Pros

Decent first job in industry. NCR is a well known company, looks good on a resume. Pay looks OK on paper. Company vehicles are late model. Customers are glad to see you, satisfaction in solving their problems.

Cons

Off the clock work expected. Lousy communication. Lowest morale I have ever seen. No career path. Raises are 0 - 2% annually. Lots of politics, fingerpointing and backstabbing. Parts are out of the box failures 40% of the time. Poor work / home life balance. Don't try to get ahead or keep your job at this company via work performance, management could care less. Must be willing to give up personal life and work for free (pre-shift, post-shift) to receive average appraisals.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop cheating your people out of their lunch. You well understand the work demands you place on them do not permit that hour you automatically deduct each day.

Pros

Excellent opportunities for advancement and career growth. Global company with a highly diversified population. Leader in technology innovation. Generous benefit package, including work and life programs.

Cons

Long hours, physically challenging at times. As a leader in technology innovation, slow to adapt new technology to internal teams.

Advice to Senior Management

Every towering building needs a strong foundation. Strengthen NCR's foundation by empowering lover level employees.

Pros

competitive salaries and benefits acceptable

Cons

no stability, no career planning possible due to constant reorganization, top mgt is untrustworthy, no concern for employees, workload is huge, not enough resources to do a decent job, expectations are that you will work nights and weekends to achieve average appraisals. Do more with less mentality has reached a breaking point.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't underestimate the value of the knowledge, experience and abilities of the people you are shedding

Pros

- A true Sales School
 - NCR Sales are very very well perceived in the market from other employers; at least what i can tell from approaches I had from other big names
 - A very fast acceleration in the first 5 years in your sales career
- Learn how to be a consultant selling rather than a feature / function brochure reader

Cons

- Dead mid-level role, from extreme growth and development acceleration in the first period to a dead routine for years that can go up to a decade till you past another threshold of management. Other words very few steps in the ladder.

- Corporate and brand visibility in IT industry is dissolving; while being well recognized in the industries served only like Banking, Retail and few other territories.

- Huge gap between Sales to non-Sales role; in terms of volume, investment, education & training, development and even hiring criteria is very low calibers hat accept incompetitive salaries. Bottom line it's either sell at NCR or don't consider any other positions; at least outside of the US

- And finally HR Sucks; maintaining and not developing.

Advice to Senior Management

- The Egg or the Chicken; when it comes to new industries that NCR hopes to conquer. It will never work like this; waiting for business to start investing.

- NCR is relatively large corporate; conquering new industries requires better investment in the field not only investing in the acquisitions and product management; which is not far from NCR's capabilities. Again specially in our markets where employee costs are relatively incomparable to the US, Western Europe and developing countries.

Pros

flexible schedule for most employees
politically correct work environment (for the most part)
can work in a variety of areas to learn the business

Cons

lack of employee education
an employee can become too "silo-ed"

Advice to Senior Management

It is disingenuous to blame the "talent pool" as the reason to leave Dayton, when management owns the processes, and most managers were asked to move to Atlanta.

Pros

What can I say: my manager really tried to make it work...... Despite poor communication from the top and negative members in her team

Cons

At NCR they are not really interested in their work force. Decisions seem to be be made in head office without local consultation and general communication in the company is very poor. The state of the building where I used to work was very bad: aircondition was always broken and everybody would suffer from headaches at the end of the day.
Many employees are very lazy and negative. Even when they are clear performance issues and/or attitude problems, nothing is done. Some employees seem to have permission to treat others badly or simply bully team members. Even raising a complaint doesn't make a difference!
Poor performers are moved to other positions in the company where they can keep their salaries and enjoy the rest of the time.
Senior management has an extreem arrogant attitude: when the site is visited they would hardly acknowledge you.....

Advice to Senior Management

Look after your people! Make them feel rewarded and treat them fair! Improve internal communication and lead by example. Look in the organisation at performance and reward accordingly.

Pros

The variety of equipment are great for an engineer and meeting the different customers is great.

