General Issues:
Very._Early._Mornings. Production starts at or before 6AM, therefore depending on your Mfg Group, you start at 6 or 7AM. On the weekends (yes you may be required to work weekends), you will start at 6. For some people the mornings get easier, but for me they definitely didn't.
No Cafeteria. You'll have to bring your own food or drive for half of your lunch break. There used to be some food trucks, but those disappeared due to Covid and still have not returned at the time of writing.
You are required to supply your own tools. The company offers only a partial refund, requiring paperwork and approval up to a max yearly limit for tools. To me, this is really strange for a billion+ dollar company. Also, you will have to carry these tools from area to area wherever you may be needed, or fail to put them to use. It's a large facility with several large buildings. Generally, I would inevitably ask the assemblers (who all also had to buy their own tools) to borrow theirs. This means you gotta get close to your assemblers across the factory. My best advice: don't buy anything until another engineer leaves. Then buy his whole tool box off him. Then sell it again to someone else when you leave.
Compensation is... Confusing. You will start hourly and remain so until you reach LV3. A significant amount of your compensation will be in the form of bonuses contingent on meeting factory wide quotas. These are meant to be "Incentives," but in my opinion they don't really work. As these are not individual quotas, but factory wide ones, you will feel like your impact will not even have a minimal effect. It is a roll of the dice. But this means that your income will be constantly in flux and you cannot plan/budget particularly effectively. They also have no 401K matching.
Paid Time Off (PTO) is not much, and also sick days come out of your PTO.
You are also an At Will Employee and can be let go at any time for no reason, or can have your hours increased or decreased at any time with little notice.
The Factory is eventually moving to Nevada, so unless you are eager to move to the desert, this will not be a long term career position.
Also, if you are a perfectionist or someone who takes their work home with them, then this job will destroy your mental health as it did for me.
Day to Day / Engineering Related Issues:
All the groups (Design/Machine Shop/Assembly/Sustaining/Process Improvement etc...) have their own goals. These are often in conflict with each other. And across the board, ironically, Manufacturing Engineering has the least power and say on anything. If I ever needed anything changed, I would have to use tactics to diplomatically put an idea into a Design Manager's head, otherwise no chance, unless I could get a 1on1 with Gene Haas (would not recommend, it's terrifying). If I could myself Red-Line Drawings and force those changes, I could easily solve the root cause, redline away my own work, and could work on things that actually contribute to the growth of the company.
Many decisions are Emotionally driven, instead of Logically driven. This creates conflict and slows down or completely stops things that need to happen.
MFG is all the way down stream, and so we see and have to deal with all the problems on a machine-by-machine basis. We often cannot solve the root cause even though we would like to. We often have parts that are bad, but need to use anyways, and have to find a way to "Make It Work". Let’s just say that I’ve had to do things I wasn’t proud of. This is particularly disappointing because we are aware that sometimes a suboptimal product is shipped to a customer. But this is just accepted.
Working here, I came across many of what I call “Haas Mentalities”. There are 3 of these that constantly kept coming back up and they were: “Just Ship It!” ; “It is what it is.” ; and “We’ve always done it this way!” . Due to these mentalities, things cannot be improved or done in the correct way. Instead, they are done the “Haas Way”.
There are too many Design Engineers in proportion to MFG Engineers. They keep making new products. We cannot keep up since we have to deal with all the other issues with current production and vendor parts etc… We are always under pressure all the time to ship this machine, or inspect this part, or make this tool... There simply is not enough time in the day. Our task lists just keep getting bigger and bigger. Another thing is that the company retains Design Engineers far better than MFG Engineers. Many MFG Engineers, including myself, have left for other opportunities, making things even more difficult for those remaining.
The culture at Haas is not ready to adopt the Modern Methods of Manufacturing. If you want to work at a cutting-edge manufacturing institution, then this is not the place. They overwhelmingly have a much more craftsman-style machine building mentality. This I am afraid does not suit itself particularly to the scalability that is required in the near future. The most novel thing that happened at Haas, was the flow line detailed in one of their youtube Videos. This barely even happened at all, amidst all of the opposition. This Henry Ford pioneered process, just recently established in a tiny section of Haas Factory, puts the company 100 years behind current modern production processes. The mentality and culture is so very old-school. I just don't think this can or will change by the time it needs to. The boat is too heavy and can't be steered. It’s a really big company that is run like a small machine shop or garage from the 70s.
Even with all that, I must say that I don't regret any of my time at Haas. I learned so much, and was able to do so much, that it was totally worth it. It has also clearly shown me my own strengths and weaknesses.
