It can be great, depending on what group you are in. Otherwise, it can be absolutely a dead end and awful place. Management is a pointless overpaid oligarchy, controlled by europe, with no power to influence any real change. It is incredibly ironic they are located (currently) on "innovation" campus yet have literally no control over their destiny. Over 10 years, the employee review system slowly went from legitimate accountability for actions, to simply "who is a favorite." The same goes for promotions. It all depends on what manager your are friends with, and what group you are in. The worst group by far is the repairs organization, which unfortunately is also the most stable if you would like to stay employed. (I left voluntarily) In this group, you are considered a 3rd rate engineer despite more work output than any "program" group employee. Also, you will be required to give up your nights, weekends, holidays on a perpetual basis for "the business." Family time, personal time does not matter to management if you are in this group. The rest of the office will enjoy their weekends off, and their 1/2 day fridays, but nope, not if you're in repair! Often, those who have "signature delegations" who can sign off on structural repairs of aircraft, are pressured to sign off on repairs despite not being able to prove structural capability. Even if the repair is analyzed properly and shown "bad," next thing you know it is approved by "the German hand wave." This essentially means, that since you can't show damage or a repair as structurally acceptable, you simply say "by engineering judgment" it is okay to fly! Wohoo! Want to know what management said in an actual meeting in front of structural engineers? "It's not like planes are falling out of the sky." This was literally during the 737 Max crisis where planes DID fall out of the sky. There are numerous times I should have "blown the whistle" on things but I feared I would be fired. Tell me one whistleblower that has ever actually remained anonymous and kept their job. I still debate doing it because of the constant managerial push to disregard safety and proper analysis in pursuit of speed and output. I am incredibly grateful to be free of this toxic job. To give examples, analysis data quite often was either *MISSING*, inaccessible, unreadable, full of analysis errors or completely useless. Rarely could any of us as engineers have real faith in the data we were using to "analyze" repairs. Not only that, but we would use data for YEARS, then be told that those reports were the WRONG ONES!!! Did we go back and check old repairs? NOPE! You will also be beaten over the head why you are so inefficient. Perpetual understaffing and inability of management to understand the repairs workflow operations has lead to complete employee burnout, and incredible inefficiency. There are truly some of the best engineers I've known that work in repairs. However nearly all want out, but are trapped in aircraft or near retirement. There are many other things I could put out there, but at least this should be enough to say you've been warned. Oh, and contractors? Don't think for a second they'll hold up their end of the bargain once you're onboarded into repairs. If you hire for a particular night or weekend shift, the reality is, they will put you wherever they want whenever they want. This is why even the contractors quit.
