Pros
Overtime can somewhat compensate for the loss of the annual salary increase. In this company, you never know if you will receive an annual raise, let alone a promotion or a bonus. To stay aligned with market standards, you essentially have to rely on working overtime. Another part of the compensation system involves RSUs, but you do not receive them as part of an annual package. It’s not even clear how the company decides who gets them or on what basis. I only started receiving RSUs after my fourth year with the company.
Cons
After years of delivering high quality service directly recognized by customers, the U.S. manager still insists on placing you at the bottom of the organization chart and refuses to acknowledge your achievements. They continue to promote U.S. engineers simply because the development team is based in the U.S., giving those engineers easier access to the developers who can help troubleshoot or correct issues on customer systems. In reality, more than 80% of the engineers are not fully qualified to work in this field, 15% do not share their knowledge, and only about 5% makes an effort to build relationships with engineers in other GEOs to share expertise and provide training to support the products. Without a strong self training mentality, it is almost impossible to survive in this environment. The stress does not come only from dealing with complex, unfamiliar customer issues in a highly dynamic field; it also comes from constantly having to fight for recognition, both against management and against other GEO technicians.