Thales reviews

Very busy. New hires are coming every week thus things get out of hands from time to time. Need to have a buddy to get everything settled in.

Very little idea how to adapt from military to civilian markets, now that military spending is in decline. A large company that has grown through acquisition but has not taken the radical steps to merge disparate technical and geographical groups into a coherent organization for the future. A very top-down management style with deep hierarchy, confused matrix management, commands coming down the hierarchy and very little information requested to go back up. Staff are treated like general purpose consultants who are expected to switch between wildly different projects at the drop of a hat. No coherent technology plan being enacted. No chance of career progression on technology track (non-manageemnt). There is little scope for innovative or creative ideas to be harvested and encouraged. They have some good research ideas, but no idea how to bring them to market through the entrenched layers of old-fashioned military business development. There is little appreciation of software as an engine for growth and source of value in a company dominated by niche hardware and systems engineering. The engineering process is very deliberate and heavyweight, which makes sense for very large complex projects over 5-10 years, but stiffling or small agile projects pushing the boundaries of what's possible. The bureaucratic approach to system development also imposes high overhead costs and huge risk margins to pad out all bids and budgets.