Vantaggi
Good opportunity to get a lot of interaction with top notch medical and military companies, wide variety of challenging projects. Generally a very competent design engineering group to work with, across two sites. Stays on the forefront of rechargeable batteries and charger design.
Svantaggi
If you value engineering, creativity, or take pride in your work, Micro Power is NOT the place for you. First of all, the company is not expanding. The lithium battery market space might have grown in the recent years, but Micro Power's revenue today (post merger) is still just comparable to their revenue before the purchase of a competitor (selfCharge, in Redmond, WA). If management was smart, this ought to be a very good indicator as to how bad they are doing. So, where do these job vacancies come from? Either: A) The person in the said position was tasked with fixing something so broken in the company, that they failed and was terminated, -or- B) The person was just so fed up that they either quit or moved onto greener pastures. So what is it like working at Micro Power? Imagine a company where the sales guy would say anything to the customer just to complete the sale, then push it upon the engineers to deliver what he had sold. He might not even understand what he had sold, or quoted, but gosh-darn-it, here's the quote and this is how much time you have to get it done. Imagine everyone being loaded to 120%, or more, and management asks, no, expects you to keep putting in the overtime hours just to get things done. Then when the time bonuses roll around, they find the smallest fault and use it to deny you your bonus. Imagine that to add to this workload, everyone is shackled to a horribly inefficient system that some business degree guy who sits in an office all day dreams up with. It takes a room full of engineers and account managers an hour (x 8 people, x $75/hr, or so) to fill out a form, just so that the technician can build 15 prototypes. And if something is to go wrong, the answer is to find fault, throw someone under the bus, then apply more and more draconian processes. Imagine a place where no one really wants to work with anyone else from any other department, that after years of this mental conditioning is afraid to take calculated risk, afraid to be creative, afraid to question "is this really a good way to do things". As previous reviewer noted, the general mentality of the company is "Check the box" and "make sure I don't hold the manure bag when things go bad". Now to top all this off, imagine a company that treats their employees with absolutely no respect. People had been fired by phone calls, while driving home after a week long business trip. Some even found out that they've been laid off when they come in in the morning and their key card doesn't work. The ONLY reason Micro Power can afford to stay in power, with all this waste and inefficiency, is because of the incredibly inflated overhead that can be charged on military and medical products. But as other competitors get better, more and more business will go away, and the rot and decay of the organization shows through. If you are a young engineering graduate and can afford to bury your head and ignore these problems, come work for a while to get some experience. But don't plan on a long career here. If you are applying for any other professions (accounting, Q/A, etc) - don't bother. There are better places to work.