Great Engineers, Crappy Managers
Pros
- I experienced great work/life balance. I rarely ever had to work more than 40 hours per week to do my job. However, I know of others who were not so lucky, and their reward for closer to 60 hours weeks was "cold Little Ceaser's Pizza". - "Hard to get fired". At LM it's known that there are "only three ways to get fired" ... mischarging hours, selling company secrets, or purposefully looking at pornography at work. However, they become more and more strict about what you can/cannot do in downtime during my 5+ years there that "mischarging" lost all meaning and became an arbitrary method of removing someone from a position. - I can testify that the other engineers I worked with in ADP were great, great people. Intelligent, upstanding... in the group I was with, we referred to ourselves as a "family" for good reason. - I did get an "in-level" promotion after being there a couple years and then a full level promotion the year after that. However, career opportunities can be a bit deceiving since the only way to move up in the company is to move around in the company, that is, you literally have to jump from division to division (including moving around the country) just to get anything.
Cons
Where to start... - There were literal rats in our workspace, and the only thing the corporation would be willing to do would put down mouse traps and then remove the dead bodies hours after we called to complain about them. The rats could also be heard in the walls/ceiling of the restroom, and a dead rat was very visible in an access panel in the restroom. - There was also a fly problem in the workspace when a pipe leaked brown liquid in the ceiling. - It depended on your area, but I would venture to say the majority of the "plant" building (that is, the main building in Ft. Worth) had not been updated since the 70's and would best be described as "dank". Even the less dank areas are still windowless concrete bunkers. - I had 8 different managers in 5 years. The last two were not even cleared to the classified area in which I worked, so they had no idea what I even worked on (and, as such, had no loyalty). - Will not pay nearly what the position is worth, relying on the "stability" and work/life balance to make up the difference. - Old computers. For a company that wants to appear like it's on the bleeding edge of technology, they were permanently at least a few years behind in machine capability, operating system, and application version (Visual Studio 10 instead of 15). - It's very, very, very corporate. You have to watch your tongue, lest you say or do something deemed inappropriate, and you have to watch your back, lets a corporate ladder-climber use you as target practice.
