An unserious company for young engineers - Senior Software Engineer Wabtec Employee Review

This company is simply not a serious environment for engineers. Engineering talent is not valued, and leadership is deeply stuck in outdated, dysfunctional processes. Program management routinely commits to unrealistic timelines and deliverables without any consultation with engineering. Projects are often handed to teams fully baked — requirements, deadlines, and customer promises already set — with the expectation that engineering will “just make it work” regardless of feasibility. The tools and equipment provided to engineers are inadequate. Getting a new laptop can take weeks, and due to past cybersecurity issues, everyone is saddled with layers of bloatware and approval workflows that make even basic tasks painful. Something as simple as changing your IP address requires multiple layers of IT approval. There’s a bizarre communication culture where executive leadership is never actually seen or heard. Instead, engineers hear about executive priorities second-hand through project managers, who talk about leadership’s expectations like messages from some distant oracle demanding miracles under impossible timelines and budgets. The company is aggressively old-fashioned. Despite promising remote roles to many employees, they are now forcing return-to-office without regard for previous agreements. Compensation is also inconsistent and inequitable — a large portion of engineers receive no bonuses simply because they fall under the “legacy Wabtec” structure, while others from the GE side receive bonuses up to ~15%. The environment is highly bureaucratic. Older engineers gatekeep tribal knowledge, documentation is poor, processes change constantly, and technical information gets lost regularly. If you are a younger engineer hoping to grow, this is not the place. There is no real adherence to modern engineering practices, no meaningful agile development, and no investment in updated tools or methods. You won’t be learning current technologies — you’ll be learning how to navigate chaos. Customer complaints and scope creep are constant, and project managers are unable or unwilling to control it, leaving engineering to absorb the impact.