Pros

Very smart people at the worker level, good family atmosphere, exciting product development, excellent benefits and salary, diverse job opportunities available, lower level employees treat each other well

Cons

Incompetent senior management, management blames "employee culture" for their mistakes, bias against long term employess, paranoid and fear filled environment from continual layoffs, can be very depressing place to work

Advice to Senior Management

The past management that build the company to greatness was not in it for the money

Pros

People are generally personable with modest egos. Most have spent a career there and have few ambitions beyond EK. Because so many experienced people have left the company, there is lots of opportunity for those with little experience to have surprising influence in a company with a worldwide brand presence and global market.

Cons

There is no hope for the future. Most employees are either (i) long-timers hoping to survive a few more years until they are eligible for retirement or (ii) recent arrivals looking to make a name and a few bucks before moving on to something better. Many new hires are there only because their spouse moved to the area for a real good opportunity, and the Kodak opportunity was available for the trailing spouse. There are no new hires who have any realistic hopes of building a company that will still be standing in a decade. So the general attitude is depressed. Even the halls are dark, as the company has removed half of the light bulbs to save energy - a constant, visible sign of the gradual decline of this once proud institution.

Advice to Senior Management

Try to better disguise the pillage of company resources for personal gain. The more obvious it is, the worse the morale.

Pros

At one time I would have said Eastman Kodak was a comany that honestly cared about their employees but it has become apparent that is a thing of the past.

Cons

The "Old Boys Club" is alive and well within the walls of Eastman Kodak. Kodak doesn't always promote the best person into a position more times than not it is a case of who knows who or
who owes who. Very poor upper management.

Advice to Senior Management

Please think outside of the "Rochester Box" Rochester is akin to a dinosaur and we all know what become of the dinosaurs

Pros

Casual dress. Flexible hours. Hard-working people. The ones at the bottom of the totem pole are absolutely propping managers up.

Cons

Over-worked. Underpaid. Underappreciated. Poor upper management. Highly disorganized. 2 weeks vacation and begging to take those lousy two weeks. No incentives to perform well.

Advice to Senior Management

Not work the trouble.

Pros

Care for the individual and sensitive to each circumstance. There is much opportunity to move within the company as your career interest change and you professionally mature.

Cons

Recently there has been much downsizing and consequentlyfriends protect friends which means the best people are not always retained for a given job.

Advice to Senior Management

Management should start thinking more stragically and move to new technology rather than to extract revenue from dying businesses. The future is in soft copy, electronic image distribution, and search automation and not in hard copy.

Pros

Interesting projects and large base of expertise from which to gather information

Cons

Large company in massive cost cutting mode. Decisions are entirely numbers focused and senior management does not seem to have faith in the individual business units' ability to run a sustainable business over the long term.

Advice to Senior Management

Being entirely numbers focused will force many product lines to fail. This will inevitably result in outsourcing of products from competitors. This is not sustainable in the long term.

Pros

Good pay for a hard working employee. Satisfying positions while they last. A good company but may be purchased by another company.

Cons

Layoffs every year which make it difficult to feel safe. Not enough vision to be successful in today's environment. They may not be around for long.

Advice to Senior Management

Need leadership with more vision to keep pace within a difficult environment. Time for changes and even harder decisions to make.

Pros

Kodak offers great development opportunities. They have invested a lot of time and money into my career growth and development. On the job you get exposure to state of the art business practices and fundamentals that can be transferred to any organization. The people are also great at Kodak, there are very few tyrants and ego maniacs in management. The culture is very open and honest where micro-managing is non existent.

Cons

There is a trade off in working for Kodak, you get great training but poor compensation. Another downside is being a Canadian employee, it would appear they are trying to pull all the business back to Rochester or sending it to Asia. There won't be much of a Kodak presence in Vancouver in the years to come.

Advice to Senior Management

You need to give back to the market that funds the majority of the cashflow sheet. Keep some jobs in North America!

Pros

Good pay, decent benefits, work/life balance.
They were good to me (while it lasted)...
It is a rather conservative place, but co-workers are nice in general and helpful when you don't directly threathen their position.

Cons

Stress, continuous downsizings, lack of support for professional and personal advancement
The work environment is corrupted by the ever-present manace of being the next downsized ("right-sized!"). Rochester is nice, but 5 months of winter is too much...(nothing to do about this).

Advice to Senior Management

Share the pain of downsizing (layoffs) be showing a human face. Cut your salaries and bonuses by 50-75% not by 15% when times are bad! You made enough money when times were good.

Pros

Some of the best technical people in the in the world-wide imaging community worked in the research labs. Both on the photographic film side and the digital imaging side, most technical professionals were very cooperative and simply great to work with.

Cons

From about the third level management and up, managers had a sense of entitlement and seemed to have been placed in their positions for reasons other than competence. However, first line and second level managers, from my experience, were technically competent and sympathetic to non-management employees.

Advice to Senior Management

You knew from the 1970s that digital imaging was going to eventually become dominant in every photographic field. The current stock price is $3 per share. How could you screw up so badly?