Thales reviews

French management rules. If you are not French, sorry.. For Singapore office: Been around for 40 years in SGP and still unable to achieve the business volume that other MNCs manage to achieve. They operate more like an SME than an MNC with no autonomy to make any decisions beyond $2M. Tedious internal process just to get approval to proceed with a bid/course of action. People waste time doing paperwork that is 50pages long just to get "approval". And this must be done 3 times. If there are more than 5 French people in a meeting, they will go on in French and ignore the other non-French speaking colleagues in the meeting. Below market salaries and bonus compensation due to poor performance in SGP and unmotivated staff with below average skills/qualification trying to project manage large complex projects. Add on a weak management that allows its customers to bully them (eg. not paying them on time or not at all). They keep writing useless letters to customers who ignore them because they know Thales will never act on it.

1. Salary is below the market average, yet job roles can be demanding. However, this may change in 2023 as minium wages rise. 2. Diversity, mostly are Indonesian, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, is likely due to the above point. My previous project leader who was a fresh grad from Indonesia university was pissed off knowing my starting salary was higher than his. 3. Promotion is based on both seniority and pleasing the management / French people rather than merits / skills. The effect is brilliant people leave after about 2-3 years of working and those in technical and management roles are filled with the average or bad ones. 4. Turnover rate is high and this company even gives 2000 SGD for a successful candidate hiring recommendation, close to what this company gives for a successful patent (1000-1500 EUR). 5. There are several high-ego managers and toxic colleagues. Sabotage and backstabbing do exist and you will be hardly be able to protect yourself when dealing with these toxic people. See point 3 on why this is happening. 6. Codebase for development, production, and unit test code are chaotic. It gives headache just to read them and make you think everyone in this company is an amateur at best. See point 3 on why this is happening. 7. Project leaders and managers do not strive for good development practice. Code refactoring is treated as a burden and unprofessional, coding shortcuts are perceived as brilliant and professional, and most teams have their agile development as just "being agile" with short daily stand-up as 1-1-5 hour daily reporting. See point 3 on why this is happening. 8. Most French colleagues I have worked with are cunning, self-entitled, and arrogant towards Asian. Some of them (expats) is incompetent and they make themselves as the most impactful contributor. Yet, they have the highest salary among locals. They mostly appear nice, which is why it is hard to identify this issue. 9. Politics are strong in higher managements, especially if it is related to French people. 10. Not many brilliant people to work with and the experts' expertise are questionable. This is a cybersecurity company focused on applied cryptography and yet, most people inside do not have strong cryptography knowledge. Nobody even cares good software development practice. 11. There is not much career progression for higher positions. 12. Health insurance coverages are average; no dental and annual health screening coverage. 13. The HR technology is bad. HR uses Workday for performance review and company structure, but other than that, it uses Oracle technology (as far as I remember). Critical aspects such as claiming benefits, downloading payrolls, applying leaves, filling monthly check-ins become hellish. 14. Never trust anonymous survey as being anonymous no matter what the managements say. I have had my hard lesson.