After nine years, I put my two-week notice in, and the following day my boss told me I would be paid for the next two weeks, but that I was to leave the premises immediately. Within 30 minutes my phone was blowing up asking if I was fired, but I wasn't. They literally paid me for the two weeks to sit at home awaiting my start date for my new job. I don't care what side of the fence you are on with the situation, that doesn't make sense why you would walk someone out before they had a chance to properly hand off projects and initiatives simply because you are emotional for them being honest about their reason for leaving...you. Upon submitting my two-week notice, I put my reason as "dissatisfied with management" and my boss was visibly FUMING. If I were him, I would want to know where they were coming from, but instead, I was paid and walked out the door without an exit interview opportunity. Here are the reasons I was dissatisfied with management and what I would have shared in an exit interview, had I been given the opportunity: 1. There is a TON of turnover. We lost nine electrical engineers in the nine years I worked there. Every one of them left for similar reasons as I did (I talked to each one). Any company with high turnover or offers "numerous opportunities," should be a red flag. The Muscatine site has lost A LOT of good talent over the years and being a manufacturing environment, the work is inherently overwhelming and stressful, creating tension among colleagues. Simply put, Morale is terrible at Muscatine. 2. Work/life balance with Bayer Muscatine is about as bad as it can get. Leadership expects you to prioritize work over family, which I will never do, and is the primary reason for my departure. During Covid, we worked from home for a little bit, but leadership was all about getting everyone back in the plant. My wife and child have a rare genetic disorder that put them at a high risk (my wife was later hospitalized and nearly ventilated), but leadership nor HR would accept an internal medicine doctor's order to minimize public exposure. After weeks and weeks of being passed from my boss to plant HR, to corporate HR, to Accommodations, to plant HR and back to my boss only to hear that he had "concerns" with me maintaining relationships and wouldn't permit me to work from home, despite that I was getting twice as much work done at home. Along that same note, in 2021 when my wife was in the hospital and me and my children had Covid, my last boss was more concerned with project status than our well-being. I was literally on the phone with a nurse telling me they want to ventilate my wife when a text message rolled in from my boss asking me the status of a project. By the way, I was later written up for not being physically present to support that project while I was directed to stay home due to Covid. 3. E&I Maintenance is one of the worst groups I've ever worked with, and something almost everyone in the plant will agree upon. There was one incident where I discovered an E&I member not wearing the proper PPE for working in an energized switchgear. I confronted him about it and he got in my face and yelled at me in front of his boss who did nothing. The next day, I was pulled into my boss's office for a documented discussion for "hurting relationships." Site leadership preaches repeatedly about "bringing up safety issues," which I did, but then I was punished for it. 4. Leadership is collectively unsupportive of personal development. I believe this is largely due to non-engineers trying to manage engineers. Imagine a hospital where non-doctors tried to manage doctors. That is essentially Muscatine. I've reported to four different managers over nine years, and every one of them struggled to accept the benefits of external training and development as an engineer. It is also the first budget that the site cuts every year. It took me all nine years to successfully complete a safety certification I wanted to pursue (and largely needed at the site), but I can thank the one good plant manager we briefly had, who made it happen. Many people got training opportunities under her, but after she left, it wasn't even a month before they announced that training and travel was getting cut. 5. There is a lot of high school type drama at the Muscatine site which gets annoying when you are a working professional. The site seems to care a lot more about feelings, and less about execution. For example, I once held a manufacturer responsible for building a machine according to British Standards, arguing it needed to meet U.S. standards for voltages and wire colors, but my boss accused me of hurting our relationship with said manufacturer and instructed me to stand down. Luckily for Bayer, one of the good ol' boys defended my position and the machine ended up getting changed. 6. If you report through production, plan on drowning in emails and meetings. I had very little time to spend on actual engineering work and projects, but it never stopped leadership from maintaining the expectation that I deliver. 7. Muscatine is extremely disorganized when it comes to project management. Engineers are expected to manage their own project materials, literally, like keeping them in your office, but engineers don't have purchasing authority to buy the parts themselves, so you can't track the parts but expected to know where they are at any time. It is quite common for parts to go missing, which can jeopardize project schedules. Projects are discussed at a capital review board with no input from engineering. Projects are assigned like you are drawing for straws and many of the projects don't even have a clear schedule and some of them don't even have a scope written. Some are literally one sentence on an Excel spreadsheet where the scope is written after it is assigned.
