Good in 2016, bad in 2023- the tale of company transformation
Pros
There is still a focus on charity and giving back to the community. Post-COVID, there is still a hybrid work schedule for now anyway.
Cons
The previously known Asymtek division has lost its way over the years. As so many other reviews have hinted, there really isn't much focus on growing employees and many of the generous benefits have gone away. The best benefit was a quarterly profit sharing program in which all employees received and it was an equal amount of money for everybody from big boss to lowest paid worker. That bonus made a big difference to the production people and this got replaced by a nebulous annual bonus % based on your income. The pension program also went away a couple years ago and that differentiated Nordson from many other companies. Most of the original Asymtek people have left the organization and things that made the company fun (bell gongs for new sales and monthly meetings that opened with an important Nordson value to emphasize) faded away. The culture got NBS-nexted out of existence- the company essentially lost its original soul in the process. There seems to be little focus on actually preventing issues from occurring in field and no perceived retribution for the bad decisions that management makes. When things don't work, there's a blame game that goes ultimately down to the engineers often. Everybody is at fault for problems in actuality, but management doesn't seem to see it that way. The company needs coaches that prepare a team to win a game instead of Monday morning quarterbacks when there are problems. Management places the development groups in some precarious situations that probably should have been avoided in the first place. Management also doesn't honestly convey actual project status to customers, so development is setup to fail when a customer thinks development is more complete than it actually is. I attribute much of the pain experienced to this simple fact. This started when Nordson shipped devices across the world that were not fully tested. Management's solution to that problem was shipping engineers to the site for months to resolve a myriad of issues. It continued in 2020 when Nordson didn't convey COVID's impact on development and it continues now.
