End-of-quarter syndrome: The company tends to do a lot of stupid things around the end of the quarter (pull in orders from the following quarter, ship ship ship, mandatory weekends, modify thousands of units of X to make Y so we can ship ship ship). This frustrates employees who are bothered by doing stupid things. The end of quarter rush is a huge part of the quality problem the company now has. This is typical of many public companies. One big problem with succumbing to the end of quarter syndrome is that people end up wasting a lot of time. At Cree, nobody has time to waste. There is always too much going on and we are always busy. Employees with brains get frustrated when they are instructed to waste their time.
No focus on quality or the customer: The Cree Way is the Cree equivalent of the ten commandments. There is no mention of our customers or quality in the Cree Way. It is focused on moving forward, making progress, and getting it done at all costs (if a procedure gets in your way, go around), and getting it done fast. New products are advertised for sale before the design and production process has been proven to work. That means promises are made to customers, and engineering teams are backed up against hard deadlines. Product must ship, and stopgap measures are used to make the design "work" until the final solution is discovered.
Infectious low morale: The company may care about its employees, but the employees do not thinks it does. There has long been an attitude of "if you don't like it, go somewhere else". It seems like management is beginning to realize the shortsightedness of that mentality. With the job market continuing to improve and word getting around, we are having a hard time finding people to come to Cree.
Misuse/overuse of the PIP: PIP stands for Performance Improvement Process. Lately there have been several PIPs being issued to engineering team members (for the record, I am not one of them). When placed on a PIP, an employee has a certain amount of time to meet certain goals or he or she is termed. Coworkers are aware when someone is on a PIP, though I do not think we are supposed to. When we see hard working employees termed after a PIP, it does not make sense that it was due to a performance problem.
Lack of training (Racine specific): Cree offers a long list of classes intended to improve their work force, but none of these classes are available to Racine employees. They are only offered in Durham.
Lack of Quality Engineers: The Racine factory has hundreds of assemblers putting together lights, but there isn't even one person employed as a quality engineer. There is a quality department, but they are auditors/inspectors, and they are very understaffed.
Lack of job satisfaction: This is probably the biggest complaint I hear from coworkers. Projects start, but are interrupted by the latest fire or end-of-quarter buffoonery, priorities change, and projects move from engineer to engineer. After a while, you start to wonder what exactly you are accomplishing by working at Cree. If all you are after is a paycheck, Cree is fine. If you want to feel like you have accomplished something that you are proud of, I recommend you look elsewhere.
