Deceptive & Low Interest in Improvement
Pros
The executive team (the family owners) are involved in engineering projects and you can regularly interact with them. Teams are small, so you can stand out easily for your accomplishments.
Cons
My interview with this company was about 30 minutes. They only asked about my history and getting to know about my beliefs as an engineer. There was no skills tests or other challenging aspects to the interview. I suppose if you can speak a straight sentence you can get a job here. I was offered a job about 20 minutes after my interview was over. Little did I know what I was getting into when I accepted. Executive and director management have no problems with being deceptive to their customers. I've been asked multiple times to create fake test results to make customers believe our solutions perform better than they really do. This crossed an ethical boundary for me as an engineer who wants to create high quality solutions. I've seen my manager take no issue with faking the way a test is performed in our software in order to work around a problem. The company dislikes when customers start probing for more information or auditing our test solutions because they can uncover the truth. Most engineers are in customer facing roles and commonly need to navigate a web of lies they've been ordered to maintain. There is only 1 metric kept throughout the whole company - Profits and Losses (P&L). There are multiple daily meetings about it. No other guiding principles are considered in decision making. Brand new projects are only given 2 weeks to complete, rushed to production, then cause problems for engineering to handle. Management distances themselves and has no problem blaming the team (or the individual) for why things went wrong. Engineers are solely responsible to design, develop, document, release, and maintain their equipment. This can frequently leave 1 engineer overwhelmed and skipping important steps in a development lifecycle to release their product as soon as possible. No special tools are used throughout the company to grow or improve. Microsoft excel sheets are everywhere, shared by emails to keep organized. Suggesting to use different tools are discredited because it means spending money. Every team I've worked with are understaffed, underequipped, and at times under skilled. This is evident by the responses from many teams you may work with. Need a part purchased? Good luck getting anyone to respond to you. I frequently run up my credit card purchasing equipment for my team because no one on the purchasing team can handle their work load. Our vendors commonly block new purchases with CTDI because we haven't paid our bills yet. Need something manufactured? Good luck getting on the schedule. Personal projects by the executive team keeps manufacturing busy with everything except what project teams need to stay on schedule. The financial incentive program, IGOR, allows engineers to achieve monthly bonuses if they accomplish goals they set each month. This creates a toxic culture of management hording resources to their own goals so they can keep bonuses. The rest of the department is usually not getting bonus money because manufacturing and other teams are told to only support certain projects which are tied to managements' interests. Every week we look like complete idiots in front of our customers because we can't reveal to them how disorganized and untrustworthily everything is. Nothing stays on schedule. There is no schedule. This is a global company run like it's still in a garage and in complete disarray. I implore you to not work for CTDI. However if you do want to work here, the 2 things you should work very hard towards are making money, and impressing the Parsons family. If you do that and can survive the 60 hour works weeks, you should have no problem succeeding at CTDI.