Pros
Wabtec is a Fortune 500 company with typical benefits. The pay is somewhat on the lower side of a typical range. To be attractive to customers, Wabtec positions its products in the market to be as inexpensive as possible. Nevertheless, Wabtec does well quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year. However, the company never shares the results of the employee's hard work with the employees who make such results possible. Neither does the company invest any of these profits into updating its product offerings.
Cons
Wabtec is mostly a railroad hardware company (locomotives, rails, signals, etc.). Wabtec also makes software, but management and customers don't understand software or software development. Wabtec's customers, i.e., railroads, resist change or progress despite much of it being mandated by the FRA. The codebase of most product offerings is poorly written (ad-hoc, without design) in Visual Basic on outdated .NET frameworks. There are small pockets of C# development and pockets of Java development. Projects are often started years late, and management expects the deadline to stay the same. Software developers are often pressured to meet unreasonable commitments, but no overtime compensation is offered. Wabtec has no intention of modernizing its product line—it plans to ride the old mare until it dies. This leads to much frustration for the actual software developers, who know what they are doing and want to make products to be proud of. Wabtec's software offerings are miserable, but sadly, they are the best the industry offers. Surprisingly, many very skilled software developers have stayed with the company despite all the negatives.
