Pros
This review is for the Carpinteria, CA location. The work/life balance here is very good, no one will bother you about work when you are not in the office. The location of the office and its vicinity to the ocean and nature is incredible. There are subsidized lunches once or twice a week which is nice. Weekly volleyball and every once in a while BBQ after work. Vacation days and holidays are good, you get an extended break during Christmas/New Years. Benefits are also very good. You get yearly profit sharing and variable compensation which can add to a lot of money. Gym reimbursement, although the choice of places is very limited.
Cons
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.
