Pros
- Reasonable education support for the Engineers on your team e.g. centralised learning offers, Junior Accelerators - Good initiatives around Engineering standards within the community - Salaries are enough to attract good Engineers - Pleasant offices (loaded with IKEA furniture, of course!) when not too busy - Opportunity to work at the stores for a few days per year ("Front Days")
Cons
Probably depends which domain/team you end up in as a Manager/Leader, but in my case: - Slow/Poor support from the Recruitment function. Most of my team I had to hire through my own network in order to ramp up in time. - Limited support from People & Culture - Regular budget cuts / changes in direction makes strategic planning almost impossible - Big push to ramp up in Bangalore hub. One office in Malmö is closing (one already closed in Helsingborg too) and the rest of the offices will be under pressure for space, so as a manager I see it's going to be increasingly challenging to hire/replace in Sweden. - Constant politics and misalignment between some co-workers in the Product, Engineering, Data & Analytics functions that makes working with the shared project budgets and plans a real challenge. We have IKEA "values" but numerous high-up managers don't seem to demonstate them. - An Engineering Manager, I have never had a 1:1 with my managers manager, which greatly reduces opportunities for feedback and to make change. - Group Digital / Retail is now going through a major reorg, so that's likely to be the focus for the coming few years, rather than addressing some of the core issues.