Pros
THE GOOD + Starting pay: Relatively good compared to other companies. + Medical benefits: With little to no external comparison, I still think it can serve the needs of an employee and his/her dependents fairly well, simply based on the prices of medical care these days. + Time flexibility: You can come and go anytime within good reason and professionalism (completing your task and/or work hours). + Facilities/equipment: The desks are ergonomic. There are different kinds of rooms (e.g. small booths for an individual, gym, pantries, meeting rooms of varying sizes and designs that inspire one to be focused on work). Provided laptop/monitor (which you can't take out of the office) are top notch. Lockers provided have enough room for a bag and other items to fit into.
Cons
THE BAD - Being deadline and delivery oriented: This may inherently be a problem of the nature of IT/business, but its ultimate priority is to have a good image to its customers and ensure consequent money in-flow (profit). In order to retain the image of being on-track to its customers, the pressure to deliver a potentially shippable product per sprint (2-3 week time frame of work) is put on lower management and developers. Code is made to be externally working and superficially bug free, without necessarily having a solid, well-designed code base that considers expandability/modularity/rigidness of the system. Refactoring is rarely done to improve code. Technical debt rises, possibly to an unsavable degree. - Rigidity encouraged in its way of work/scrum: You're expected to be incrementally working each day. It won't sound good in a status meeting if you say that you spent a day on improving your programming skills in order to do better at work (this is related to the first point) without spending an hour or two on your delivery. - Rewards those who have statistics to show: In the company, metrics is highly a key (since as I said, image is important). Test coverage and learning indices are valued too much, even if though those don't necessarily reflect actual quality of work. Bug fixing is glorified because it can easily be quantified in terms of number of bugs fixed, but promoting good design in software development or code reviews, which could -prevent- bugs in the first place, are not because they cannot really be quantified in the same manner. - Inconsistency: Only occasionally practices what it preaches (e.g. "quality first", promoting software design principles and best practices), because of said being deadline and delivery oriented. - Scapegoatism system: if someone can be blamed, he/she/group might be blamed. The unfortunate premise here is that a person/group is expected to be responsible for something that goes wrong, and not necessarily the systems in place at work (e.g. cutthroat way of work as per being deadline and delivery oriented). - Work done can be so tedious yet mentally unrewarding: one can spend a week or two on fixing bugs or working on pre-determined work instead of being able to actively design the system. Even if one is able to "move up" in his/her career path and do design/architecture, the existing code base of the particular business line already presents a number of structural problems that one might be left to settle with workarounds suggested by developers, instead of being able to have an ideal design/architecture. One is only partially able to improve as a software developer in doing programming work, and so he/she will need to seek it outside of work during his own free time. - Trainings: Too much time is spent on mandatory trainings that are not always relevant to the developers (trainings such as that relating to company culture). Programming trainings, on the other hand, are subpar because the management would prefer to have the bulk of time allocated for actual implementation of deliverables. Trainers who are pressed for meeting deliverable deadlines are, thus, only able to churn out lecture slides that they read out for the most part, promoting passive learning. - Overtimes: The pressure to deliver makes people overtime even when the management does not ask for it. And when they actually do, they might end up prying on your reasons for not being able to do overtime. - Not much extra-curriculars: This is probably due to both time priority being given to meeting deadlines and budget not being allocated for such activities all that much (delivery-oriented). The burden of making time and money for extra-curriculars becomes the employees’ burden. - Food sold at the pantry is so-so, with little variety. THE NEUTRAL (depends on you) = Pay will only scale well if you’re able to prove through metrics that you’re essential to the company, and that task will come with the challenges presented in writing above. = Little work variety: Regardless of role and unless you’re in upper management, you'll probably still be working on the same project, over and over, dealing with the same concepts in different configurations and permutations. This could last for years. May not be everyone's cup of tea. That said... = Work output is rarely tangible: Unless you've reached the point/target year where your product has already been released, you won't have anything tangible to be proud of. No showing your family/friends how cool your new, little Play Store app is. You're almost never going to be able to brag along the lines of "I made that." = Market of your product limited by social class: When the time comes that your product is released, only those who can afford will be able to use it. It's not that cool Play Store app that everyone with a gadget can download or voluntarily donate money to. = Time flexibility isn't really so flexible: This may also not be specific to just Nokia, but your free time is affected by the consciously/subconsciously encouraged mid-shift working hours. While the reasons why people come to the office a bit late (10 AM, or even beyond) is complex and not simply company-rooted, this nature of the schedule is also influenced by how one needs to interact with counterparts around the globe (especially in Europe, who are 6 hours behind Philippine time). = Need to study telecommunications apart from actually implementing code, doing architecture, etc: You're encouraged to spend significant time studying, and yet there is little time to thoroughly do so because of deliverables. = Little practicality of non-programming, technical concepts outside Nokia: If you're not for embracing telecommunications and network engineering concepts with all your heart, it's not the company for you. Maybe 75-90% of what you learn won't be usable for other IT companies that aren't TelCo. Add this with the fact that you're also not much mentally rewarded on the software development aspect. = Constant interaction necessary: Because of the incremental style of work, you may also be required to talk to people everyday. If you're an introvert or looking for variety between your days, I doubt you'd like this kind of constancy. = Open office environment may not be for everyone. Depends on your style. Unfortunately, it's hard to consciously be alone because of said need to interact to deliver requirements to proper spec.