Davenport location: 0 chance of promotion, or decent merit raise
Pros
Davenport Location: Some employees can work from home 100%. This is literally the only exceptionally good thing about the site. Location recently got acquired by Eaton, so employee resumes now have more brand recognition when they apply for jobs elsewhere. This might be the best thing to happen to us in the past decade. Site contributes to local community, charity, and social issues. Coworkers are generally polite. Relaxed dress code is a decent reason for not jumping ship to Deere if you don't like the "smart casual" costume. Good benefits.
Cons
Davenport Location: Organization is rigged so you will not get promoted or a decent merit raise regardless of what you do. Flowed down goals are unclear so no one can tell whether you achieved or exceeded them. You can still get let go for not doing your job, but because your job and goals aren't aligned you aren't rewarded for doing your job, either. Your reward for a good year is you get to work there the next year. Congrats? No annual bonus. This despite Cobham being in the same job market as MidAmerican, which pays ~16% minimum. New ownership blindly wants employees in the office 3 days/week, which is unnecessary for many functions. New ownership haven't offered pay improvement/increases, despite them being obviously subpar. New ownership seem generally oblivious to the poor facility morale and have not articulated a plan to improve it. New ownership said we're they're biggest acquisition and that they care about us but the person we report to couldn't be bothered to travel to the site for our 1st intro meeting. Most employees only care about their own job function and not what they pass on to the next person in line. Many employees seem to think responding to emails isn't in their job description. Lots of resources spent on putting out fires instead of implementing systems or doing the right thing that would prevent them in the 1st place. This makes the facility as a whole incredibly inefficient. Most managers would rather allow a problem that costs the company 6 to 7 figures a year and costs us money that could be used for bonuses and raises to continue than spend 4 or 5 figures from their own budget to fix it. Major improvement initiatives often grind to a halt because people don't want to bite the bullet that progress requires or simply learn something different. Most leaders are uninspiring at best. Many lucked into their roles because someone above them left. Lots of sabotaging of good engineering process for imagined "job security," such as not documenting something correctly or completely so a particular person is absolutely necessary. "Acting" leaders often become permanent after the company literally can't find anyone who'd actually want to take the job. Company desperately needs a brand new facility but obviously doesn't have the money for it. It took COVID to force management to issue all engineers laptops and Webex. Previously, the company literally expected people to take paper notes like it was 1994. As in, "no laptops" was a meeting rule. Unbelievable. Company commitment to inclusion is strong externally but uncertain internally. Gender diversity is the only type we really have. Non-white people are mostly on the production floor and rarely anywhere else. They're also rarely promoted and mostly absent from significant leadership roles. Local leadership understand accounting and finance very well but not engineering. As a result, flowed down goals make little sense in an engineering context, and strong engineering culture direction is absent. A lot of box-checking instead of doing what's right from an aerospace perspective. Not because people want to do the wrong thing, but because they don't necessarily know what the right thing looks like as a result of the right thing not being flowed down to them. Parts are still built from 2D drawings instead of 3D CAD. In 2021.
