Pros
Cree has great benefits, great job security, a great product, and excellent market position that should allow them continued dominance and mastery over their competitors should nothing surprising happen. Working at Cree was a very valuable experience for me in many ways.
Cons
For all of the great things about Cree and there are a lot, there are four major things that it does not handle well. The first is that there is no concept of work-life balance. They expect you to work weekends, holidays, erratic schedules, and 12+ hr shifts. It would not be so bad if trying to schedule vacation days was not like trying to pull out your own teeth with a pair of pliers. I lost a significant number of vacation days, because there was no "convenient time" to schedule my vacation request. If you are not an R&D Scientist then you are going to be hard pressed to have all of your holidays off. The second is that Cree's merit compensation is also a misnomer, since merit is based more off of the "amount of time" you work and the "number of years" that you have worked there and not the "quality of your work". Cree loves warm bodies. You can be incompetent, but if you work over 80 hours a week, you will be well compensated. Despite expecting you to work a ridiculous number of hours they only pay you what the market pays for a 40 hour a week job. The third is that Cree does a very poor job at building their internal talent and helping valuable and talented employees move up the ladder. Many of the fellow operators, techs, and engineers that I worked with that were obviously over qualified were unable to go anywhere. On more than one occasion I was told myself, that I was hired as a tech and despite my engineering degree, that a tech I shall remain. They told me in the interview that I would probably be an engineer in a year. Cree prefers to either hire desperate experienced people who have been laid off for cheap, cheap college grads, or to poach an employee from another company over promoting from within. Cree would also prefer to hire a new employee rather than send you to training to improve your skill sets. The last is that Cree's culture is very much "Caste" based. There caste's breakdown from lowest to highest as: the Manufacturing Operators, the Technicians, the Engineers, the R&D Engineers, and the R&D Scientist. The culture dictates that each caste is intrinsically superior in every way to the castes below them. They demand absolute respect and obedience from them irregardless if they are even above them in the org chart. To reciprocate these inherent rights they feel that they deserve, every caste is expected to treat the lower caste's very poorly, often times it felt as I was being treated as if I were less than human. The R&D Scientist caste is considered to be infallible and they treat everyone as if they are their servants. If you are not R&D, then your opinion is most likely pointless. Your overall respect, recognition, and intangible perks are directly tied to your caste level. Like most caste based societies, you cannot move up. Personally, the extreme level of arrogance gets old fast.
