Nokia

First of all I would like to say thank you for asking and secondly, I am a contractor working at Nokia. I was a direct employee of Lucent Technologies for 11 years and left on my own in 2003 to start a furniture company. When that business wasn’t successful I came back to Alcatel-Lucent as a contractor. A male that had been on the same team as I was, doing the same job also left the company around 2002. I came back to my current job in October 2013 and was only able to get in as a contractor. The male came back in 2015 doing the same job that I am doing as a direct employee with full benefits and his service was bridged.
This year I was told that one of the groups in Murray Hill was going to make a direct position for me in their group, they currently had no-one doing that type of job. I was working on a hot project and spent over 100 hours of my own time to get it done as quickly as I could, mostly because I care about doing a good job, partly because of the promise of the direct position. There was never anything in writing about this job being opened for me. When the project was nearly completed the male was let go from his position because his whole group was let go. He was given the position that was made specifically for me. If they had waited two months for him to be off the books they could have offered the job to me but once again he had a “Godfather” in the department who made sure he got the job. That is how he got back in the door direct two years ago.
Sorry to unload all of this, I’m not a radical male discriminator, but I am a smart, hard working person who deserves the same treatment as this male.

I’ve been with Nokia for 17 years, including 11 years at the headquarters in Finland. One of the most outstanding aspects of working for Nokia is that they truly support the work-life balance of their employees, which stems from their being a Finnish company. When I relocated to Nokia in the US, I was afraid that the excellent work-life balance would be lost, but no – even in California, Nokia is extremely supportive of working at home and taking time for necessary child care activities. I consider myself extremely fortunate to work for Nokia in this regard. However, this should be balanced out by the overall lack of advancement that I’ve seen in my Nokia career. When the company was doing well, 10 years ago, it was possible to advance and be rewarded for excellent performance. But for the last decade, cost-cutting has been the watchword, so promotions and salary increases really don’t happen at all. One senior manager even said, in so many words, to my entire team, “Promotion? Do you realize how lucky you are to have a job at all?” This kind of attitude is uninspiring, to say the least. However, I stay, largely because of the work-life balance, which is worth more to me than money would be – fundamentally, I’ve traded off the prospect of more money elsewhere for the ability to manage my own time that I have at Nokia. I do find Nokia to be generally supportive of women, but it’s more that they don’t care whether you’re male or female, rather than taking a position of active support and development of female potential leaders.

I’ve worked in telecommunications for 20 years. It is a very male dominated industry. I absolutely have felt that I have had to prove myself more than my male peers in order gain respect from internal and external clients. With that said, I became a part of Nokia last year during an acquisition and the company seems to respect talent and promote career advancement – however – I have not seen that in action as of yet. It really has to do with your organization and direct management chain. In that regard, I have had excellent managers and have worked with some awesome people. At the end of the day with hard work and dedication comes advancement and respect!

I’ve worked in telecommunications for 20 years. It is and will be for the foreseeable future a very much a male dominated business. I absolutely have felt that I have had to prove myself a little more than my male peers in order gain respect from internal and external clients. With that said, I became a part of Nokia last year during an acquisition and the company seems to respect talent and promote career advancement – however – I have not seen that in action as of yet. It really has to do with your organization and direct management chain. In that regard, I have had excellent managers and have worked with some awesome people. At the end of the day, what I have ultimately found is, with hard work and dedication comes advancement and respect!

It is a great company to work in.

I have worked for Nokia for about two years, starting when they acquired the company I was originally hired with.

While I would attribute my poor experience there with equal pay to originating from the original company, Nokia has certainly not done anything to alleviate the situation in the time since the acquisition.

I would say in many ways I still view the corporate culture as an outsider since our office is still very much removed from their larger offices. However, aspects of the company culture have slowly seeped in over the months. While they seem to have good intentions with regards to career advancement and helping to support their employees succeed, they seem to have a bad habit of stepping on their own feet when it comes to the actual implementation part.