A Disguised Mess - Process Engineer PowerCo Employee Review

This was challenge, soooo many broken systems here from top to bottom. You need to pretend you don’t have any experience, otherwise your manager will be afraid of outshining them and more expectations being set. Because everyone plays the same game, it’s easy to just skip the work without any accountability. I guess a pro is they hire lots of immigrants like me, which is nice. But then they don’t want to listen to us and just want us to sit there in meetings and agree to stuff that are wrong.

No career options, even if you wanted to become a team lead, you would need to 1) wait several years for a free spot in the team lead mentoring program to open 2) go through team lead mentorship 3) wait for a new team lead position to open in the company. This means you can wait many years to maybe get promotion. And for pay raise, there is a political thing called “10% rule” so which means at most 10% of people will n company could get a pay grade increase, even if it is very deserving. Many teams have people with same job title and responsibilities, and one of them is higher pay grade. Often the higher paid person is just used chat gpt / MS copilot to do all their works. Really silly to see this, and with all confidence doing it. It really is politics here, need to play the game I guess.

Good work-life balance Pleasant office atmosphere

The company is far from Volkswagen standards: -Salary bands are not competitive and are well below the market average in Spain for specialist, expert, and senior expert positions—especially in operations, engineering, and battery manufacturing. -Career paths are nonexistent, with very limited opportunities for progression. Promotions tend to depend more on internal connections than on actual performance or merit. -Benefits are poor, and support for expat employees who are not in management roles is extremely limited. -Additionally, there is a lot of manual work required across all departments, as the company consistently refrains from investing in modern technology and tools that could streamline processes.