Good people but poor manufacturing
Pros
As an engineer, I really like working at Geospace but I could have been the exception. My abilities matched well with my work. People were friendly and the environment was clean. Benefits were also good. It was rare that people were fired. But the oil and gas (exploration) has been it hard and layoffs were inevitable. When I was laid off the company was almost 1/3 the size from 18 months ago. I say this as a positive because Geospace keep many of us around a lot longer than we had expected. I give a lot of credit to the CEO.The new CEO is Rick Wheeler and not Gary Owens who retired at the end of 2014.
Cons
My projects where challenging enough for a technical aspect but some "valued" old timers with old school manufacturing techniques kept the company from making strides in quality and general improvements in manufacturing. An example would be the implementation of ISO quality standards. The first certification was in 2015 and in my opinion is WAY behind the times. In fact this probably would not have happened until a major client requested Geospace get certified before more business was done. It got done. But the overall change in many critical manufacturing areas was slow to come just as it was with the ISO certification. I was in manufacturing but the ivory tower was the engineering department (which I was not a part of). I suspect part of the problem was multiple layers of management which the top did not have a good understanding of what was going on below. My manager(s) were hard working and always pushed their employees, but the leadership skill were nonexistent. Communicating the problems upward never got the right attention and if the project was worthy enough it intercepted by engineering as their project. Project results were either very slow in coming, compromised or never finished.
