Ansaldo STS USA Reviews

Pros

people are just so family like.

Cons

weak managment needs to get better

Advice to Senior Management

reward for experience and hard work

Pros

Alot of challanging technical work. Stable work enviroment.

Cons

Many changes occuring at the same time of increase buisness needs. Seems to be a challange for prior Senior mangment to guide the company through the process. Changes have been made to the leadership team that seem to be improving the situation, but they will need time.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus the team, dont fight the organizaiton intergration distract the organization for technical solutions and execution.

Pros

Offers International business and cultural opportunities.

Cons

Some areas, lack of strategic vision and lack of management support for critical issues.

Pros

Very talented engineers. Comradery amongst engineering staff is great.

Cons

Management from Director level up does not understand the industry in which we work. They are trying to change the company, but there is no vision of where they want us to go.

Advice to Senior Management

Before rocking the boat, create a vision of where you want the company to go ... Communicate the vision and get buy-in from within and from our customers, create a plan to execute to the vision and then execute the plan. (not rocket science, really)

Pros

Stable workplace, Co-Workers are friendly

Cons

Stale workplace, lacks direction and goals, project feedback from management is zero. Defiantly seen a decline in leadership and company feedback.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide some direction or goals where the the company is headed is unknown to everyone that works here.

Pros

big company, deep pockets, highly technical individuals employed

Cons

tight with money, too many people coming and going (headcount stable),

Advice to Senior Management

quit moving people around the building

Pros

Great people to work with and interesting technology

Cons

Too many incompetent managers with too little cultural understanding.

Pros

Ansaldo STS USA (aka The Switch) still offers challenging work in an interesting domain. The railroad industry is alot more complex than most people realize until they work here. US&S systems are quite intricate and fun to develop. The software engineering staff is talented. Compensation has remained competivitive in order to retain quality staff.

Cons

Company cutbacks in 2010 damaged projects, corporate culture and customer relationships. Senior management and direction is now non-existent. Most experienced technical staff has left in recent years. Salary is competive but the rest of the benefits package is not up to industry standard.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide direction and visiblity into the company. Get back to stable staffing levels so that projects don't have to raid each other. Recognize and reward accomplishments. Increase all aspects of benefits package to maintain market competiveness. Do everything possible to retain experienced staff.

Pros

For quite some time, I have been impressed with the quality of the Engineers. Have learned a lot over the years from some very talented people. Unfortunately most of them have left the company in that time as well. I also like the challenging nature of working in the Rail Industry.

Cons

High amount of stress. Mostly due to the company being understaffed and poorly organized. Also has to do with the developers/sw engineers having to double as the front line customer service. It's a huge burden to place on developers to expect them to be creative/productive in accomplishing the design/development while also expecting them to carry a pager and be at the constant beckon call of the customers. In most organizations, a customer service team acts as the front line of defense in answering customer issues. Upper management won't even acknowledge the morale of the employees as a problem and instead mocks them and revokes holidays. There seems to be no motivation in upper management to compete for the best and brightest talent. The attitude is: "we'll simply pay five contractors off shore to replace each person that quits here." Replacing decades worth of expertise that has walked out the door is nearly impossible at this point. Particularly in a 100+ year old industry where maintaining continuity is essential.

Advice to Senior Management

The company has been in steady decline for 15+ years now. Nothing done to date has changed that course. There's not much hope of changing that course unless you bribe most of the talented people to come back and most of them probably can't even be bribed at this point. Your only hope is to embrace an extremely long term approach to the problem (10+ years) and start building and retaining a team that you plan to keep together that long.

Pros

The location is very nice, gym and free coffee guaranteed.

Cons

There is no team spirit, employers are not motivated