Unlike anything else - good to start your career, not good for long-term future
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
- a company that has stability (at least short to medium term) and pays ok
- good for career starters, as you will very often be pointed to new tasks and technologies
- local colleagues can be fun
- there is an opportunity to visit industrial and scientific conferences
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
- HQ lacks: vision, roadmap, decisiveness, mostly big words, and slogans without standing firmly behind them
- working culture could be significantly improved: transparency, accountability, collaboration (and collaboration is something that should be bidirectional, not only in the direction from us to HQ), meritocracy
- unfortunately, the Korean word has always more weight in the decision process
- each day when you open your mail, you are afraid that you would need to throw everything away that you are doing currently and start something new - not because it makes sense, but because someone from Korea wants it and wants it now
Verbesserungsvorschläge
- make a stable, committed roadmap and strongly focus on improving the culture based on openness, collaboration, meritocracy, flat hierarchies, trust, and accountability - success will come as a result of that
- when you set a goal, make sure that you have enough people to realize it and that those people have tools, empowerment, and genuine support to achieve those goals - you cannot compete with industry giants with a handful of people and while being stingy in terms of the big-data infrastructure, HIL frameworks, equipment in general, etc.)
Arbeitsatmosphäre
Work with local people is good; work with Korean teams is very hard in aspects such as planning, transparency, vision and professional competency. Local expatriates, as they know that they will eventually return to Korea, to some extend enforce decisions from the HQ, regardless if they make or do not make sense for the long-term company benefit. Decisions are made not by meritocracy, but by short-term needs for hotfixes and by the fact that someone is Korean.
Kommunikation
Among European colleagues, communication is good and frequent. With Headquarters, depending on your luck, you end up with a pallete: from more or less okay and frequent meetings to not being able to meet your counterparts in more than a year. They ask for your reports, but they do not share theirs. Honestly speaking, many expacts, even higher-ranked ones, have a very low level of English. This makes it very difficult to communicate more complex, delicate topics.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
In Mobis, local colleagues are mostly very nice and fun. However, in a smaller fraction, not all teams have the same rigor and quality control when hiring, so when you need to collaborate with them, you end up mostly writing code for them. However, it is not their fault, but rather managers who do not set rigorous standards when hiring people (e.g., coding interviews).
Work-Life-Balance
In terms of the work hours, I would term it okay. Personally, on the other hand, dealing with Korean teams is very stressful in many different aspects (lack of trust, no transparency, no long-term planning, lack of depth in their technical knowledge, power plays). It is hard to have a good work-life balance in such a situation. As mentioned above, directions change very often, so it means that very often we need to throw away some good work to start something new that the HQ wants (and what very often does not make sense long-term). This makes a very bad psychological impact on good engineers, who want to contribute to developing something novel and meaningful.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
European managers are fair and professional, but unfortunately, their hands are tied by the headquarters. Managers from well-known companies (e.g., Bosch, etc.) some to retire here, not to make a bold impact and difference. For that reason, they mostly avoid fair confrontations (standing behind their words and their team) with the HQ. That is unfortunate but true.
Interessante Aufgaben
Tasks are interesting until the moment you get a sudden request from Korea. Then you need to throw away everything you and your team is doing to serve often something that does not make sense long term. Each time when I open my laptop in the morning, I am afraid that there is yet another newly set direction from Korea.
Gleichberechtigung
Whenever there is an important decision or disagreement, a vote from a Korean is more important than a vote from a non-Korean. This is very consistent. Furthermore, no matter what kind of mistake or sub-optimal decision Koreans make, the perpetual excuse is that they were/are busy.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
Mostly okay.
Arbeitsbedingungen
Working conditions are mostly good. HR and GA put a lot of efforts to maintain our offices good, they hand over office material and stuff. On the other hand, because of ineffective and complicated approval lines, engineers need to wait a long time to get their equipment purchased, and that is mostly the responsibility of engineers to find quotations, even for the most simple items, which is very inefficient. The number of test and recording vehicles and technicians to maintain them is highly insufficient. The infrastructure to handle large data, for example for autonomous driving development, is very immature and limited. The HQ does not want to recognize it as a major showstopper.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
It is okay.
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
Mobis pays okay (medium or a little bit more than that depending on your case). There are bonuses, snacks and meal vouchers.
Image
Mobis is a big deal in Korea, but unfortunately a very small player in the rest of the world. My advice here would be - give independent projects to local technical centers, enforce strong culture and check for accountability of middle-managers. The company has potential and good resources, the culture, technical discipline and vision are the problem.
Karriere/Weiterbildung
For us to develop a career, we need to have a long-term commitment to a roadmap and the company needs to behave like that. Big words without consistent actions do not count. Unfortunately, one gets the impression that we are mostly used to scout for some technology and transfer the knowledge to the headquarters. For people who are at the beginning of their career, depending on a team, it can be a great place to learn the technology but not processes like ASPICE or ISO 26262.