Pros
Free coffee and soda (but don’t let management or HR see you in the break room too often, you WILL get a reputation)
Cons
I started 5 years ago as the new Global Research center was being set up. It moved from Kingston Canada and some staff came down but there were many gaps to fill especially in the labs. The first 2 years were therefore exciting and the management directive was to drive NGRTC to become a world class R and D center. The primary problem was that project leaders complained they could not get enough data fast from the labs (while they sat in meetings all day). Everything requested was urgent and needed immediately. But when project review time came around and project leads had to prepare presentations they would go back to the labs to ask for that same URGENT data that they clearly had not even looked at. Labs would point to the email with data sent to the project lead a month (or even 2!) earlier, so clearly the “urgent” data wasn’t as urgent as it seemed. This resulted in a huge divide between Project leads/scientists (really engineers not scientists). Management couldn’t understand the problem so they spent inordinate numbers of hours trying to allocate the lab staff time down to the last second to enhance the efficiency of the labs. This allocation work happened quarterly and was altered every quarter to try to take into account more and more facets of the lab daily operations (vacation time, maintenance, admin/meetings/other events etc…). So project leads spent up to a month each quarter dealing with this allocations problem trying to request exactly the resources they needed and fighting vigorously amongst themselves why they need the lab staffs time. Then came new management that decided there was a simple solution. Just force the lab staff into more accountability for their time, forget providing time to grow the staff and just chain them to the equipment and keep it churning as efficiently as possible. If the staff couldn’t keep up just outsource the work to other labs. But as already pointed out the project leads/Engineers already couldn’t keep up with the data they were getting from the labs before so things just got worse. Projects languished, nothing useful was resolved or discovered. But it actually wasn’t the project lead/engineers fault.
