Tellabs Reviews

Pros

Good knowledge sharing and environment to work

Cons

Beware of frequent firing and lay-off

Advice to Senior Management

Let employee know in advance abt the management decision

Pros

A dynamic organisation that can give you a lot of opportunities to manage works by yourself. It has a good relative small size company. It has high degree of flexibility.

Cons

Relatively small size company compared to other competitors in telecom market. Sometime it used too much conservative approach to tackle a the issue.

Pros

pressure is not high
balanced life
good technology

Cons

stock not performing
product is not very competitive

Advice to Senior Management

sell the company

Pros

The only pros I can honestly say about working at Tellabs is that you make some good friends there. Also the work / life balance is great. You really don't have to do any work and you can continue to get a paycheck.

Cons

There are many downsides to working in Tellabs IT.
Non-existent career advancement. - Promotions are based on superficial factors. You have to put on a dog and pony show to the existing management to get ahead. If you work hard and do 'real' work to help the business grow, forget about being recognized. There is no training for the people that do the real work.
IT Management doesn't know what they are doing - Each day is a new idea and new direction from IT management they can't stick to any one plan because they don't know what they are doing. And honestly some IT managers have little understanding of basic IT concepts. They believe that in order to innovate they need to buy more and spend more when there is no money in the IT budget. Here is a concept? Use what you have already paid for.
Why do IT projects take way too long to complete? Because IT management can't seem to make any definitive decisions. They love to debate issues all day long without coming to any solutions.
TOO MANY IT MANAGERS! There are completely too many people in IT that think their only job is to come up with ideas. Fine but who is going to do the work!. Tellabs has laid of a lot of IT talent but kept many of the managers.
Cronyism is rampant. How is it that the people that do the most work and get paid the least while the people that only come up with goofy ideas make the most. Also when the rank and file employees do have good ideas they are brushed aside by management who go with their own ideas (most of the time the ideas come from slick advertisements of vendors) despite the fact that they say they encourage the subject matter experts to give feedback.
Finally IT is a huge field. Some managers think that a single IT employee should be an expert at everything IT. That's impossible unless these managers think that an employee's entire life should be spent in service of Tellabs IT.

Advice to Senior Management

Tellabs is a good company only because some of the people that work there. Other than that, the company is not a good place to work. IT especially is a terrible place to work. IT has for the last few years been a slow churning machine that produces nothing. The fault lays squarely on all the IT managers. Give the IT employees severance and then Outsource IT and focus on making networking equipment. Realize though that individual departments will start hiring their own local IT staff and you'll eventually end up with a disjointed IT environment.

Pros

Started out a great place to work. When the times were good and the money was rolling in it was OK. They allowed for training classes yearly and respected people. You could get promoted for doing great work.

Cons

Promotions are for brown-nosers only now. People that started out as college interns and only been there 5 years are being turned into Directors! People in IT with many many years of loyal service are fleeing there because they plan on outsourcing the whole IT dept. However the VPs have not even gotten Board of Director approval on this outsourcing plan yet! If the Board rejects it and they keep IT in-house IT will be in trouble anyways at this point. People are RUNNING to look for new jobs in IT over there now.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop trying to outsource something that you know NOTHING about. Treat people with respect and communicate your plans with your employees.

Pros

Have opportunity to work in the leading edge technologies

Cons

Relatively lower in compensation compared to other similar companies

Pros

great benefits, great people. Pay is very good

Cons

like any other corporate america, lots of politics

Pros

Good Benefits, good culture. Some very good people work at Tellabs. I had hoped to work for this company for many years.

Cons

I was laid off, Tellabs moved almost all manufacturing to contract houses.

Advice to Senior Management

Develop middle management talent with character. The trend these days is to promote the worst characters, this is the most demoralizing thing you can do to your workfoce

Pros

Flexible work environment
Strong investment in growth areas
Decent benefits

Cons

Very political - long time insiders have ear of management
No consistent strategic vision between product groups

Pros

great technology, good infrastructure, great accessibility,
laptop for work, email okay, work from home and remote lab
access, secured work access

Cons

all downside, prepare to work long hours,16hours a day, may be on weekend
without any pay so it not that you want