Pros
Best industrial control design software in the industry. Opportunity to Travel (at the beginning of your career). Many customers have very deep and interesting problems to solve. Trade shows (e.g. Rockwell Automation Fair, Automation Express)
Cons
Chaotic management (assignments given at the last minute. Managers travel A LOT between offices and Germany. Plans change but information is slow to get to those in the trenches. You will be put on and pulled off a task in the blink of an eye without knowing why) Terrible communication (Unending meetings of people congratulating themselves in unending monologues, but little substance. Actual operational information that could be useful is withheld until it's too late. There is a constant push and pull between the three offices in the US, but management will typically deal with whatever is literally in front of their faces first. Customer requests are not communicated or understood by sales, so there is a lot of rework) Poor feedback (Unless you do something horrific like swear at a customer you will not know how you are doing until the year end assessments, which are always late and clearly written at the last minute. There are not any objective KPIs on which to base evaluations, only averaged customer responses. Management is very focused on the sales staff and to fill in their knowledge gaps about the applications engineers they have a tendency to listen to what the sales staff says.) Poor office software and skills (for a software company, it's embarrassing how bad the office software practices and general PC skills are. There is a TON of manual work that the parent company refuses to automate and the IT department is run by a sister division that has no idea (or care) what EPLAN does. Multiple antiquated pieces of tech do not talk to each other. What's really painful is when you go to headquarters and see the German colleagues HAVE automation and software that connects and are supported by a responsive IT department) Training (Minimal and chaotic. The products are crazy powerful, but you will have little to no shot of learning it to full potential on your own. However, since the US office is a satellite office and focused on sales, management doesn't have a good handle on how to train people on using the software beyond the introductory class level. Every once in a while, there are training sessions for office processes (e.g. how to deliver a powerpoint presentation) and there is a yearly new version assessment, however you don't really learn the new features as much as study trivia for a multiple choice test. It's also confusing why some colleagues get chosen for special training and others don't. Typically, these special trainings aren't recorded, so those who don't attend can't benefit. The more senior colleagues have all learned EPLAN on the fly or on the job and are usually too busy to show anything. Again, if you want to learn EPLAN (and your job), you are on your own. Career advancement ( Don't get stuck being a Support Engineer, you will never get out of it and then you will burn out. There is no clear path on how to advance. There are no tests or internal interviews. Sometimes they promote people in a batch. The salary increase is a few points above COLA)
