Terrible IT corporate culture & pseudo-benefits - Incident Manager The Emirates Group Employee Review

1. Extremely compartmentalized work environment. 2. Excessive number of staff who've been around for over 20-30 years, so a work environment where people are often very set in their ways and highly resistant to change. 3. Corporate culture of passing the blame and political strong arming. Extremely hard to find people willing to come together to improve things because they're often blocked by someone else's agendas. 4. Staff benefits are OVER-HYPED. Cheap flights often involve hours of waiting with no certainty and staff are prioritized lower than cargo. 5. Blatant racism in hiring procedures; eg - a UAE national with a college degree and next-to-zero experience will start at the same level as an expat with post graduate degrees, 5+ years of experience, multiple industry specific certifications; and still be paid 2-3 times more. 6. Mistaking loyalty for complacency - a large number of staff have been in the organization for 10+ years doing the exact same thing and are very comfortable not trying to improve. 7. Hierarchical approach to promotion - often it's not the best candidate for the role that is promoted but the person who's been around the longest with the better connections even if they are unsuited for the role. 8. Poor staff development initiatives - very small programs such as SPARK which are highly restrictive and appraisals are merely seen as a formality with little to no initiative by managers to develop staff. They are often treated as a necessary evil as opposed to a fulfilling means to building up talent and allowing them to reach their potential. 9. Deeply ingrained work cliques and political divides. Departmental competition is not for driving improvement and progress but rather as a means to assign blame to others. 10. The Gulf's tendency to censor - being a monarchy, freedom of expression is extremely controlled. Despite facing a massive recession, the company and the country it represents will censor any and all information which could potentially paint them in a poor light. Make no mistake, the company is run through government decree and will call itself wholly private when convenient and put on its governmental hat when it suits its needs. 11. Low chances for learning new technology - they are often several years other market leaders and prefer to bring in already trained specialists than train their own people. Working in the company for an extended period will guarantee diminished skills. 12. Be ready for nepotism - you will find a lot of people & their relatives working there. Hiring is often for friends & family, over skills and experience. 13. Accommodation promises are often unfounded. While it might be implied that you could potentially get free or discounted accommodation; the practicality is that the wait times are several years. 14. Extremely poor work-life balance - the nature of the work is demanding at the best of times. In the current economic climate, the region is struggling financially and it tends to bring out the worst in human nature. Be prepared for staff being terrified of losing their jobs and the organization subtlely using it squeeze more out of them. 15. Poor salary increments & annual bonuses - Increments can often be 0% but I've seen 0.3-1% increases more. Annual bonuses can vary greatly and the salary split (basic + accomodation + *transport) means that what you're actually getting is a lot less than you're actually earning. 16. Three year improvement cycles - They launch refresh cycles every 2-3 years, with new branding each time. Essentially it's a fresh initiative to streamline operations and improve the company; sadly the only thing that consistently happens is that the cliques protect each other and the people who are actively trying to make improvements and challenge the status quo are the ones being made redundant or replaced. The old cliche of 'the more things change, the more they stay the same', rings extremely true here. 17. Corporate purchases can sometimes be done for under-the-table reasons. eg - HP had a mutli-million $ deal with Emirates IT even though their tool set was utterly useless unsatisfactory for the use cases but never the less several packages were purchased and most never even used. Be prepared to use packages that are outdated and ineffective because it's been shoved down your throat. 18. Extremely spoiled staff - you will find staff extremely inflexible in their habits. If implementing even new tech and offerings, expect a lot of frustration, time and money to be put into making the new applications look and feel like the older ones for zero benefit. 19. Mix of in-house and 3rd party applications - Notoriously difficult mix of in-house, 3rd party and vendor applications with an insane amount of inter-dependencies and unsupported formats. Often applications exist merely to translate information from an ancient application(that no one can support) to another intermediary application which then feeds it to another system to uses the data. 20. Lack of high-quality managers and management team - you'll find a lot of people who've been promoted internally who lack the skills to be effective people managers and have been promoted purely on technical aptitude & time in the company. If you're looking for good mentors and a management team that can see the big picture, you could be left unsatisfied. 21. Extremely reactive work environment - Especially in IT, you'll see corners cut for testing and deployment and will often see packages and upgrades rolled out that turn up creating new issues. It's the cycle that sustains the work flow, the people that are responsible to create and maintain the applications end up justifying their presence by bungled software launches; made worse through poor project management and forced deadlines from corporate and seriously restrictive budgets. You will spend the majority of your time here firefighting. 22. The region is dying - since 2015 there has been a steady decline in oil revenue and a massive reduction in tourists from North America and Europe. This company runs of tourists and cargo, and without them any semblance of job security at Emirates is a dream.