Wabtec Software Development Engineer reviews

Pay is well below market standard and benefits are mediocre at best. Several engineers have gone years without a performance review or merit increase. There is little feedback on your job performance overall. Cooperation between departments and engineering teams is very poor. People seem to like to carve out a kingdom and stick to it. Upper management is severely lacking in leadership and transparency. They do not inspire anyone to go out of their way at all and mostly stay in their offices with the door closed. The whole aura screams "go away, I don't want to talk to you." Management does not engage or challenge employees, and they have no respect from any of the people working in the office. This is not an engineering firm. They have no process in place to develop software, and the code they do have is so bad that it is at critical mass and is no longer maintainable. Despite that, management seems blind to these issues, even when they are repeatedly told they cannot continue this way. Even customers are starting to notice the problems. Employees are leaving like they are on a sinking ship and management cannot even begin to fathom why.

First and foremost leadership is nonexistent. Managers are seated leaders that cannot lead themselves, much less a team. This is systemic from the Directors-up. Many of the managers do not even reside in the office, yet dictate from afar resulting in a disconnect of daily operations. Be sure to check Glassdoor on what you should get paid for the position that you applying for. Wabtec does not pay it's current staff anywhere close to the industry standard and they have stated clearly that they have no intention on increasing staff pay to meet that standard. The result has been a very high attrition rate of staff, and righteously so. Wabtec managers have gone so far as to say that they don't understand why an employee would get another job offer and then ask for a counter offer from Wabtec. Staff getting paid what the industry dictates is seemingly a foreign concept there. Needless to say, Wabtec is a great candidate for unionized staff !!! In addition, Wabtec does not have any retention program. Job knowledge and talent are allowed to walk away without any transfer of knowledge and without any kind of formal training on the industry. New hires will find themselves in a sink or swim situation and this struggle is then compounded by the lack of process and practices. If you interview here, be sure to ask about average merit increases, bonus possibilities, and annual reviews. There are Engineers that have worked at Wabtec for over 8 years and have never received an annual review or any kind of merit increase !!!