Pros
If you are at a career step when you feel the need to systematize your approach to work, ALSTOM can be the right company for you. Procedures, rules, work instructions, processes are all the best of the company. Your really can learn a lot about that. Work/life balance is also a good point of ALSTOM. You are generally asked to work 8 hrs/day, 40hrs/week in a flexible schedule. Overtime can be compensated. The pay is fair.
Cons
If you are an enthusiast, passionate, self-motivated worker then, please, do not go to ALSTOM. The cons are all at the other side of the pros coin. The major focus in ALSTOM is on procedures: that means you will be judged on your compliance to procedures level rather than on actual results. Indeed consistency and quality of results are very seldom taken into consideration in any kind of performance review. Even for technical projects it is more important to have all the paperwork done and to be within time and budget than the proper technical result itself. A straightforward consequence of this religious creed for procedures and, on the other side, of the highly hierarchical management model is that the company tends to develop extremely poor people management skills within its leaders. They are used to manage documents very well, to fill hundreds of cells in an excel files, to ask for dry feedbacks on project status in terms of on time and on budget deliverables, but very seldom they have a fair conversation with their employees, or try to understand the real status of a project in terms of needs and roadblocks. Generally the level of trust is low and there is a tendency towards micromanagement, Colleagues are rarely friendly and on the contrary quite competitive. Especially because, as a consequence of the described company's culture, competence is not the key parameter for career improvement or performance reward, political games are winning over well done job. People tend to judge others on the base of the title, more than on competence.