, but the core problem is a lack of a clear decision-making flow that is endorsed and enforced by top-management. Instead, top management seems to "let it be" and allow inefficiency to exist while at the same time expecting underlings to come up with some magical way to reduce overhead.