HERE Technologies reviews

Micro managers and even some nasty people seem to get promoted or rewarded, benefits are being cut, limited formal learning opportunities

The pay and benefits are mediocre. We recruit and interview candidates like we think we're Google making the interviews very tough but top tier candidates that would pass that interview can get better offers elsewhere. HERE seems content to be market average in all aspects of compensation. There is no opportunity for equity (options or stock) due to being a European company which is a huge negative in my opinion. Perks seem to be disappearing (fresh fruit, Christmas parties) rather than being expanded. The latest story is that company priorities have changed and that we are in the business of making money. That never bodes well for employees because management with that attitude sees them as costing the company money rather than enabling them to help generate revenue and profits. We're flush with cash due to the divestiture of the devices division but HERE acts like we're cash poor. Due to the changes over at Motorola Mobility, we're getting a lot of new employees from Motorola which is definitely changing the culture. They're not used to a flat, lean organizational structure so they're trying to reproduce what Motorola had which is lots of managers, lots of distributed responsibilities (nobody is allowed to "wear multiple hats" and deep reporting structures. The problems of Motorola in the 90's-00's were not due to not enough managers. The plus side is that if layoffs ever come, all of these new managers will provide a nice layoff cushion before they start laying off engineers. We're supposed to be an agile company but since there are project managers, product managers, program managers, enterprise architects, system architects, product architects, etc. it takes forever for any decisions to be reached due to the sheer number of people that need to have input. I've never seen a worse case of too many chiefs not enough Indians in my career. As a result, the organization is very Water-Scrum-Fall. The development teams are expected to be agile while the rest of organization still has gates, detailed requirements, architecture and design documents, etc. before development can begin. Again, this is a result of hiring all of these people from Motorola who have never done agile before at a team or organizational level. HERE does know how to do agile at an organization level but since these new managers are too busy, they are never trained in it and think they know better than what has worked for HERE in the past. ISO and A-Spice have made the lack of agility even worse. Again, because the ex-Motorolans have only seen processes implemented in a Waterfall manner, they can't imaging being ISO and A-Spice compliant without producing reams of documentation and having many many meetings. Management has over-commited with the expectation that the new year would bring more resources but due to recruiting issues and an emphasis on cost cutting, management is trying to put 20 pounds in a 10 pound bag. This will only end up having really negative impacts on work-life balance when the deadlines can't be met. Even though the bulk of the employees in HERE are in the US, HERE is still very much focused in Berlin. Management insists that the corporate headquarters are not in Berlin and that there aren't really any corporate headquarters, all of the senior leadership are based in Berlin and all of the leadership hires are coming from Europe.