Pros
- Excellent insurance and retirement options. - Most of the people who work here are dedicated, highly skilled, and a joy to work with. - Tillamook's cheese is a superb product, manufactured the old-fashioned way, and is a pleasure to help produce. - If you are a member of the C-Suite, you will be completely immune to the consequences of your own disastrous decision making, through the power of blaming failure on the poor execution of your underlings.
Cons
Far too many to make a complete list, but here are a few of the most notable: - Atrocious work-life balance. You will be expected to be reachable at all times, even while on approved leave. If you're salaried, you can look forward to regular 12 hours a day, 6 days a week work; otherwise you're "not sufficiently dedicated". Vacation accrual is laughably skimpy, and there is no sick leave. Since the company has a punitive policy for calling in sick, expect to be around very ill workers on a regular basis (this in a food production facility!). - Take it as a given that you will be micromanaged, and chances are your expertise will be regularly ignored by managers with far less experience and/or knowledge than you have. - If you are not a member of the C-Suite, you can and will be held accountable for decisions you had no say in. See the above point about micromanagement for insight into how much freedom you'll have in how you go about carrying out those decisions... - Employees across all departments - including top performing managers and folks with many years of service - are regularly fired for reasons that are more political than performance-related. Tillamook is a tiny, isolated community with very few other places to work locally, so being fired likely means uprooting your entire family and moving some distance away, or accepting an hour-plus commute. The Creamery's management knows this, and effectively utilizes the fear of the pink slip to quash all potential dissent. In fact, people who have been fired are often given a "perp walk" to their car during shift change, so everyone can witness the latest culling. - Voluntary turnover is appallingly high, especially among highly skilled and educated workers. Since Tillamook is such a small community, with a correspondingly small hiring pool, that means that brain drain impacts this company far more significantly than it would a company in a larger city. Management has even given up on filling certain positions, after they've been open for months without qualified applicants - requiring that those functions be contracted out, at great expense to the company - both financially, and with respect to institutional knowledge. - Human Resources is utterly unreliable. Getting any response at all from them always takes repeated contact attempts, and once you finally do get a response, it's quite likely to be incorrect, misleading, or unhelpful. Worse, it's widely known they cannot be trusted, as they tell lies with ease and regularity; it's so bad that there's an ongoing joke in the rest of the company about HR communications: Are they lying this time, or just wrong? - The Marketing department has entirely too much power, often dictating production without consideration of the impacts of their decisions. This creates needless burden for the production departments, and is also leading (with increasing frequency) to extremely costly wasteage and noncompliance events. However, in spite of these facts, Marketing employees seem impervious to the consequences of their poor decision making, while people who are openly critical of Marketing usually are themselves terminated in fairly short order. Bottom line: This proud old ship is sinking fast. Avoid at all costs, unless you're really into schadenfreude.
