Bell Laboratories Reviews

Pros

Excellent folks to work with, the discussions with others will open up your mind and will sharpen your thinking process.

Cons

Discrimination between PhDs and Masters even if they are competitive. Promotions and salary structuring are based on pedigree and not on achievements.

Pros

Most things are very good there.

Cons

Diversity is much more important than most other things.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on the job instead of social concerns

Pros

Great fun, dynamic and enthusiastic colleagues.

Cons

sometimes the company feels too big/slow to efficiently jump on opportunities.

Pros

Prestigious
Some interesting work (if your areas of interest overlap with management's new vision for the lab, and you manage to survive the politics and stick around)
Relaxed atmosphere
Great resources (on-site libraries, compute centers, etc.)
Interesting colleagues with which to communicate and collaborate
Freedom of inquiry / ability to design your own projects for even junior-level researchers (at least, that used to be the case)

Cons

Cross-division collaboration is verbally encouraged, but bureaucratically difficult to actually accomplish
Communication across departments and divisions about related research is largely informal, and some managers started discouraging it as "distracting"
Clueless management, all the way up to the top, leading to innumerable reorganizations, layoffs, and rules changes, and high levels of employee dissatisfaction
Mission statement of the labs shifted away from true research and more towards early-stage product development, and from long and medium term projects to short-term ones
No oversight of lower-level management, leading to frequent misdirection of junior staff
Employee review process is perfunctory, and useless as a tool for employee betterment
Byzantine management structure above the DH level contributed to excessive reorgs
Little correlation between research group performance and compensation / job security

Advice to Senior Management

Operate the place like a real research lab, or just give up and shut it down completely

Pros

challenging and cutting edge technical work opp.

Cons

upper management has no ability to communicate goals

Advice to Senior Management

communicating higher and lower level goal is vital