Pros
•Plenty of opportunities to apply critical thinking to solve multifaceted problems •Process-oriented workflow allowed you to focus on making the right technical decisions to resolve technical issues •Teammates were a joy to work with generally, and were my favorite aspect of working there. People cared about democratizing technical know-how •Unique technical challenges that arose from time to time were extremely satisfying to resolve. •Working with multiple teams to overcome technical challenges and deliver projects was extremely gratifying. I'd recommend this company to engineers with good hard skills and excellent soft skills
Cons
•Engineering decisions would lean toward favoring current project timelines/urgent milestones to the detriment of saving time or money on future projects, although I felt like this was beginning to change •Unique mechanical design challenges seemed few and far between, although those that arose were fun to tackle. Challenges often could be traced back to PLM issues and making sense of poor, old documentation •Overall, it felt like a 'mature' technical problem space to work within, and whether that's a pro or a con depends on what you want out of your work. •Tight theoretical timelines on paper often stretched out due to forces outside your team's control, and projects would be re-prioritized to maximize manpower utilization. However, this tended to generate 'important, but not urgent' work that competed with 'important AND urgent' work for your bandwidth. The team I belonged to acknowledged this and was making concrete strides to address it systematically, but it's an unavoidable aspect of this kind of work