Pros
- You work with a lot of great people in engineering. Even though management leaves little to be desired, most of the rank and file employees would give you the shirt off their back. - Can be a great place to launch a career if you get put in the right department with a good manager. Very few managers at GE are natural leaders so, getting put in a good department is a crap shoot. - The education benefits are, at least for now, fairly good. If you can get into one of their leadership development programs, you'll get a free master's degree out of it. Beware though - it's very specific to GE Aviation.
Cons
- No matter how much they claim otherwise, you will have no work / life balance at all. 60 hour work weeks are pretty common. Hours vary depending on whether or not you have a telecon with your outsourced counterparts in India, Mexico, Poland, Turkey or China. Be prepared to work a lot of unpaid "casual overtime". - Even though many experts have said it's old and slow to adapt to changes; Six Sigma is such an entrenched bureaucracy at GE, it will never leave. As a consequence, you'll spend about 25% of your time on Six Sigma projects that have little or no benefit. - Most of the offices at the main plant are horrible. One office I worked in had a problem with flooding and black mold. Another one had a problem with rats. I never had allergies before working at GE. Now I'm constantly sneezing and get a sinus infection about once a month. - Like a lot of businesses in America right now, the leadership just plain stinks. Jeff Immelt gives flowery speeches about things like renewing GE's investment in America but the company rarely follows through with them. As an employee, I want to believe what the leaderships says but they haven't given us a reason to believe lately.