Pros
- Good starting job to get your foot in the door and gain experience. - No degree is required to become an Assembler, although having one certainly helps. - Also a good job for those that want a career change or want to "settle down" from more demanding positions. - Good work/life balance. - The work is usually not physically intensive or dangerous. - Work can be relaxing once you get into the groove of things. - Decent flexibility when it comes to making up time. - Good focus on quality and safety. - Decent room to get promoted to other positions. Upper management loves seeing employees rise through the ranks, when possible. - Decent health/dental/vision insurance. - Excellent safety record.
Cons
- Hourly pay is low no matter what your position is. There's a good reason why BD doesn't usually share their hourly wages on job posting sites despite bragging that the company has "competitive pay". Even on their own website, the salary is just listed as "competitive" with no actual wage given. - Management acts like they care about you, but they really don't. Any semblance of caring that comes out is only because it's part of their job as a manager. They also tend to treat newer hires as expendable. Corporate is even worse in every regard. - Little to nothing is done about toxicity and workplace conflicts. Management usually focuses more on conflict avoidance and downplaying rather than actually working through it. On a daily basis, the burden of conflict management is typically placed upon coworkers to sort things out; which usually results in either more conflict avoidance (ex. one party quits as a result) or long term "behind-the-scenes" grudges. - There's high turnover and short staffing, especially among assemblers and warehouse employees. - The workload at the end of every month increases dramatically and becomes more stressful, even more so if it's the end of a fiscal quarter. - The time studies used to gauge production efficiency are based off of guess work and not actual metrics. - Little to no appreciation is given for work done. Expect a pizza party here and there, but nothing of value is earned on a daily basis besides more work. - Work can get repetitive, especially if you work on the main product lines. - Coworkers/management seem apathetic towards issues unless it affects them directly. It is safe to say they are more reactive than proactive. - Coworkers and managers tend to micromanage newer hires, even if they're both the same level of organizational hierarchy. - The best way I can describe management is that they're like absentee parents at a Walmart. They're (usually) not malicious, but they're so swallowed up with behind-the-scenes work that they have little time, let alone, knowledge to actually "manage" people. - It is often difficult to find documents relating to corporate policies on the BD employee website. - Seniority is overvalued among both managers and coworkers. - There is definitely a cultural disconnect between the office workers and the people that work on the production floor. - In general for BD, the IT and HR departments border on being useless. - Lots of "fire fighting" to keep things under control. - Changes and improvements are slow to implement across the board, sometimes taking years. - There feels like a constant underlying and overwhelming pressure to work harder and faster, even during trainings. - No long/short term disability until you have worked a full year.