Bureaucratic and Slowly Descending into Subpar Mediocrity
Pros
- Job was not difficult by any means. A competent employee could easily complete their tasks for the day. - Laboratory was flexible with hours. - Bonus plan was good, though not nearly as much as our competitors. - Paid shutdown from Christmas to New Years.
Cons
- Pay was low compared to our competitors, and raises were small and did not keep up with inflation. - Laboratory was flexible with hours means some people start their shift in the middle of the night and then are not present for normal business hours. - There were no repercussions for poor performance. Poor performers brought down the rest of the team. - Only 3 weeks vacation, and 10 years of service before you acquire any more. My site required employees to use their own vacation time during a week long site shutdown in July, so if your spouse cannot also take vacation, you have wasted 1/3 of your vacation time right there. If you can take vacation, it is the hottest, most crowded, most expensive, most miserable time of the year to do so. - During my time there, the site gradually stopped providing lunches, snacks, or any of the little glimmers that lighten the mood during long grinds, and by the time I left nothing was celebrated and employees weren't thanked. - My site's safety team preached ergonomics but somehow never had enough money to replace wobbly chairs with broken height adjustment, anti fatigue mats, or adjust heights at laboratory benches. - Open office layouts, even in the lab, means there is no privacy if you need to talk to your manager! - Managers were on so many calls it was often impossible to have a necessary conversation. - Moving up takes years because once people reach a desired position, they camp out there until they retire, which may not be for two more decades. - The site I was at kept reducing head count and increasing workload, and then wondering why it wasn't working out. They also switched production from 10 hour shifts to 12 hour shifts (with hardly any notice) and then were confused that people were burning out and quitting. - Many managers are not given any kind of manager training and were fairly incompetent.
