Infested and set back by irrelevant philosophies and management style
Pros
Things vary a lot from group to group so these are just the general pros: Fairly relaxed environment with a lot of experienced and very knowledgeable engineers who have been at the company for decades. Sports facility and recreation center. Compensations are a bit above the market average. Standard large corporate benefit package (I guess that's how desperate our society has become that we take any benefits as a plus).
Cons
Being owned by Danaher - (Here's the long explanation: Tek was bought by Danaher which is a portfolio investment enterprise back in 2007. This was Danaher's biggest and highest tech purchase to that date. The way things work in this arrangement is that there's a bunch of executives on the board passing down a philosophy of being lean and profitable by assigning a president to the company. The thing that you have to keep in mind is that they want the profit to roll in every quarter but Tek products aren't cheap consumer grade toys but rather robust, complex test and measurement instruments that take years of multi-faceted R&D to come to fruition so the success recipe is to maintain the leading edge and momentum by continuously and patiently investing in diverse technology and research. Unfortunately, the opposite happened over the course when Danaher has owned Tek. The advanced research teams were let go and R&D budget was shrunk and dumped on a couple of very complicated and stupid projects. As a panic response, there was annual downsizing and lay-offs to keep the financials attractive to the Danaher execs. Being a part of a larger and diversified entity like Danaher should actually open the R&D bucket and relieve the pressure from the companies to do what they are good at better than the competition but alas the greedy and short-sighted nature of M&A is the force at work.) No employee stock option! Seriously... you would think being a part of a bigger enterprise like Danaher would make sense to get your "associates" invested in your organization if you make them shareholders but nope! Employees are like any body else on the street to them. Not very many young and talented blood added to reinvigorate the company. The age average of the engineering workforce is very much skewed to the older generation and they are clinging tooth and nail until they retire. So if you're a young engineer and thrive in exciting and energetic environment this may not be your cup of tea. Very frequent reorganizations (at just about any level) and manager changes. On average, every employee's manager changes every 1.5 year. That's usually not a good sign of stability or strong management.
