I've worked for this company for almost a decade, so I feel as if I have a good grasp of what to expect. The site I worked for used to be a great facility filled with locals that knew how to design and could really hit the ground running. Of course, in 2012 they decided to layoff all of their return of experience and leave the place in absolute shambles. When I arrived a few years later you could tell that the place was just starting back up again. Which brings me to my first con. The biggest downfall of this place hands down has to be management. For within the first few months, I had absolutely no idea who my manager was or how the hierarchy and processes for my position were dealt with. Also, I'll never forget that 6 months had gone by before I got my own personal workstation because IT was absolute chaos. I was micromanaged like an absolute child the first year of working here. One morning I brought an Arizona tea to work, as I sat down in my cubicle which faced the corner. I was confronted by my boss and HR because they thought that I had brought an adult beverage into work. Not to mention, my own manager pulled a contractor to the side and asked if I was "worthy" enough to keep around which my coworker politely told me about as soon as he got back. Now getting into the second con would have to be the processes. In the beginning I worked alongside a long-term contractor which happened to know his way around a bit. We both came to the conclusion that the drafting standards were nonexistent. So, for the first 3 to 4 years, we developed our own set of standards that we followed which worked out for the most part. Management was liking what I was doing, and I seemed to know my way around better and better. Of course, that helped out engineering in the long run because industrial engineering would blame there. lack of success on us. As every other department would. One year we were so far behind schedule on delivering a trainset. That the company sent out an all-employee email stating that if everyone came to help build the train there would be pizza and coffee. I of course volunteered because I was eligible for overtime. So, here I am with a wrench and screwdriver out on the shop floor having no clue whatsoever as to what I was doing, building a trainset. lol Of course, I knew it would get better overtime and this was unfortunately my first job out of college. Despite all of that, the next half of my career at Alstom was far worse than I could imagine. We had adopted a high-speed train contract that I thought would absolutely skyrocket my career to the moon. Unfortunately, Saint-Ouen our slave driver mothership as I like to call it, had other plans in mind. They stripped us of our contract and sent about 90% to India. We were no longer considered a design site but a manufacturing site instead. Of course, the hostile takeover didn't end there. Alstom then flooded the place with various French and Brazilian workers that had REX from previous sites but no clue how to work in the United States. I was stripped from all the stuff I had known from the first four years of working there. Forced to read packets of processes that worked in France and Brazil but didn't correspond to what we did in the United States. Which ultimately bit us in the butt because suppliers didn't want to touch our drawings due to incorrect welding standards. As well as lack thereof information to manufacture the design. Evidently in France you don't have to specify exactly what you want. You can specify kind of what you want, and the supplier has free reign to choose whatever he feels like. Moving onward in my career at Alstom I no longer did work that mattered. I would perform duties like move the spot weld and move the bolt to the correct place. Busy work that India just didn't want to do but kept us busy and employed. I did that for three years until the contract became sustainable on its own from an engineering perspective. Until we were able to jump on our next double decker contract. I thought to myself, maybe we might have a chance at doing more given the fact it wasn't so crucial. Nope, wrong we actually had even less work than before. For about 5 months, 8 hours a day I moved dot on a drawing to specify spot weld locations. Overtime the dot would continuously change colors and the assemblies in which we were adding them to would move or shift. Thus, driving me to an absolute breaking point because there was no communication from Saint-Ouen. After a long talk with my manager, he finally moved me to an older contract. Finally, I was doing actual design changes but unfortunately as a drafter at Alstom you are not part of the design change discussion. This is most likely due to the fact that I did not have a four-year degree. If you have an associate degree your treated like you don't know what you're talking about. You are given hard to read excel documents that don't have all the information. Expected to do changes you aren't properly trained to do. At my fiscal year review I was expecting to be given a good standing evaluation due to all lack of work we had. Instead, I was given a poor evaluation and labeled not a team player. After years of being an outstanding employee I might add. Finally, I decided to just give up and find a different place of employment as I was underpaid for the area and management was not willing to fight for us.
