Good pay if you don't mind losing your sanity.
Pros
Decent pay. High priority on safety. Majority of co-workers are brilliant and fantastic people to work with. Work is rewarding and purposeful. Lots of opportunity to gain new skills and experience. Decent benefits with good 401K match and HSA contribution from the company. Company provided safety shoes, prescription safety glasses, and other benefits. Very difficult to get fired.
Cons
Management likes to setup an absurd amount of mandatory meetings that are usually lacking of agenda/content and take up very large chunks of your day, which makes it very difficult to perform any work if you are in a technical position or in the lab. Management is lacking, especially if you work in the lab (managers rarely make an appearance) . Egotistical battles fought in almost every meeting. Multiple levels of management willing to slow roll if they do not get their way. No clear direction or communication of expectations or changes. Large fraction of management is disconnected from the projects which causes major confusion. Miscommunication is rampant based on poor understanding of the processes they oversee. Technical/lab staff forced to follow arbitrary rules with no logical backing. Takes ungodly amount of time to change policy even with industry guidance and empirical evidence. Pay and title are not merit based. Will delay your career just to hit arbitrary requirements that are outdated. Management and HR constantly weaponize “guiding principles” against employees, this will effect your bottom line. Poor performers are “failed up” which inflates their perceived authority. Majority of company works from home but the company does not offer incentive for technical based roles that are forced to be in office. Corrective action program is primarily used to document people’s mistakes and rarely used to correct or improve processes. Professional opinion and empirical data is ignored or pushed under the rug in favor of “good looking” engineering drawings and documents. This causes multiple months of delays for re-work after obvious signs of failure. If you make a suggestion and do not hold a PhD, you will be ignored. Anyone with less than a PhD is steamrolled in meetings or excluded from decision making process. There are no repercussions for poor performance, wasting money, or repeated mistakes. Many people are not willing to admit mistakes or take responsibility.
