Pros
Great work environment for fathers with young kids and average or below-average work performance/engineering skills. Several of the male managers and experienced male engineers were focused on the family and took advantage of the family-friendly culture. This included babysitting their young kids in their offices during school vacations (even when they had stay-at-home spouses), paternity leave back-to-back with their vacation after birth of a new baby and fathers working from home when kid-related commitments came up and fathers being allowed to work from home on a regular basis after the birth of a new baby. Colleagues and management will invest a lot of time and training on poor performing engineers who are full-time. The most experienced engineers will train the poor performer and the manager will divert resources to rework unacceptable deliverables. Eventually, the engineer will start producing average work that meets minimum requirements. Engineers take time to get to know each other outside of work and will become personal friends. For example, engineers had a spontaneous, informal dog meetup in the office and bonded through their animals in the middle of the work day. One of the support staff does dog rescue and puppysits the fosters she adopted out to colleagues while they are traveling.
Cons
An extreme maldistribution of workload between technologies (STRATCO alkylation and IsoTherming hydroprocessing) and strong performers vs poor performers. Engineers do not help each other and will socialize instead of working (even when they have agreed with their manager beforehand to help out). Potential for extremely long hours per week (80+ and past midnight) for top performers with a unique skill that no one else at the local office possesses. Resources are limited and other business units/locations will not easily make themselves available due to job instability at their sites from massive restructuring. If you don't have young kids, plan to travel in place of colleagues with young kids or on longer trips/farther locations. If you are the only resource that can perform a certain task overseas, plan to travel for several weeks at a time - young kids or not. Corporate has taken away some of the perks, such as the ability to keep credit card mileage points and airline miles. This would have offset the pay, which is at least 10% lower than common to the oil refining industry. This was okay when the company had stable employment. Now, DuPont has experiencing multiple rounds of layoffs since 2012.