Panasonic reviews

Sadly, this company is going the way of the dinosaurs ... not via lack of evolution but more the meteorite of baffling new executive management. On the heels of the FCPA/DoJ backlash and the departure of every single executive - this should have been a time to invigorate the company, the strategy and the future business landscape. Instead, the inept CEO/COO hired in a convey belt of 'idealists' with no cohesion and vision of how they will 'reboot' PAC. The biggest turning point was losing Paul Margis; many will argue if he was a good CEO but one thing he was, the drive of innovation and technology that inspired so many first in the IFE and now IFEC world. I cannot state this enough, there is ZERO real innovation in PAC now and in fact he company is regressing. It's convoluted future strategy hinges on 'services' and 'cloud' ... both areas that others have mastered, already doing way better than PAC and PAC has no real experience, background or appetite. Massive investment via the new CTO in 'cloud' but with the methodology and mindset of technology companies from 5-7 years ago 'everything to the cloud'. Problem is, no-one knows what they are going to do with the data once it is in the cloud and how it will drive Panasonic Avionics business in the future. Even this strategy is being done in a vacuum and lacks any cooperation through the existing teams and knowledge base that build the company and had it a successful as it has been. It's future was being constructed on connectivity and its fair to say PAC has struggled in this space but no worse than any other vendor in this space. Given the announcement last week with PAC partnering with Inmarsat for future connectivity, it gives another clear signal on how it is putting an arms length between being a IFEC provider and instead becoming an integrator. Once again, another nail in their coffin of innovation and being the company that leads the field in IFEC innovation. The current leadership has no experience in IFEC and are selectively losing it's best assets because of its confusing strategy ... or lack of. The best of PAC is leaving PAC because it can, what is being left are the dregs that cannot find work elsewhere and succeed and a set of new executives that are all starting to empire build around a none existence future strategy riding this meteorite into earth. To see this once great IFE leader stare at the sky at the screaming fireball about to hit is is disheartening but inevitable. I hope I am wrong but if you are looking for your next career move, not a job, this is not the company for you. It's place in the market and its stature was all build on a foundation that is all but eroding.

There are only a handful people working here who know or care to follow federal and state laws. This is just not the 2013 and onwards FBI probe for bribery. This company's HR does not know any kind of labor law and tends to do whatever they think is right. The incompetence is appalling - the VP of HR quit about 7 years ago after the department was called out for not withholding California's labor law regarding overtime. In fact, the company had to back-pay employees for at least two years. After this snafu, they made up some arbitrary laws regarding non-salary folks and over time which resulted in many more class action lawsuits. Some employees are still being paid. If you call out HR on ANYTHING, they point the finger back on-to you - even when they are fully aware that they messed up. Oh, and HIPPA violations left and right. We are waiting for this to come out...soon. Everyone here has a process: check off their task and call it a day. We have lost many customers due to bad hardware and software. This company was big enough to "pay off" it's failures. The new CEO would like to learn the process and is working hard to win back customers - but deep down the management line, people are STILL doing incompetent things just to say they got stuff in on time. It is actually mind boggling - the engineering managers PUSHING engineers and project managers to release software without a full integration and end to end tests. They would rather have you turn in something so that they do not get in trouble and have YOU "test it after" the release. Yes, AFTER. This only creates vicious cycles where engineers are too busy putting out fires when they should be working on new, "innovative stuff". Or whatever the latest buzz word is. Useless HR and bad managers have created a very toxic environment. If you complain, you will get punished. If you don't complain, you will get punished for delivering bad hardware/software because it was never tested. Some of us really like what we do and really like working with the good people that are still left.