Work is not assigned to you through management. You have to search out work assignments within the company for the PMs to bring you into the work. So the relationship you have with these PMs will directly affect your billable hours for the week if they choose to give you work or not. So you have to sell yourself to the PMs instead of having management work the with PMs to have work assigned to you.
Management does not develop you at all. They are there just to approve or deny you access to engineering tools and time off. Other than that, you are literally working as an independent third party contractor having to look for work from the PMs.
Pay is 40%-50% below market rate.
You report to management but you are responsible for finding your own work and your own development. If you succeed in work you found yourself / developing yourself / etc., the manager gets credit for having a good team. If you fail at convincing PMs to assign you work, then management is immune from this. Its Heads Management wins, Tails you Lose situation.
Management asks you to develop yourself and does not involve themselves in developing you. Asking your manager where they would like to see you developed to at the end of the year is a wasted conversation on them.
Exposure to software development tools, even when its free to access, is locked down under project requirements. You can't train on the engineering software tools because they will not allow you to install the engineering software tools, even if its free to do, without a project for you to bill the software analysis work to. So you can only train on a software tool when you are assigned a billable project to a client (and staying within budget of the client, so you can't charge the training hours of the software to the client project) oh and you've had zero training on the software since this is the first time they will allow you to install the software. You get 10% per week max of billable training hours, so that's 4 hrs a week maximum.
