Continental reviews

1. Really cheap company. Because this company is an automobile company. Then control cost is the first thing they think. Then when they try to hire somebody. They want to pay the candidate salary below industry level, even lower than your salary now lol. And they will give you really variety confusing benefits that make you think you'll earn more in final. That's fake. Never trust them. 2. Vague goals. At beginning, they open a division called intelligent transpiration system (ITS) as a start up without any ideas. But they think they can open a billion business because they have a really large base company in the world. But the reality is that base company becomes real obstacle in your regular life. For example, when you try to use some cloud service as in other company. The engineer can choose any cloud server they want to (AWS GC etc.) But in this magic company, you have to write a report that explains why you need AWS rather than other cloud provider to the a department. They will take 2 months (even longer) to decide if this is right. Even a USB cable. You cannot buy it directly. But the base company always wants this division has more and more revenue. Then the management fake everything. 3. They only hire politician in their management team. Your boss only care about if he can pass the review. And if he cannot pass the review, then you will become the unlucky guy. My ever two old co-workers, they just left the college as a new college grad engineer. But they left company, cause they don't have enough performance after they join team 4 or 5 months. And they almost didn't get any tutoring and help when they were in the team. When one of that coworkers find a new job, he even told me, he was really afraid to ask questions in new team. And his new teammates cannot understand why he is so shame to ask questions lol. 4. Bad culture. Because this is a fake start up. Everybody's work will not influence their final salary. Then there is no co-work, no communication in the team. No body knows how to compromise in the work. And the most interesting thing that I cannot understand is there is almost no benefit to fight in work. But there is huge amount politics fights in team.

Where to begin. To understand some of the problems a little history is necessary. This was a local Lidar company in Santa Barbara (ASC) that Continental bought. Continental is a big international company, but you get a feeling that the German colleagues are preferred over others (look at the board members and you get an idea) so of course a bunch of German engineers/managers who were eager for promotions were sent to this location for the transition. The cultural gap really didn't help during the transition period and there were problems right off the bat. The original engineers that really knew the technology hated how things were, to a point that just after a year the main hardware guys from ASC all quit so I'm not sure how the next generations of this lidar sensor would be successfully developed. The upper management at Continental is eager to ship all the jobs it can to countries where they don't have to pay as much money and you are told that your salary is too high compared to them so this is justified. In the time I've been at conti, I've seen most of the hardware/software components shipped out to other places for the sake of saving money on paper. Most of these places are on different time zones with some not having any overlapping working hours. To make things worse, you have no power over the other teams in other countries as they have other bosses and also other tasks from other branches. This creates an incredibly inefficient system, where it takes forever to get something done, and when it's done it better not have any bugs/issues because resolving them takes even longer. So you end up tracking other people's work, and conti has actually created a lot of positions specifically for this reason, track what others do and bug them until they do it. A lot of smart people who were hired to do real work are used for this, and you can see that they are not happy about it and are already looking elsewhere for employment including myself. The management has mentioned that this is Conti's most expensive branch to keep open so I really wonder how long more it will be here once all the components can be done elsewhere. I really would not recommend this branch to anyone. I can go on and on about the problems but this should be enough to help smart candidates stay away. Too bad the top managers at this branch don't even care as they are on temporary expat contracts so they can just go back to where they came from, or to another branch where they can focus on collecting their big bonuses while it lasts.