Autodesk Reviews in China

Pros

1. Work life balance is good.
2. Office location (Pudong office) is convenient.
3. People here in shanghai are nice.

Cons

1. Compensation is much lower than other well-known MNCs
2. Overall quality of the employees is not good. Especially after the acquisition happened on early 2008. Of cause, there are still many high capability guys but seems its very hard for this organization (ACRD) to keep them.
3. No innovation environment.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to pay more attention to people. More investment on people, more training, create more innovative environment, more opportunities for employees to be advanced.

Pros

Looks good in your resume.
Nice working environment, friendly staffs.
Have the chance to learn about culture in an international company.

Cons

Not high enough salary compare to the same level of work.
The company is too big to take risky. So, it could be quite dull after working for a couples of years.

Advice to Senior Management

Try to be in the employee's shoes and communicates more with the teams you managed.
No more meaningless meetings and surveys.

Pros

Flexible work time. Easy to learn knowledge if you want

Cons

Fewer opportunities to tech engineer.

Advice to Senior Management

more opportunities in China

Pros

1. a good work and life balance in company
2. a good office in company
3. it is relatively fair in company

Cons

the salary is relatively not competitive. and the opportunity of getting prompted is very rarely. it is hard to transfer from one department to another.

Advice to Senior Management

I am totally disappointed with management team. every year, they made re-organization once for nothing. that's very stupid. it's better to do this for a good reason.

Pros

Well, I think this company can provide you good salary. The house fund is great, too.
The working environment is also very good. The company in Pudong live in a park, far from the annoying road but still convenient.
And the work burden is low. You don't need to come on time every day. If you have some personal issues, be free to tell your boss and you can get some paid vacations.

Cons

Although this company provides relative high salaries for the engineers at first, the salaries will increase very slowly in the following years. At first, you will find that your salary is higher than the employees in other companies, but later you find they have more money.

Almost no bonus for the good-performing team.

Advice to Senior Management

Please provide bonus for the team which performs good!

Pros

Great and interesting software to develop, flexible work time, and work with many talent peoples. It's a well recognized and famous company in CAD industry.

Cons

The low level local management team sucks. They just play kiss-up games all days to satisfy their upper managers, but don't care their employees.

Salary have no competitiveness compared with other US software companies in China.

There is no room for promotion.

Advice to Senior Management

Care offshore employees benefits and not be fooled by your offshore management team.

Pros

The Chinese development office in Shanghai is rapidly expanding and this offers potential for career growth.

Cons

The opportunities for career growth are not balanced with compensation nor with realistic expectations from their overseas employees. For example: As a global company, meetings are scheduled across time zones. This is normal; however, meetings are frequently scheduled at absurd times, such as 4am or 1am on Saturday night.

Software development life cycles are too aggressive because Chinese managers can't say no (and lose face) to their American or European boss.

The human resources department is nearly useless. The HR Director is literally never available. She was given the job because she's friends with the Chinese operation manager, not because she's competent. The result is that standard HR requests, such as reimbursement for health care, go unanswered. Why does senior management allow this to happen? Because they're clueless (or don't care) about the operations in Shanghai.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop treating employees in China as 2nd class. While Chinese people will smile and say they are happy, the truth is that they're already looking for new jobs and feel exploited and ignored by senior management. More and more foreign software companies are expanding into China and they are looking for experienced, English speaking developers. With 40% of Autodesk's software development managed in China, the loss of these employees will certainly impact the productivity of the company.

There should be direct oversight by by senior management. That means that the VP that manages the China development office (ACRD) should actually live in China. Not just fly in, stay in a 5 star hotel, have "meetings" in Beijing (although there is no Autodesk office in Beijing) and then scold the Chinese employees about "fiscal responsibility". Like I wrote, Chinese people will smile to you, but that doesn't mean they're happy.

Pros

Autodesk is No.1 company in Graphic Area in the world. Peopel can work as more important member, do more important things compare to other foreign companies in China. The hardware of work environment is great here. Can gain more career opportunities in Autodesk. Benifits are good than other company in China.

Cons

Communication b/t Divisions are not good enough. Resource cross divisions are hard to be reused. Every Division has its own process, development skills, and knowledge sharing is not enough b/t divisions. Employee quality is a big problem after purchase HSL. Salary are Competitive enough compare to the Influence of Autodesk in China.

Advice to Senior Management

More increasement of Salary.

Pros

Good life work balance - though sometimes you have to work more than 8 hours a day before shipping the product, which is common among other corps in software industry.

Good office location - don't have to worry about commute

Cons

compensation is just so so - is it that hard to pay a seasoned engineer 2000 bucks a month?
too much politics for such a middle size corp
management doesn't pay attention to employee's career's growth - take a look at Microsoft's fancy career model (yeah I agree Google doesn't have that too but come on...)

Advice to Senior Management

less politics
more innovation
take care on the inabilities of middle management