Where Passion Goes to Die - Software Engineer GE HealthCare Employee Review

The Waukesha x-ray software team, director included, was recently placed under a a director in Bangalore, India who has been cutting syphoning work from Waukesha to Bangalore and wants to prove the Milwaukee team irrelevant. This kind of off shoring with US teams working under international managers with negligent quality standards and a desire to only work on stuff that makes a sexy demo, however duck taped together, is common. The Waukesha team was literally recreated to solve quality issues due to outsourcing x-ray in the first place, yet was placed under the people who caused the problem. While my personal interactions with coworkers in Waukesha and Bangalore including the aforementioned Bangalore director have generally been positive and many people including him have gone out of their way to help me at times, so I don't want to knock them too bad, the Bangalore culture of working hard without taking time to find ways to work smarter has been percolating to Waukesha. Agile estimates are a joke and they're debating abandoning Agile altogether. Most teams are siloed and though many people are helpful, team leads (architects who double as product owners and team leads who don't usually have much time to help engineers yet find time to micromanage and who shape the actual boss' opinion of engineers with their super biased and unrealistic opinions) usually see time spent helping others as time wasted, so though several of my teammates were collaborative, they felt pressured to focus entirely on their individual tasks, which was all they're evaluated on rather than the team commitment. Contractors, mostly from India, who make up 75% of the team report to another manager who reports to the director so he's even more distanced from their needs. Competing programs with program managers who are evaluated on how much they can get done for their programs rather than their contribution to the priorities and goals of the department put pressure on these team leads who respond by increasing the teams' velocity with no discussion of how to reach these targets besides "work harder." I mean clearly we're slackers when Bangalore people literally work 24/7. While I was passionate about the work and willing to put in some overtime now and then, I found it inappropriate and discriminatory when I was putting in 60 hours a week and my team lead and subsequently my boss told me that since I'm single, my career should be my focus. When I responded that I was working about 60 hours they said it wasn't enough. While I have no bad blood towards them (I really don't and understand your perspective in case you ever read this) but I wish I'd had the guts to tell them in person how I've struggled ever since grad school with people assuming I have no needs of my own and expecting I always have room to do more for them, with no idea how many others were demanding the same with no regard for my well-being. While I understand that some people have harder lives than me, I still have responsibilities and needs outside of work. Plus, that's just an incredibly disrespectful way to look at single people. I don't need to be validated by a partner for my time to be worth respecting. I am an end in myself. It's Wisconsin. Most people are happy to go the extra mile if you just ask nicely, but so many of my coworkers, many of them visa restricted contractors, put up with this kind of disrespect until you're seen as a problem if you want to be treated like a human being. These were the same people who were always willing to lend a hand with little things, always polite, good people who do good things for society and and outside work. The culture had just gotten so toxic that such comments were accepted as normal. Some people also seem to have an old fashioned attitude towards women, mostly the innocent "ladies first" but I can sense some subtle bias against fun-loving, independent young women. No, this isn't a description of myself parading as a category but a based on comments I've heard and behaviors I've witnessed. On the extreme side, I went to a work event shortly after joining GE and stayed pretty late ~9:30. I was enjoying networking and hanging out with people on other teams when some 40 year old man (I'm 24) I was discussing our career backgrounds with kisses me on the cheek out of the blue. This was an isolated incident and HR dealt with it very professional - 0 tolerance policy. There one thing I felt iffy about was HR telling my manager. As a new employee I didn't want to be judged, though after dealing with plenty of harassment in school, I've developed enough passion for gender equality that I would've fought the fight if it came to that, but I know some women feel immense amounts of shame about something society really needs to understand isn't their fault. I wasn't going to bring this incident up since it was isolated until I realized there might be a sublte climate of some people judging others' lives - live in couples, same sex couples, women staying out late etc. That said, there are plenty of very progressive people as well and people generally keep their biases to themselves, though most of the more progressive people tend to not stay long with, along those with modern Engineering mindsets, though the American dream mentality isn't respected either, so I guess everyone is judged equally. While the silo life appeals to some, our systems are deeply coupled with legacy code (C++ 98,) which leads to an immense learning curve, increased by a culture lacking knowledge sharing. People cope with the pressure by keeping system knowledge and environment tricks to themselves, anything to get ahead of the constant sense of inadequacy. While the Waukesha director encourages knowledge sharing, most people are under too much constant pressure to "work harder" to invest in improving their process or bother learning about anything besides the tasks at hand, which they understandably choose based on their narrow areas of expertise. So 90% of process improvements and knowledge sharing efforts leave with the new blood. All that persists is the subteam leads' ridiculous expectations for new engineers to contribute independently as the level of seasoned team members after 3 months when onboarding is essentially non-existent and what little support you do get, you only get for the first subteam you get placed on. Switching subteams means a whole new mountain of legacy code and expectations to perform at veteran level after 2 weeks. When this method of nonboarding didn't work, they let go of several new hires during the recent lay-off, a stunt to make profits look good on paper. GE lays off entire teams at the drop of a hat to shift work across locales. It doesn't help that they're located in a renter unfriendly area where few apartments let you terminate your lease. They give great severance though. Though leaders sometimes ask for input from new engineers, the input is often met with "wait your turn" type talk or tense relationships later. While a good early career resume booster, I wouldn't recommend GE for your first job out of college or a long career. Your first job out of college is a unique opportunity to be mentored and learn industry standards, which you won't get at GE and you'll start your career developing an old school mindset that'll be unattractive to 98% of other companies. If it's your 2nd job you'll have something to compete it to and likely won't absorb the mindset unless you stay long. Lifers who've becomed dissatisfied due to recent changes have a hard time finding other jobs with their narrow skillset focused on low level programming and proprietary GE tools built before internet became a household term.