Bureaucratic...No clear path of career development...Very qualitative review process...Limited career growth
Pros
The brand name helps in the resume
Cons
There is just way too much waste. There are too many managers to manage very few people. Even being an individual contributor, you will feel the politics being played. I might be useful to do a lean project to reduce the waste in the number of managers. Although they have a so called career ladder, it is near to impossible to go up being in your own division. For example there is only 1 principal engineer for over 300 engineers. The only way I see to go up is to move laterally across GE businesses. The review process is very fuzzy. There is no clear way of understanding how are being reviewed, or may be I haven't learned to play the review game yet. There is really not any innovation going on in the software division in "Smart Grid", although it is called NPI. If you keep working for long in such a domain, you could end up far behind the rest of the software community and might not add any value to the resume
