Designers are routinely doing project engineer work without the title or the pay. The wages do not reflect the scope of what’s actually expected, especially given the Lehigh Valley market. Communication from management is inconsistent at best. Scope changes come down with no corresponding schedule adjustment, and pushing back on that gets you nowhere. We’re told to ask questions, then made to feel stupid for asking them. Recent guidance was to route questions through team leads instead of supervisors, but the team leads almost always send us right back to the supervisor anyway.
Continuous improvement gets talked about constantly, but ideas get ignored, dismissed, or quietly absorbed without recognition. Meanwhile the team is working overtime on projects that were poorly scheduled from the start, which makes the CI ask feel disconnected from reality. The bigger issue underneath all of this is accountability. When something goes wrong, the reflex from management is to find someone below them to pin it on rather than own the call they made. That pattern is the most demoralizing part of working here.