Cons

Low wages. No chance of promotion or wage rise. new people get paid more even without experience or training

Advice to Senior Management

put yourself in our shoes for a day (or better - our wage for a month)

Pros

There is great scope within your role to explore new possibilities and to propose change. Also the possiblility to travel extensively and work with a broad range of stakeholders, from global internal coleagues to channel partners, customers and vendors.

Cons

The current internal atmosphere is, quite frankly, shocking. Whilst there is the possibility to recommend change on numerous scales, the chances of any major change happening if it is not a top-down idea are slim at best. It is a technology-centric company, often foregoing the input of customers for the sake of technological development.

Benefits have been axed quite ruthlessly in recent months. Salary freeze, bonus cancelled and now health care slashed. In comparison with competitors and other tech companies, they've little chance of either recruiting or retaining talent. And that's despite the move of HQ to Atlanta from Dayton in search of better talent (and considerable govt subsidies).

The company is run on excel spreadsheets. There is no central data warehouse despite having spun off Teradata a couple of years ago at great profit to the CEO. For example, there is no way to analyse revenue by product line, let alone see what sells well, where and therefore make the assumptions why. It's pitiful for a supposed 'tech' company who claim to sell eMarketing SW that the basic business information is not readily available, if at all in many cases.

Staff at most levels are expected to jump when commanded, with goals and targets changing regularly (or is that irregularly?) at the whim of a rapidly growing snr mgmt team imported as FOBs, or 'Friends of Bill'. There are seelingly more and more snr managers but a dire lack of 'leaders'. In fact I've enquired about a leadership training program - of course there isn't one and that speaks volumes. One feels wholeheartedly un-enabled.

There is rumour that the CEO is setting the company up to be acquired (and given his record, that really wouldn't surprise me) but why, in the meantime, run it into the ground be reducing morale to unprecedented levels?

I couldn't possibly recommend anyone to seek employment with NCR, unless, given the current economic climate there was no alternative. Do more, with less, for less, until tomorrow, when we'll revise those measures down and up (further in the wrong direction).

I could go on and I find it sad that having only worked for the company for a relatively short time, I'm already actively looking to leave. There are widely publicised internal moral and ethical guidelines which every colleague I talk to, without fail, find utterly hypocritical.

Maybe once they've stripped the company to the bare bones, sold it off and all acquired fat multi-million dollar bonuses off the back of it, they'll actually achieve their oft-mooted ideals to become the world's leading Self Service provider but it's a pipe dream at the moment.

Advice to Senior Management

Read, understand and adopt the business philosophies of Wendelin Wiedeking, now ex-CEO of Porsche AG. The man took Porsche from a loss-making, niche sports car manufacturer to almost, almost acquiring VW (sadly he got involved in the feud between the Porsche and Piech families) and recently resigned as a result. However, he created a huge business by doing the simple things to the best of his abilities. It goes something like this -

There are 4 priorities in business -

1st - Customers
2nd - Staff
3rd - Suppliers
4th - Shareholders

He maintains that if you look after the first three groups in that order, the 4th group will look after itself. NCR, like many other under-achieving companies, focuses on the 4th group ahead of all others. Until NCR finds a 'leader' like Wiedeking, it'll continue to under-deliver and with the current activities under way, under-delivering should be the least of the comany's worries.

Nuti is no Wiedeking. Before it all goes too far, the board should remove the blinkers and realize that they need a true leader to save NCR and enable the people who put so much work in, to relaize their and the company's full potential.

Pros

Stretch or development opportunities are common because of limited internal resources. So much work to do, and not enough people or resources to do it.

Cons

Always putting out fires or working on urgent projects with little or no sense of overall direction; very little investment in core resources in recent years

Advice to Senior Management

Don't assume that long-time NCR employees are stuck in the past.

Pros

Excellent and dedicated co-workers who really want to make a positive change in the direction and success of the company.

Cons

Always looking to see what can you contribute today. Never enough time to do the job right. Got to meet schedule over all else.

Advice to Senior Management

Get in the trenchs. Install the product, talk to the customers, talk to the people servicing the products. walk the talk.