Vantaggi
The company has wonderful benefits, an on-site fitness center, barber shop, masseuse, cafeteria, etc. Some of the employees are passionate about what they do, and are willing to help when asked. If you end up under the right manager, and if business is good, it's a fantastic place to work.
Svantaggi
The company constantly touts "doing the right thing". We even have yearly ethics training to that effect. Unfortunately, the "right thing" means different things to many different people. For example, I had the experience of working for somebody that literally stole the cans out of the Habitat for Humanity bins (stationed throughout the tech center) for several years. Concerns were raised to the ethics department, yet nothing was done. Up until the last day I was there, he was still regularly collecting from a couple of the bins. As a matter of fact, he was rapidly promoted and has several dozen underneath of him. To the best of my knowledge, he is still there and up to the same antics. Others who have raised concerns about this have either already left on their own or were laid off. If you manage to accumulate a significant amount of knowledge in a particular product line, you can expect to be stuck on a program for an indefinite amount of time. Also, if you happen to be a person that isn't a complete butt kisser, then you can expect to be stuck there regardless of your desires or abilities. If you let them, they will kill your career and prevent you from learning anything new. If you have been working at this site for greater than 5 years, do some job searching and you will see what I mean. You will say to yourself: "I don't have many skills that other employers are looking for because I've been stuck doing xxx the entire time." There ARE lots of IRAD opportunities to learn new things, but those are saved for the pets. Pecking orders are strictly enforced here. In order to move ahead in this company, you have to be willing to blow your own trumpet at every turn, and make sure that if a peer screws up, that you ensure the whole worlds knows about it. They have an employee ranking system that is populated with many different technical factors. When it comes time for yearly merit increases, they have meetings where much of management comes together to discuss who goes where in the site-wide single-file rank. If you do not make nice to the right people, or routinely hang out with the right people after work hours on your own time, then forget about getting ahead here. As a matter of fact, you will be in the running for being laid off whenever that joyous time comes around again. Layoffs are common here. As mentioned above, if you aren't constantly throwing your peers under the bus and taking credit for every single thing that may go right, then you can expect to be on the chopping block at some point in the future. Over the last 5 years, there were 4 rounds of layoffs. Whenever there is a layoff coming up, working conditions get significantly worse, as most people can't concentrate on their jobs. People watch the board room Lotus calendar as the day gets closer, to see what kind of weird reservation shows up on the rumored day. They seem to be catching on, as the last time they didn't put anything in the Lotus calendar for it. Anyway, they keep their detailed layoff plans pretty hush hush. They hint around at town hall meetings at reductions, but you never know it's you until it happens. The day it happens, everybody knows immediately. All productivity for the day is killed, and everybody spends the day either saying goodbye to a treasured friend of several years, or walking around speculating on who is next. The individual usually doesn't know until they get a call from HR telling them to come down. On this day, if your phone rings, you jump. One can blame the economy, the government, or whomever, but when it comes down to it, the fault of this working environment rests squarely on those in charge of others. The pay here started off pretty good for the area. Unfortunately, it has not kept pace with the massive cost-of-living increases that have crippled the Fort Wayne area. The local government spends us into oblivion. Here are a couple of examples: We have a minor league baseball team, the Fort Wayne Tincaps. We had a wonderful baseball stadium on the north side of the city. At some point, the city council decided that if we wanted to become a "big city", we should have a baseball stadium smack-dab in the center of town, since most major cities appeared to have this going on. They took a vote, and 27% of the people voted in favor of this. They built it anyway and jacked up everybody's taxes to pay for it. The result = higher property taxes. You get the idea.