Where to start...
This review is specific to the Windsor Locks, CT location but elements of it I suspect would be applicable to all North America locations.
Firstly, the work here basically is all of the legacy work and engineering rework on things that just simply aren't paying enough for Pratt and Whitney engineering to want to bother with. In other words, the work that Quest gets, just simply isn't all that important. As such, when you try to get information from your counterparts at Pratt, you will get a runaround like you have never seen before. It makes getting even the most simple of tasks done take much longer than it would. Corporate management at Quest takes this opportunity to argue the statistics to Pratt for more people in order to get jobs done faster. Pratt complies, because Quest is a 'low-cost' solution that United Technologies' corporate management has bought into, tacitly, at this point. The result is that YOU will end up sitting around doing a lot of nothing. Does it take 4 people to make phone calls and edit a few power point slides for weeks-on-end in order to accomplish a relatively paltry amount of work? The answer at Quest if you are working for a United Tech account, is yes. (and very likely you ARE working for United Technologies in some capacity if you are in NA...more on that in a bit). The history on this company, compiled through conversations with former Pratt employees who in more recent years left Pratt and landed at Quest, and being old enough to remember what was going on in the state of CT at the time, is as follows: Pratt, like the rest of the aerospace industry, started feeling the 'crunch' in the late 90's due to high fuel prices. Airlines simply weren't making the margins they used to and that put downward pressure on everyone else in the industry. This meant that the merry-go-round of lavish pay and benefits for everyone in the industry had to be mitigated somehow. But how to do this? The employees were heavily unionized, the middle management and, to a lesser degree, lower management, were well entrenched. How to ablate all of this heavy overhead without causing everything to come to a screeching halt? The answer was bottom feeder upstart companies like Quest Global. They popped up overnight. Essentially what Pratt did was, they fired, laid-off, forced retired, swaths of their workforce and refused to hire them back. These people, many of them middle aged or older, hadn't the time to reinvent themselves while maintaining the lifestyle (read bills/mortgage/kids in college etc) they had. So they took their knowledge to companies like Quest which offered a refuge but at reduced pay, and MUCH reduced benefits. The cost reduction at Quest goes to the point that most of the engineers are working off of computers equipped with a single 15 to 17 inch monitor, with subpar resolution. The computers themselves are run until they literally quit working, which means that the computer you are working could be 5,6,7 + years old....which means that it takes 4 minutes just to open a single program. The engineers aren't treated too well, but better than the project baby-sitters....eerr 'managers'. The whole company is run extremely inefficiently, templates don't work, multiple yet different versions of power points are stored all over the place on various servers. You will be constantly harrassed and watched/monitored in regards to which contracts you're working on and which charge lines you're charging...constantly. Meetings are a 'thing' here, and sometimes, you will even get an invite (mandatory)to a meeting about a meeting. Nobody communicates here, even when is all they have to do is get up and walk a few desks over, they won't. I think its because everyone knows how much incompetence and finger-pointing there is to go around and nobody wants to invite more of it on them. As a result, things don't get done, people are fearful, communication worsens, people leave the company suddenly which causes gaps and makes a bad situation ever worse. I imagine it would be like when you're the engineer on a train that is about to collide head-on with another train, and the thoughts that you would have left in the few moments, except its every day you go into work. You know its too late to do anything, to make a difference at this company, yet everyday is going to happen. I suspect the fact that some of the management came over from Electric Boat has something to do with this, having worked their too. Some of the management found out that I had worked at Electric Boat in fact and immediately treated me as though I was an enemy, I suppose because they knew I would be onto their game. The coup-de-gras for my experience their was when on one beautiful summer morning, on a Friday, everyone was ushered into a large, but nowhere near large enough room (no AC either) to hear the quarterly company propaganda statements from our great, intelligent, and truthful management. They told of stories about how they had just met with Pratt management and how great and strong our relationship was with them. They said that Pratt and Quest were going to be doing even MORE business together and how we were beating our competition (for United Tech's business) via better quality, because our competition had to send their work to India in order to compete with us on cost but at the loss of quality and accuracy of work. THEN, the merger between United Technologies and Raytheon happened, just shortly after. The management at Quest was caught completely off-guard. They tried to quell the panic and convince everyone that everything was 'business as usual', they sent their best liars, the one's they had hired from Electric Boat, to do the story-telling. They told these stories while they secretly were off-loading as many contracts as possible to India, basically anything that was NOT military in nature. Then somebody in middle management let the truth out and the upper management again tried lying to us telling us that it there were contracts coming and that those were all old contracts that were being off-loaded to India. The lying continued, I jumped ship as soon as I could. I have a couple of buddies still there because they are material requirements engineers (there is never enough of them because hardly anyone wants to do the job). They said that the office is comparatively 'cold and dark'.
'Snowflake-ism' is alive and well here...be warned, be wary.
Design engineers get treated fairly well here, better than engineers to be honest. If you are an engineer that decides to give project management a try, you are in for a ride. Most of the management that you will be interfacing with do not come from engineering backgrounds. They come from humanities and social science backgrounds, and they don't like engineers (nothing there has changed). You will be treat like rancid meat that is barely fit to feed to a dog. The truth of it is, you just aren't that necessary or important in this company as a project manager because you only serve to charge the clock, throw more bodies onto a project to make it go faster, remember? It doesn't take 4 people to make relatively minor changes to some power point slides (and at a glacial pace at that) and make a few phone calls. You will have long periods (days or even upwards of a week or more) of absolute boredom punctuated by queries from middle management of "did you get my email on xyz or did you work on xyz?" when nobody told you a damn thing about xyz nor did you notice one obscure email in the many dozens you get every day (mostly about garbage that nowhere pertains to you).
There isn't even an incentive to just simply bury your head in the technicalities of the job/work here at this company. On multiple occasions, when I asked a question that only took a basic level of understanding of the design, operation, or construction, in order to answer, nobody in the room knew the answer (then what are any of us doing working on this? That is what I wanted to ask next). What is worse is that I was told to 'get back in my box' by somebody in middle management (ex Electric Boat) and 'stop asking those questions'. YIKES!!
