Corresponding to the #'s above; 1) After a few years and hundreds of fire trucks later, it's just another job. Our fire trucks are extremely customized and as such, there's never two of the same trucks being built..which means nothing goes together like Legos. Manufacturing and engineering are constantly battling each other's understanding of customer options from one another when it comes to getting the order right. We send so many one-off prototypes out the door I don't know how we're known to be so reliable relative to the other fire truck manufacturers (this must mean the others are really bad). As it relates to the wide array of customization and high degree of turn-over and retirements in manufacturing, there's constant churn in getting people properly trained to deal with this fact. 2) Manufacturing are treated like animals compared to office employees. Some of these guys on 1st shift have to get in here at 4am and work mandatory weekends. They have set breaks that they must take, short lunch times and punch in and out with their badge. Office employees are given the "honor system" for recording their hours worked (no punching in and out) and can take a lunch pretty much whenever they want, for as long as they want. I know for a fact this is a widely abused perk that's only complicated by the fact that flex time exists and managers are too busy to notice the abuse. 3) The good pay is a double edge sword....very few other places in the Fox Valley pay as well which will make your choice to leave all that more difficult (by design). A number of us are "stuck" hating our jobs but can't leave without taking significant cuts to pay or benefits. 4) The attempt to make our internal culture are somewhat limited in scope and capabilities; having a car show once a year, sponsoring a 4K walk, or holding food drive for the homeless drives are good...but it does little to nothing to improve the internal culture. 5) The benefits package is good, there's few complaints other than healthcare costs are high and have steadily gotten higher since 2009 (thanks Obama). 6) This company (like any other I suppose) likes to attract fresh grads from 4 years schools to positions of power. A lot of these people don't have the proper experience to be inserted at the level of oversight...BUT they have a piece of paper that indicates they know how to "engineer" something. After talking to some of these engineers, you discover a number have no mechanical aptitude what so ever. At Pierce, the majority of the "engineering work" is done by employees with associates degrees in design, and for some reason Engineers mostly become managers/project managers. The irony is that the designers do the engineering and the engineers do the managing without having the proper background in design experience. With that, my supervisor and boss have absolutely no clue how to do my job after a decade. They don't know the details or even generally what I do, they wouldn't know where to begin to do my job on a daily basis. If I leave for a day I have plenty of work waiting for me that others don't/can't do. My boss and supervisor leave for a week and the only thing not happening is excessive paper printing and duplication for meeting purposes to review "metrics" ie others peoples actual work. It's an open secret that a lot of these mid managers are useless but make a ton of money. Most of them simply relay information that a lot of us "peons" give to them in the first place to others like them in redundant/fruitless meetings.
My biggest complaint is the glass ceilings intentionally installed to prevent upward mobility. They DO offer the tuition reimbursement but ironically, in offering that for you to get beyond the glass ceilings, they've also paid for you to be able to get out of Pierce and find a higher paying job somewhere else.
