The company has grown so fast they have lost control and many employees are disgusted with the place, there is little to no motivation to work harder and do a good job as overall communication in the company is a complete failure and managers never provide clear guidelines so many no longer care and just consider it a paycheck job - its not a career there.
Turnover hurts everyone there, seems every few weeks whomever was supporting your projects has quit or was let go. They expect you to give them 110%, yet compensation has been getting worse the last decade as raises are at the point of insultingly small and bonus for all but the executives and managers are practically non-existent, all while the company is making record sales. There really is no incentive for most employees to work hard considering the company does not reward efforts, working late and missing time with family is the norm. And despite them gutting all the benefits and performance compensation we are expected to work all day and when home with the family, leave them hanging every night to field conference calls for hours from the engineering teams in China.
Even worse is how terrible the test labs are. There is a small handful of good technicians but they are always busy and all the engineers can't get even basic support. The labs look like pig-styes!! So the engineers often have to step in the lab themselves and do the technician's tests - which means an extra 10 hours a week of unpaid time on top of the late night conference call we do not get compensated for either. When we speak with the technicians they definitely are not happy there, one even told me he feels as if "the company feels technicians are second class citizens and to upper management we do not exist." He said all the technicians had their Christmas and performance bonuses taken away a few years ago and it makes them sick seeing the company spending uncontrollably on items such as tens of thousands for liquor at marketing get togethers (the infamous $50K tequila parties....), tens of millions for decorating executive offices. But try to get a $500 piece of equipment required to run a mandatory test and you are told no.
So the company pushes to have tests done in China, so now we have to wait months for them to complete the
tests but they are ALWAYS done wrong and you ALWAYS get bad data - yet projects are pushed through even when they do not work right. The big joke is we have the customer be the "Guinea Pigs: to test the products.
15 years ago it was a great company. 10 years ago the Chinese bought it and you know what they think about workers hours, benefits and compensation. 9 years ago they took everyone's profit sharing away. 8 years ago they started laying off all the long time employees who had the knowledge of the products and they gutting benefits more. Then they went on massive hiring sprees to get young kids out of school to fill all the openings as they will will work the long hours but turnover is big!. 5 years ago the technicians tell me they all stopped getting Christmas and performance bonuses. It just disgust many what has happened to this place and the repeat failures in leadership
Ironically, every company meeting they have they parade up the executives and brag how great sales are, how great has been the growth and how much money the company is making, and do not realize many in the audience get angry when they hear that as they all remember how many benefits had been taken away and they just pretend to be happy workers, but afterwards leave and talk about how bad things are now for all bit the executives.
I am part of the fortunate few who are not managers or executives but get great pay. But since the majority around me are not compensated well, it hurts my ability to complete projects. Because of my pay I have been complacent about leaving but know to have a real career I would need to go to a company that did not have so many internal failures. That will be my next new year's resolution.
