The Systems (that is, embedded software and electrical engineers) department at Vermeer has become very corporate recently. Amid a ton of recent growth, they have hired up many many ex-John Deere employees, mostly at the management level. Very quickly, I saw Vermeer turn from a place where I felt I contributed real engineering input to a place plagued by poor management decisions. I no longer felt listened to. Management became very vertically stacked and more middle managers were added. While this may seem contrary to my first point, in truth, engineers are actually given quite a bit of leeway. Vermeer Systems department relies on its self-sufficient, dedicated employees. This is what drew me to the company in the first place. However, there is limited technical growth potential when management does not receive input from engineers. Eventually, as an engineer, taking the decisions as they come, just "making it work", and not being given a meaningful pathway to provide input for future decisions gets tiring. Because of this, there is also a lot of technical debt. Standardization projects are rarely successful.
