The company has been in decline since it lost its identity as Navteq. Being tied to the dying fortunes of Nokia created many problems in trying to recruit and retain the talent the company needed to be successful. The company has been saddled with some of the most mediocre upper and middle management I have ever seen and unfortunately, they bring in their friends who are just like them skill and experience-wise which continues the cycle of mediocre (and worse) management.
HERE is now owned by a German car consortium who don't know how to run and manage a high tech company. Germans might be known for their engineering but it is their mechanical engineering, not hardware or software engineering, which they excel at. They have yet to learn the lesson that you can't manage software engineering like you can a factory or assembly line. They still want to apply Taylorism even though better methodologies have come along (agile, etc.). The German software engineers I worked with were also not exactly top of the heap and the ones that were competent were also extremely arrogant and hard to work with.
The company feels like it forgot how to do software engineering. Or perhaps it never figured out how to do it right in the first place.
With the reduction in benefits for US employees (and US employees only), comments by some senior leadership that US employees are too expensive (but easier to fire), it is really obvious that the long term plan is to shut down US offices and move the positions to Germany and India.
Over the past year and a half, HERE has been doing very small, quiet, well timed layoffs that do not require HERE to notify state labor authorities. The floors occupied by HERE in the Boeing building are only half full where three years ago, they had to expand into a neighboring building because there wasn't enough room. The "office refresh" program is a euphemism to consolidate space and put more employees per square foot in order to save money.
Reducing compensation and benefits to below market average are going to create a recruiting problem that will eventually only be solved by moving those open positions elsewhere. Be wary of the open positions on the website for US offices. These are not new positions, these are openings to backfill due to the brain drain of more talented employees going elsewhere.
The latest news about not receiving US approval for Chinese investment is just going to quicken the pace on closing US operations for HERE. The US can't disapprove if there is no US company in the holding company.
