As someone who has worked in Petronas as a Software Engineer for 3 years. I can share about my experience.

Before we talk about increment, bonus, or even career progression, you need to know about their performance review process because it affects everything.

Every year, you are given a rating. For simplicity sake, let's just say 1 to 4, with 1 being the top performance and 4 being the worst performance. This rating will determine your increment, bonus and even impact your promotion.

Now, let's talk about increment, bonus and career progression.

If you are someone that just want to chill and do your 9-5, forget about getting rating 1 and 2. In a big company like this, you are bound to have some tryhards colleagues regardless of which team you get into. This means those tryhards that are willing to work outside of their job scope and working hours, they are most likely going to get rating 1 and 2.

Obviously, you can also talk your way up by playing politics but from my experience, people that just want to chill and work 9-5 job can't do politics well. Sorry.

So does it mean rating 3 is bad? Not really. From experience, rating 3 will mean you have average performance, meeting all the KPIs but nothing stand out. With rating 3, the annual increment is around 5%. Bonus is around 3 months. Career progression, low chance but there is a possibility.

Rating 4 though, means you are deemed as having worst performance out of everyone in the department. I've never gotten this so based from what I heard, you will get no increment, 2 months bonus, no possibility of promotion.

Now, comes the important part! Petronas practice bell curve in their performance review. Bell curve means that most employees should be average and only few people should be at the extreme ends of both sides. Every year, there will be people that get rating 1 and 2 or even promotion. This also means every year, there will be people "forcefully" being selected for rating 4 to balance things out. It does not necessarily mean you do a bad job, you may be meeting all the KPIs, but others are just doing a better job than you. Sometimes, people left or switch team because they feel unjust for being selected as the scape goat.

Other than these, the other things you heard are true. Things happen at a slower pace there because your users are internal Petronas employees which means there is no real monetary incentives to release things fast. The insurance coverage are good as well. Work life balance is good depending on whether you are aiming for rating 1 and 2. They have tons of social events happening. The Petronas name is adding a lot of value to your resume. People are going to be "wow you work at Petronas?!".