Calspan reviews

Upper management does not care about their employees. I have heard one executive specifically say he is O.K. with employee turn over so they can continue to pay bottom dollar. Work environment is pretty toxic. They work you to the bone. There really isn't much room for professional growth since you are working hard non-stop and they never make it a point to allow you to learn. If you do somehow get promoted or change roles, your old role never leaves you. You will now be asked to do both roles for the same pay. Back filling your old position is not a concept they want to implement. Techs/Engineers can get promoted to managerial roles, but they aren't trained on how to be a manager and so they struggle in those new roles. There is really one individual who runs this company and is very old school. Does not believe in remote work and in their ideal world, everyone would be in the office 100% of the time. There is a bad sigma around "corporate" and you need to walk on egg shells around the executives all the time. HR preaches about family and "One Calspan", but then do nothing about employee retention. There is not much of a work/life balance. If you are salary, be prepared to work 50+ hours a week, every week. Be careful what you say in emails, teams, etc. because they are known to dig for things to fire employees over if you don't agree with them in everyway. They do not accept differing opinions. Good luck finding diversity at this place. Lets just say fox news is the preferred news channel in the breakrooms. There are two owners at Calspan and one of them is very nice, but the other is degrading and condescending. To this day, I don't think they care or know what their upper management teams are doing to the employees.

After a certain point there was no room for advancement, if there was a position open we were not notified only to find out that one of the "select few" had already been chosen. Management was relatively new and had no idea of the program's workings. We were purchased under the old contract by Calspan in 2010. We were micromanaged and could not perform our work efficiently without constant time consuming reporting. Quality and moral deteriorated quickly. In 2012 there was a major layoff after being awarded a 40 million contract which was cut considerably by the government due to irregularities. Execs enjoyed many perks that were not passed down to the worker bees on the workers dime. 50% of the work force was let go, mostly senior employees, higher salaried, "complainers" and those that did not "conform" to the new management Forget any suggestions, they are never listened to. It is their way or no way. Everything suffered, from quality of our former work to poor showings of what we had done previously. After being purchased in 2010 we became salaried. No overtime, no bonuses and no incentive to work harder. Projects requesting volunteers, forget it if you refuse, you will do it whether you want to or not. Earned vacation almost no time to use it, so you lose it. There is no life with this company, they own you and dictate what you do. It used to be a great job but they sucked all the joy out of it.