DevOps @ Bosch = complete fail
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
-
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Hiring talented young software developers from the best universities to have them fill out Excel sheets, making Powerpoint slides and work with mainly outdated tools later on.
Verbesserungsvorschläge
Create real career paths for Software Developers and make it attractive to stay in a technical role.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
Bosch strategy points more and more towards a world that is founded on software. As developers we are committed to this vision and we eagerly tried to make it happen but it is impossible in our current situation. We know how to make it happen but we can't. It's insanely frustrating to go to work under such circumstances. Regardless of that, we like to work at Bosch because we like our core values and the people we meet every day. This contradiction is tearing many of us apart and so they decide to leave for their own mental health. A lot of these people who tried to drive change already left the company and I absolutely respect that because a lot of us are openly discussing to leave Bosch on a regular basis.
Kommunikation
It's all so polite that you could print it word by word in a children's book and read it to your 3 year old before going to bed. Even if your project is on fire and the last customers are about to stop using your product and team members leave the company and there is still no strategy nor plan what to do next, not to talk about how to do it - hey - everything is still super great and world domination is close. This is like someone - who always claims to be honest and transparent – is sitting in front of you and making it more important to talk like a politician than to bring up the real topics. I think that grown up people can handle the truth and this whole communication netiquette all too often leads to frustration and employers who no longer want to take part in discussions.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
Good.
Work-Life-Balance
Possible.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
Agility and "Lean Management" is another topic worth mentioning. The basic concept of agile software development, namely taking small steps and iterating quickly as an enabler to manage uncertainty is not understood at all. Every project I worked in was started with (at least) world domination in mind. Hundreds of hours were spend in upfront design as well as tons of work on the meta level. In my 4 years at Bosch I did not work on a single product that I would say was successful. But I saw millions of euros wasted - and guess what: still no world domination. That became really frustrating over time. Agile approaches were mainly reduced to having daily standups and doing sprints. We never came to the true heart of agility. Quick iterations require end-2-end responsibility for the teams that build a product. Distributing tasks over multiple departments and managing them with an army of project managers and useless Excel sheets kills agility in its roots and generates so much frustration within your staff that they either lean back in their seats and wait for the next paycheck to arrive or quit and search for better work.
Interessante Aufgaben
A common (anti-)pattern I frequently saw: "Oh this project failed - well let's start another one with the same scope but don't talk to the people who failed before, because - well - they failed!" And at some point this also comes back to the "Helping People to Grow". If the overall technical skillset of your people is more or less stuck on a low level, how will you ever - as a company - become mature enough to successfully tackle more challenging problems. This is no blaming of the people on the working level. They do the best job they can! It is how Bosch as a company intentionally handles learning, training, mentoring, career paths etc.
Gleichberechtigung
Probably good, but there are almost no women working in SW dev.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
Try not to become older than 45.
Arbeitsbedingungen
Let's start with a simple thing: give the developers the tools they need. Yes -a MacBook seems to be expensive at first glance. But compared to the salary of an average SW developer, it's ~1% of it's annual salary. And if it helps to getting your work done more easily, go get them! Besides the monetary aspects, this has something got to do with appreciation: if you value someone's work, you provide her proper tooling. Or the other way round: if no proper tooling is provided to you as a SW dev, you can easily get the impression that your work is not valuable enough.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
#Dieselgate
#Astongate
#Nikola Motor Company
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
After Bosch I applied for a job with a comparable or higher salary level as my Bosch salary at 3 different companies. I did not have to pass a single HR interview at any of them - all 3 of them provided me a job afterwards. But at a company that I worked for for 4 years, I need to pass stupid HR interviews to get promoted and get to be judged by people who know nothing about my skills or what I do in my daily work. Nothing to be added here.
Image
Bosch is currently trying to become a leading "AIoT company", what is the funniest thing ever heard. Leave out the "A" and "o" and we have an IT company. From my understanding of IT companies, the most valuable capital they have is the people who work there – because they are the smart ones that need to come up with innovative, disruptive ideas and make them work - as well as the reputation of the company with regards to being attractive to new talents. At least for the "make them work" part, you need highly skilled software developers, since they are the ones that bring the ideas to life.
So ask yourself the question, whether Bosch currently has the reputation of being an attractive employer for IT professionals. The answer that I found for myself over the last 4 years is: nope!
Karriere/Weiterbildung
Coming back to the low quality of software products at Bosch (e.g. several Android APPs), I see a huge demand in proper education and training of SW developers. We hire the best graduates from universities and afterwards let them starve with regards to mentoring and learning. The reasons for that (from what I saw) is that talented senior developers and IT professionals are rather rare at Bosch, because they either quit or go into management positions, knowing (and this is another point) that there is no real career path for software developers. This leads to people being stuck on a junior level without any chance of personal development and growing as an IT professional.
It also leads to plenty of management positions being staffed with techies that are not the best fit for the job - with two side effects (that I experienced): 1) they are not really good in people management and don't take proper care of this part of their job and 2) since they come from the tech side they think that they still can make proper technical decisions. I will forever regret not leaving much sooner.