Sony Ericsson Mobile-Global Reviews in Raleigh-Durham, NC Area

Pros

Great work environment to work in. Opportunity to test cool phones.

Cons

tedious testing from time to time

Advice to Senior Management

Keep track of work delegation

Pros

Great people & great benefits

Cons

Poor leadership; lack of strategic direction

Pros

Good company to work for,
Good team to work for.
Goos salary and benefit.

Cons

Decision making relied on parent company.

Advice to Senior Management

More authority locally.

Pros

Skilled co-workers that are very helpful
Interesting projects and working with the latest technology
Good facilities close to restaurants and stores

Cons

Too much politics when it comes to product development responsibilities.
Too Sweden-centric, everything must be accepted by management in Sweden
Management too slow to make decisions, leading to non-competitive products.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop promoting the best engineers to become managers. Not only are you taking away the best engineers, but they are often not very good managers.

Pros

- Great benefits with good pay
- Co-workers were smart and competent.

Cons

- Products are behind in the market
- Development process is very inefficient
- Decisions by upper management make you wonder what the companies goals are

Advice to Senior Management

Upper management need to take a serious look at the current mobile market and development process to have any chance to be competitive moving forward

Pros

If you want to work with Smartphones and you can't get into RIM, Nokia, Apple, etc, your choice may be Sony Ericsson in California going forward. Not sure how long that experience will last though. The SW developers seems to have become a bit more unleashed and some nice UX is coming along on the upcoming phones. The old platform (OSE running on Ericsson EMP) has been moved to China and focus is now on Smartphones, and some nice form factors are about to be released using some of the leading Smartphone OS'es.

Pretty relaxed work environment, but appearances can be decieving as this is consumer products after all, and deadlines have to be kept ?!? Well, at least that applies to the grassroots.

Cons

Horrible standards of communication from middle management and up. You basically can't trust anything they say as far as major developments go, as they prefer to keep people in the dark, one can surmise, to "increase productivity". Lack of clear focus. Even now they can't focus on one platform (Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian) but split forces, focus and team on 2 or 3, with duplicated efforts. Madness or Genius? Take your pick.

Even when they had 20-30+ phone projects going on, Sony Ericsson still had the appearance of a startup company in terms of organizational efficiency, learning from past mistakes and Quality Control. Too many chiefs and not enough indians to execute their vacillating wishes. Probably this could be blamed on having 4 major development centers around the world, each competing for resources and duplicating some efforts, but the failure to succeed in the US, one of the biggest and most competitive markets, where high value and quality at reasonable cost became unattainable. Dont' even mention low cost phones. Not possible for Sony Ericsson, Perhaps high end $700 smartphones, the final frontier, will keep the ship afloat a few (2-3?) more years...

But with the maintained lack of focus of developing for several platforms, using duplicated development which do not communicate with each other, it looks more desperate (read: same old, same old) approach than a serious comeback. I hope I'm wrong because if they had REAL leadership able to forge a ONE MIND team this company and its engineers would probably kick ass. Unfortunately there does not seem to be a culture of openness willing to listen to critique.

Advice to Senior Management

See above

Pros

Great engineers in the USA and interesting products. challenging issues to work on...no end to the issues. Benefits are really nice and good vacation/PTO policy.

Cons

Proprietary solutions in a world going open source. Tied to Ericsson too closely. Only "cool" stuff gets done in Sweden and Japan (Sony and Ericsson), even when it could be done better and more efficiently in USA. Software technology stuck in the 80s. Forgot more than i learned in my decade there.

Advice to Senior Management

Crystal ball: Sony Ericsson wont be around in 2 years.

Pros

When the company is doing well, it is a great place to work. There are great benefits, great people, and challenging work.

Cons

Company is in a downward spiral and I would not recommend working there now. Senior Management always announces how to improve, but never has a plan to improve.

Advice to Senior Management

You are forced to lose your talent because the management team does not know how to create a plan and put it in action. The product planning team is also very bad at forecasting the future and always seem at least a year behind. Also, quality in software is horrible, yet there never seems to be any plan to fix it.

Pros

Sony Ericsson in RTP has a reasonbly good work life balance, with really good benefits. The salaries seem to be relatively competitive.

Cons

There is definitely a glass ceiling for engineers. This may also be true for engineering careers in general, but if you are in a specialized area that is where you will remain. There is the constant threat of layoffs, of course. The Research Triangle Park site is a satellite site with little political power. It is a puppet resource to be used up until the day it is no longer competitive. There is a feeling that all of the design sites are competing with each other, which goes against the lip service of "we must all work together."

Advice to Senior Management

Decide what products you want, and stick to it.

Pros

The Employees and Culture is what makes SonyEricsson a great place to work. The lifestyle is great the low cost of living in NC is always a plus.

Cons

Promotions are pretty much lateral moves, it's difficult to make any move upwards. SonyEricsson Sweden basically makes all the decisions.

Advice to Senior Management

Customer Focus should be #1 priority