Pros
The projects are pretty unique and in a 'cool' field.
Cons
The projects are mostly all short lead-time projects that start without, or with very incomplete, statements or work. This almost always leads to last minute changes from Sales Engineering (who is lead by one of the owners). This then leaves design engineering with long days without over time and no incentive (the bonuses are a joke for the exchange of your time). Then projects are either outsourced for manufacturing only if in-house manufacturing isn't already overloaded with overtime from the previous project. Towards the end of these ~3 month long projects, expect your evenings and Saturdays to become the companies without compensation. It's a pretty even 40 ~45 hour work week until those last minute wrenches get thrown in. This is typical workflow for the vast majority of the projects (seriously 90%+). The longer lead projects have their own issues, often spurring from having numerous engineers working on and being pulled off of design. So lots of cooks, differing ideas and lots of catch up. The prototypes are actually sold to the customers as production units. The things learned on each sequential build is supposed to be implemented on the next revision BUT there is no revision control. This leaves an obvious issue when replacement parts are needed in the field but they had one of the prototype variants. Old documentation is quite poor and with the high turnover rate of engineers, details are often hard to get. In my short time there, the small design engineering department had 10 people leave in a department that is ~16-18 people. Turn over is high and job satisfaction is low. Many leave to due the repeated and unchanging problems that come from the projects, and others leave due to the lackluster benefits, and finding better opportunities isn't hard. The company is hugely inflexible with time off/out of office. If you need to run to the doctor for an appointment, you have to take a half day of vacation as that's their smallest allowable time request. If you are sick, it comes out of your vacation. Due to this policy, you'll often find sick coworkers in the cubicle next to you. They could really learn to be more pliable with their salaried employees time...or as manufacturing/fab calls them 'carpet walkers'. The 401k offering is also extremely lack luster. Understandably this is common in many smaller companies. The employee count between MSI and JRI shocks (conjoined businesses) is ~100 people. I expect the business to keep chugging along due to supplying a better product faster and cheaper than the competition, although this is done at a price.
