Pros
A good starting place for a career if you are a local. Not a dangerous place to work. Some of the assignments can be interesting.
Cons
The CTC business model is to accept any military contract they can get. This means that they could be training guard dogs or designing ejection seats, even if they never did that before. When a contract is accepted, they go out and hire people with experience in the area of interest, but when the contract is finished , those people are frequently laid off due to no further work available in that specialty. A truly ethical company would tell people they hire that it may well be a long term temporary position, with uncertain employment when the contract is finished. If you are a recent grad, living in a rented apartment, with no children, and are looking for a few years of experience, this is no big problem. If you would be buying a house to move here and have kids in school, this is bad. Job stability has always been a problem for many employees at CTC, but it has gotten much worse in the last few years. During job interviews, CTC brags about a good vacation policy, but fails to mention how you are expected to use it. CTC expects everyone to use their personal vacation time at company convenience if no work is available, since they say there is no other choice, and “it has been done by everyone”. Therefore, you may be taking a few hours of vacation on short notice at very odd intervals, and not have any left for your real vacation. When there was plenty of work, we were salaried, and so we had to put in unpaid overtime. With a work shortage, we are virtually treated as hourly, and have to charge hours with no work available to our vacation. Not just a few hours, dozens to hundreds over a few years. Not ethical at all. Project managers have 2 mandates: never go over budget, and never be late with the final report. Otherwise, they are unsupervised. Some project managers will pick project staff based on how personally comfortable they feel with the worker. Such a project manager often selects a poorly qualified candidate for her project because she got a warm fuzzy feeling from that candidate on another, unrelated project, rather than taking on someone she does not know but who is an expert in the field of the new project. Other project managers, under pressure to stay under budget, take on the lowest cost candidate that might possibly be able to do the work. The result is very mixed competency in project quality, and the experienced and expensive experts in a field are often very short on work. Again, a new grad (read cheap labor) is in a better position. Siloing or stovepiping, keeping the work in “our” group rather than letting it go over to those “other guys” within CTC, is another problem related to staff selection for projects. This leads to even more mixed quality results and work shortages for those in the wrong group. It may be my imagination, but people who are native to the Johnstown area seem to have a longer career here than imports. They also seem to get better assignments. This creates a small core of longer term employees who are more satisfied, and it provides a basis for various company evaluations. This explains some of the very good evaluations in this list. CTC has been selected to be in the top 100 places to work in Pennsylvania. A look at the details of this competition reveals that only about 120 companies compete, so CTC is in the top 100 of 120 candidates. That core of long term local employees is probably sufficient to get them there. Most of management is clueless, since most grew up within the company and never worked anywhere else. As an example, to address a work shortage, they hired outside marketing consultants from 2 consumer products companies, in order to use them as a pattern for getting military contracts. As a result, our approach to getting more government contracts is based on the type of image created for selling Starbuck coffee and Harley motorcycles. Another example, enormous amounts of technical equipment has been sold because it was not used for a couple of years on existing projects. Meanwhile, rows of cubicle walls and office furniture remain in long term storage. The technical equipment sold was high capability that was lost, the furniture kept was easily replaced junk. We could get contracts based on existing equipment plus talent to go with it, we can’t get contracts based on office furniture. Although there are a few truly expert technical people remaining in the company, there are also some with a mediocre understanding who are regarded as experts by management. Explanations for this incorporate the stovepiping and clueless management cited above. Overall, if you are a local native, a recent grad, are willing to move in a few years, and want a place to start out, CTC might be OK. For everybody else, it’s only better than collecting welfare.
