Carter Machinery reviews

Oh man.... so much of a good ole boy’s club! If you haven’t been there for 20+ years, good luck to you. Some of the departments have pockets of really great people, but most of the tenured staff are unwelcoming, close minded and even rude to the newer and younger team. Lay-offs will always hit the newer team members even if the good ole boys are lazy.

If you care about the quality of your work, this is not the company for you. The profit is the only thing they care about. Parts junk and won’t live a full rebuild lifetime? Reuse it anyway. Parts washer didn’t completely clean a part and left dirt all over it? Put it on anyway, we’ll blow time standards if we take the time to do it right. Carter is not the company it was years ago. There is absolutely zero quality control. If you have your engines rebuilt here now, you should be looking elsewhere. If you have a family or care at all about anything outside of the workplace, this is not the company for you. 50-60 hour work weeks are common. Most of the top performers are in there more than that. Abusing Adderall or other prescription drugs to achieve this productivity is common. This is the best example of a company I’ve ever seen that acts like they care about safety, but only allocate enough time to do a task in the unsafe way. Or better yet, when they redesign an area and don’t put in cranes that are tall enough to remove heavy parts from the larger engines. When management is told of said issue, nothing is done about it. But if/when someone gets hurt due to practices like this, it’s their fault and they’re let go. Lower-mid management cares more about their bonus check for staying under budget than getting needed supplies or equipment. Weekend shift at Salem needs a new supervisor or the current one throughly retrained. A severe lack of social skills, technology related skills, problem solving and process management skills doesn’t create a very good work experience for those under him. Good technicians don’t go into management, whether this is their own choice or the company’s I don’t know. You either end up with the worst technician as your supervisor or a manager hired from the outside with no experience in diesel mechanics. Either way, you end up with someone who doesn’t understand how to do your job or the complications you’ll run into. Business comes and goes mainly depending on politics. Not a con for this company specifically, just heavy equipment companies in general.