Pros
- Excellent work-life balance (most of the time) - Awesome PTO (4-6 weeks, no questions asked) - lots of autonomy and creative freedom - Santa Rosa site is gorgeous, despite the seedy town If you're looking to be a design engineer for somewhere with an easy paycheck & lots of creative freedom, and you don't feel a need to climb the corporate ladder, then this is the place for you!
Cons
- Santa Rosa: poor pay compared to the rest of the Bay Area - housing is unaffordable. Awesome campus though. - CO Springs: pay is the roughly the same as in SR, so decent for the locality. BUT the office is an old & dingy cubicle farm - like straight outta Office Space from the 1990s. That said, I work in Santa Rosa and have only visited once. - NO orientation whatsoever (wtf?!) - Niche products which leads to poor branding. Good luck explaining where you work and what you make to your friends and family. - Difficult to move up unless in sales, marketing, or customer-facing application engineering. Most of the Executives & VPs came from these roles and so they put a lot of emphasis on customer interaction when it comes to promoting within. This is understandable since the products are made for a very niche market and it takes a very specific background in RF electrical engineering to understand most of them. I do not come from this background, and since there's no orientation or company/product overview for new-hires, I was never able (nor willing tbh) to gain an in-depth understanding of the products. If you are an EE who is knowledgeable about the products, this may not be a problem for you. If not, your best bet is to get promoted to middle management after 8-10 years and then spend the rest of your career there. - The company used to be a wing of HP so most of the "senior" engineers are from there and have a complex about the good'ol HP days of the 1980s, and have been living in that bubble ever since. Most have no awareness of pop-culture or know how to interact in the modern workplace. It will be interesting to see how the culture changes as they retire. - No direct interaction between Executives and ground-level engineers -- except for the customer-facing ones of course ;) If you're looking for Executives that sleep on the factory floor or makes an effort to get to know employees over lunch, best to look elsewhere. When onsite in HQ they seem to rarley, if ever, leave their Ivory Tower offices (they're literally elevated higher than all the other workspaces) except to sometimes give scheduled, MBA-style coffee talks.