GE reviews

The average work week at GE is greater then 40 hours. "Casual" overtime is often expected and usually puts people work week between 50 to 60 hours. For regular employees GE has an extremely poor compensation plan. Top performers get ~5% raises on ~16 month interval. The majority of employees get 2 to 4% raises on a cycle greater then 16 months. Flexible Work Arrangements are not a "true" option. There is way too much opportunity for losses in productivity due to the informal "casual" overtime policy. Manufacturing engineering and design engineering have a poor relationship, so much so that manufacturing will not share office space with design. This causes a lack of space for the design employees, so often times six people are squeezed into a four cube area. Attrition seems to be getting worse and the quality of new employees is not as good as in the past. I believe lack of talent is driven by a desire to rapidly grow so a strategy of quantity over quality was employed. The attrition and lack of talent causes additional problems, employees usually split time trying to train the new people but often see the good ones leave in a year or two, while the ones lacking skill stick around taking a long time getting up to speed. Over the past couple of years GE has started reducing benefits for regular workers. Two good examples of this are a 20% increase in heath insurance and 33% increase in medical copays. GE relies very heavily on "outsourcing" and feels it is the future of the company, even though the quality of work is often poor. Human resources are completely incompetent and I am not actually sure what value they bring GE.

GE, as a company, pretends to care about their employees but the real focus is the bottom line. Most employees have no personal stake in the company's success or failure and consequently are only motivated to advance their own career. This can foster a highly competitive hierarchy in which there exists little camaraderie.