SEL is a great place to work if you're a sycophant
Pros
Decent pay, good health insurance if you're single. There are some really great people working there, some of them are close friends.
Cons
Wow, where do I start? I guess the title is great. It's not what you know or where you've come from, SEL doesn't care. They told me directly that they didn't care about the literal mountains of engineering experience that I brought to the company from 20 years experience working for major companies. This tack is completely counter intuitive and wrong. If I was the manager for the New York Yankees, would I want to know what the performance and past stats of a potential player were before I brought them on? Using SEL reasoning, why even bother submitting a resume, just get some random schmuck off the street who can pronounce "engineer", maybe even spell the word then. They just didn't care. SEL management is a classic case of the book "The Peter Principle", wherein complete morons are promoted above those who have all the people skills, technical, and even common sense to move the company forward. If you're good at what you do and can work with people, you'll have the target of professional jealousy on your back in microseconds. This is coming from personal experience. Their "360 Feedback" system is little more than an SEL version of Stalin-era snitching to get HR (eg KGB) to black list you because one person doesn't like you for what ever petty reason. Forget if the rest of the plant likes you and speaks highly of you. HR is predatory and nigh worthless. Even going to HR with an issue will make them target you as the trouble maker and not the person pointing out a serious issue. Many managers promoted to their current offices should have been kept as just machine operators. Having just ambition isn't going to cut it for being a leader of people. SEL loudly claimed that they didn't set people up for failure. What a blatant lie. There are hiring and firing costs with every company. SEL employs a tactic where in they get someone who has been targeted so frustrated that they "rage quit" saving SEL the hassle and cost of firing them. Zero, and I do mean ZERO leadership training there. Ask them to define, 'engineering level work' and you'll get either "deer in the headlights" looks or no response at all. Deming said that if you can't explain your process simply you don't know what you're doing, well they sure don't know what they're doing. Shame that they had several books written by Deming in their library but never read them. They could certainly benefit from reading his 14 Points. One method they use is passing over experience people for promotion and then hiring complete green horns out of the local universities for lower pay. The green horns then end up screwing up so many systems through a lack of experience it then costs twice as much money to fix the mess. My advice to you is, don't get suckered in by the propaganda and the smiling faces on their ads, I was once one of those smiling faces and got shanked in the back because of the aforementioned professional jealousy. If you like kissing posteriors to advance in your career, then it might be the right place for you.
