Pros
Nice facility with professional and dedicated engineers who are trying to hang on in a dying industry -- the teamwork and camaraderie during this difficult time has been a plus.
Cons
My colleagues and I continue to read that the executives continue to further enrich themselves with huge bonuses -- it's fair to say that the sentiment here is both strong and unified in disgust for this move. This is especially bad when we read that the original recommendation to the judge was focused on the Sr VPs. Why are they a flight risk? They are either lifers that would never leave or incompetent executives with no where to go -- or in case of the COO have already burned bridges from past (including girl/expense report trouble at competitor). Therefore this is nothing but a glorified hand out to the exact group that is responsible for getting us here. This is truly disheartening!! To make the above matters even worse the existing executive team continues to cover up the reasons all this happened. At the beginning of 2017 -- at the insistence of Toshiba -- an independent root cause team was commissioned. This team was comprised of recognized industry experts and they were chartered to find out how the company got here. The current CEO told us about this in an all hands meeting in March and he promised to communicate the conclusions of this review once complete. That never happened!! What did happen is of great concern to me and my colleagues. Apparently when the first drafts were reviewed the company didn't like the answers. The first drafts highlighted the flaws in the process used to buy CB&I and was clearly not to the liking of the CEO. Apparently this version of the story didn't match the conclusions reached by the outside lawyers that others in the company had hired (same outside lawyers were allowed to review the draft root cause -- how is that independent??). As a result of this the root cause was suspended and ultimately cancelled. In addition, the executive who was managing this effort was removed from the senior leadership team and sent home. How is any of this consistent with the values we hear about? What happens to "walking the talk"? At a recent company leadership team meeting the CEO was asked again about this root cause. He said it was cancelled because it contained "factual errors". Errors according to whom?? Do you think the independent experts would agree with that? Why not address these "errors" directly with them and fix the report. This really seems to be a case of not liking the answer and going to extreme measures to not allow these conclusions see the light of day. It's certainly not ethical. Do these guys really think this report will stay buried forever?? Separate issue -- in addition to the executive bonuses mentioned above about 200 employees recently received bonuses as well. These ranged between $50-100k. First half paid now with second half paid in April. Why can't we see that list? So the company is laying off people left and right -- but somehow believe it's appropriate to send 9 people to a conference in India (all flying business class). Great sightseeing trip if you can get it. How many jobs would the bill for this trip pay for? Does the company think India will really buy all these reactors? It's also hard to believe that Saudi Arabia will buy this still unproven and expensive technology. I wonder how many executives will travel there? Why hasn't China loaded fuel??
