The division provides excellent IT hardware running outdated/incompatible software. The more up-to-date software tools we do have are underutilized, as there is no budget or time to train anyone to make full use of the tools. The time accounting system is an antagonistic, unforgiving labyrinth of codes and account numbers that guarantees frequent mistakes, and there is an entire department that is dispatched daily to hunt down those mistakes and punish the transgressors.
Very poor vertical communications; day-to-day motivation efforts usually take the form of management-by-panic, coupled with vague threats. Management relies to excess on ill-advised metrics that routinely do not include any relationship to the real world; and as a result, almost every week the floor employees are introduced to new and exciting ways to lose their jobs. A fellow old-timer said it best, "We pay top dollar for first rate thoroughbreds, and with years of effort we break them into pack mules."
Management initiatives tend to be based on 5 to 10-year-old fads (Six-sigma, grandiose "whole system architecture" projects, "Who Moved My Cheese"), none of which has ever made any difference for the floor employee. Mahogany Row Management is constantly touting a "commitment to diversity," which they seem to think includes any and every employee-relations effort. Management continues to make this effort "one of their top priorities," in spite of repeated employee surveys that indicated that the effort made little to no impact on the floor employees - they fixed that by not including diversity topics in the employee surveys.
Budget for internal research/development is miniscule (a fraction of what it was 20 years ago, before inflation), but management has no problem spending tens of millions on a granite-and-glass showroom for outdated products. There is no effort to provide the engineering floor employees with any kind of familiarity with emerging technologies, or the knowledge and benefits of lessons learned the hard way in previous efforts. As a result, every development program has to start from a "clean sheet" - the architectures and subsystems either have to be bought from outside vendors, or specified, designed, built and tested from scratch. When an innovation is suggested, it routinely meets with a level of resistance that most places cannot match; and when in spite of this a new technology actually does get developed, Management adamantly refuses to seek patent protection.
Since there is no internal R&D, the engineers have no opportunity to prove out what works and what doesn't. And since new-product contracts don't make allowance for mistakes, with every new contract Engineering starts out behind schedule and over budget, and things deteriorate from there. This is exacerbated by a supply chain management system that thirty years later remains rooted in its automotive mass-production mindset supplemented with government-accounting-system rigidity. The procurement process, from the time when an engineer issues a material request to when a purchase order for the material is let, generally takes three to five months. In spite of it being a firing offense, engineers frequently need to have sample components delivered to their homes to make scheduled milestones; and it isn't unknown for the engineer to pay for those samples out of their own pockets.
Performance measurement of Engineering management tends to place emphasis on the number of engineering hours sold over the quality of work performed - for example, because the division was about to miss it's annual goal of labor hours sold (hence threatening the size of the year-end bonuses on Mahogany Row), Engineering was recently subjected to two months of mandatory overtime during the holiday season. Overtime PAY is capped at $25 per hour; for floor engineers this represents a per-hour pay cut between 30 and 45%. And since the company bills the customer by the hour, one does have to ask if the savings generated by these reduced hourly rates are also passed on to the customer...
Facilities tend to be poorly planned and executed, with working spaces unevenly lit, ventilated, or thermally controlled. Office layout tends toward cubicle farms (built with materials purchased in the late 1980s) that block access to sunlight, with no set way to identify where a person's office might be found. The telephone system also dates to the 1980s. One office, built in an old warehouse, is routinely overrun with fruit flies. The main office facility is frequently subjected to noxious fumes from a nearby automotive plant; it took a couple of years, many sick employees, and several employees citing "unhealthy environment" as the sole item in their "Reason For Leaving" form for Facilities Management to even begin to address this in a serious manner.
Don't get me wrong - this all makes it sound like a horrible place to come to work, but except for the last three years it really hasn't. The average employee is well-educated and friendly (we work with the Government, so we have to have a high tolerance for BS). The company has a number of products with a well-earned reputation, and has for the most part been a gratifying place to work. But current management seems to be more focused on maximizing current revenue streams (especially their personal revenue streams) rather than developing new ones. This is the kind of short-term thinking that has been repeatedly shown to drive even the most solid and profitable companies out of business.
