Alcatel-Lucent Reviews in Canada

Pros

Global company offers the possibility to do business worldwide. Opportunities to move across product groups. Superb technology.

Cons

Politics. Promotions and salary increases are not always fairly dealt.

Advice to Senior Management

Despise the promise of senior management that the best qualified person for a job will take it, it continues to be favoritism to hire local employees. Strive to make job opportunities known to employees world wide and provide a fair system where all employees can compete for new jobs/promotions without favoring employees that are given high potential status.

Pros

2 years after the Alcatel + Lucent merger, there has been a lot of internal restructuring ongoing with a new CEO replacement. Talented people step up and are assigned heavier roles. If you believe you can make a difference this place has a lot of opportunities for climbing up the ladder fast, as talents are recognized.

Cons

Constant changes make a dynamic environment sometimes even chaotic.
But this must be true for any other worldwide corporations during this financial turmoil.

Advice to Senior Management

Ben clearly sees the weaknesses of the company today and is not shy to point them out to the employees. However a solid roadmap for the "how" part has to be inplace and clearly communicator to people at all levels.

Pros

It is a global company. There are opportunities for mobility assignments.
Life / health / family and work balance is encouraged.
There is respect from management towards employees.
A lot of technical opportunities if you're a computer / electronical / telecomunications engineer.
The top management recently changed and started implementing positive change fast, which is good news for current and prospective employees.

Cons

The company is in bad financial situation. Some employees are afraid of losing their jobs.
The salaries are generally not good enough.
Even though it is trying to change, it's still a slow company with a lot of burocracy.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep the transformation efforts within the company. I think the top management is doing good, and there are many employees down below that understand them, but the mid / mid-junior management should try harder to adapt the change.

Pros

The overall flexibility of work hours and ability to work from home are key positives to working here. Most other benefits depend on what division and group you work in. Many divisions are moving to a much lighter weight development model and a flatter hierarchy of management, which is great if you thrive in this environment.

The company is in a transition under new senior management, too early yet to see if this will be positive or negative. Early indications are that this will be a good thing for the company and employees.

Cons

The merger of Alcatel and Lucent was a rough period to work at the company. The Senior Management did a pretty poor job of communicating with employees and seemed unable to deliver a direction for the company.

Advice to Senior Management

The company is in need of strong leadership and a new direction. This needs to be done quickly and efficiently communicated to the whole company.

Pros

Large multi-national company had a strong support structure with lots of really great, smart people working for it. ALU also has a fantastic company history, but recently has struggled against competitors.

Cons

Local senior management team in Canada extremely weak, many unqualified senior executives and cronies. Integration of Alcatel and Lucent was incredibly poor, basically operated as 2 companies for 18 months. Cultures of the two companies were an afterthought in the merger, resulting in high levels of dissatisfaction on both sides. Corporate senior management too focused on quarterly results, not on building long term value by investing in product R&D and human capital.

Advice to Senior Management

Too many top executives from the "old days" of short term financial thinking. Need to refocus the company on a smaller set of products that can compete globally, and then support it with R&D and marketing.

Pros

International Group well implemented over 100 countries, one of the largest telecom product/solution providers, staff can get internal job mobility opportunities

Cons

No management vision and direction, No clear HR rules, too many small teams doing the same jobs in matrix

Advice to Senior Management

Don't only look at the current quarter Sales, choose executives who hold fairness, eliminate private issues in work

Pros

Positive (for the most part), flexible working environment. It is a big company, but you can focus on your individual group. Comraderie and team-work are strong in my group. My boss is great. We work hard, but the work is interesting and fun (yes, it's true). When I need to take time off, or work from home, there is a great deal of flexibility. There are some very smart people at this company, which is what makes it fun. Pay and benefits appear to be in-line with the industry. Increased the number of vacation days -- nearly 20 days to start!

Cons

Ongoing layoffs and financial difficulties. Some turmoil remains. Stock price is in the toilet. There are still a lot of differences/tension between the Lucent and Alcatel worlds. We seem to be losing the technology battle in wireless (esp. UMTS), but I management is taking it very seriously. Any company the size of Alcatel-Lucent is going to have some issues, of course. Our cafeteria is not great (does that matter)? Lots of outsourcing happening (e.g., HR, Finance and IT) which causes some problems. Can no longer just go to a different part of the building to talk to the person who can help you.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep your eyes on the long-term (technology and investment), Asian competitors and getting bogged down in old alliances. Let's be sure to continue our investments in technology (e.g., Bell Labs), although it would be nice if the technology was telecom related (e.g., Bell Labs invented the laser, but what does this have to do with telecoms). We need to tackle Huawei in North America.

Pros

Over the previous years ALU has been a very stable place to work, It seemed to weather the 2001 downturn better that Nortel. A great thing about Alcatel-Lucent is its people. Very talented people all over the world.
The work environment is excellent, respectful and professional. You feel at home here.
ALU has great potential : in the IP space and the DLS access space.

Cons

The extensive use of outsourcing in the last few years is not quite working as it should. there are issues with time zones, training of the people overseas. I personally spent nearly a year training/supporting engineers remotely in India and China. Sometimes there is simply no way those people could get to be as efficient and knowledgeable in two months as the people they replaced that had been doing that for 10 years. Specially true in the domain of testing.
ALU sometimes feels too big, the merger is a 'catastrophe' (some competing products were still being developed as of two months ago!!)

Advice to Senior Management

More do and less talk.

Pros

Good compensation and truly innovative products. There are some very talented people working for this company.

Cons

Large and bureaucratic, it can take a looong time to get new projects off the ground. Paperwork and administration cut into productivity. Too much senior management turnover.

Advice to Senior Management

4 year job terms for VP and up. Cisco is more nimble and better organised. Streamline.

Pros

Flex hours, comfortable working environment. Also the starting wages for an engineer are very competitive, and there is room for growth.

Cons

Slow, bureaucratic processes typical of a large company. Many projects seem to be recycled from older projects.

Advice to Senior Management

Value ideas of employees