Pros
-Most of the people there are intelligent, hard working, engaging and helpful -The work is interesting -Great apprentice and grad schemes -Friendly environment -Some gems of people within the management level (who I was lucky to be mostly managed by, hence the high marks) -Some of the guys in charge of the actual production (in the clean rooms etc) are leaders in their field, which gives a lot of opportunity for quality learning
Cons
-Although the people there are good, they are severely limited by the structure they've been put into. There are complex, interdisciplinary products being built but many departments are still too siloed. Sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing (even though, independently, both the left and right hand are very competent). -Very risk averse. In a meeting with senior management once, we were talking about the process of developing new processes/products. Due to being burnt before, management were only willing to develop anything if it was completely fronted by the [first] customer who would use it, regardless of how many subsequent customers would want it. This, in my opinion, is a large over-reaction to previously being burnt. We're not in a high-volume market, but I think parallels can still be drawn to the ridiculous idea of what would happen if Apple got the first customer of their new iPhone to pay the millions of pounds for its development costs: i.e. it would never get made. In the same way, e2v's development of products was stifled.