these were the best days, these were the worst days... - Senior SQA Alcatel-Lucent Employee Review

ALU afforded me many opportunities and the pay was great.

I can't think of any

The workers at Alcatel-Lucent, at least the former Lucent employees since I worked almost exclusively with these folks, were among some of the smartest and most conscientous I ever worked with. The people who tried really cared and carried the company.

Alcatel brought with it a lot of the classic characteristics of bad French management. ("Why make it simple when we can make it complex?") Lucent has all the characteristics of a former 100-year old monolpoly. Its management is full of managers who never had to be efficient or organized (since it was based on a "cost plus" revenue system while Ma Bell ran the US phone system). In fact, the more people it hired and the more it spent on useless ideas, the more money it made! It has horrible compensation systems for its management and salesforce (paying for sales, not for profits). The company is very badly organized and while some departments are working 60+ hour weeks, others are fairly useless and make it hard for the productive groups to get real, very needed work done. They promote rah-rah cheerleaders into management who have no clue how to manage except to support the people who suck up to them. There is no well-integrated strategy for the company, and this leads to scattershot efforts at doing anything to have a good quarter, even if it means robbing next quarter's sales and profits.