Pros
Carestream has some of the most intelligent and smart engineers in town. You will get to work with mostly the latest technologies and some of these engineers are actually personable and friendly. But most of all, Carestream pays well, much better than any company in town, for now, while others are catching up. The compensation for the right person is 20% - 30% more than the average in the town and in all, might be the only significant pro for this company.
Cons
Let’s talk about leadership. Carestream is filled with Kodak senior managers and very few outsiders. If leaders screw up on a project, it’s okay, they are part of the old-boys-club in the upper management echelon, so they move on to another role. Let’s talk about pay. I mentioned in the 'pros' that the company compensates everybody well. But then the employees have to put up with outsourcing overhead because of this. Oh yes, a favorite topic of the reviews here, outsourcing. Other reviews are correct that there is a significant amount of out-sourcing done at Carestream, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing if Carestream had figured out how to outsource the right way. Engineers here are pissed off that foreign workers are not doing a good job, and the management’s answer to that are more meetings, more late night calls to talk half way across the world where the phone line is bad and the language barrier makes it worse. There are no tools for effective outsourcing, no local project leads to bridge the gap, no teleconferencing, no web tools to manage projects remotely, just some pissed off project managers. Let’s talk about morale. Employees carry a lot of old-school mentality, Kodak cultural baggage, inflexible towards new ideas or processes and quite short-sighted in their views. And they have been bombarded by seven years of performance management, so everybody is gun shy; almost everybody is justifying their job to everybody they run into. But again, many people are just bridging their time to retirement. You will hear a lot of “I just want to get through a few more years to retirement and I don’t care about anything else.” The morale in the company downright sucks with almost everybody always pissed off at somebody or something. And anybody new that joins Carestream leaves in a couple of years. If you are one of those people who don’t want to spend 8-10 hours a day being bombarded by bad attitudes and sulking people, then find yourself a different place to work at. The work-life balance is good in that people don't work inordinate hours in a day, but employees do carry home mental baggage that affects their quality of life at home too. Is it worth it? It wasn't for me. And lastly, the most favorite topic of the employees, performance management. Yes, forced ranking, bottom 10% start packing, the turnover rate is probably the highest in town for any company. But then you might say, only the bottom 10% is affected, so I won’t be affected mentally. Well, think again. “Rank and yank” is the most favorite topic in-house in meetings, round-tables, quarterly meetings, coffee area discussions, cafeteria talks etc. Even if you don’t want to talk about it, you cannot avoid it. The performance management culture affects 100% of the employees and not just the bottom 10% or the bottom 40% or whatever they claim it is. This is just my opinion, and you have to make a decision based on your priorities and choices available to you, but I figured I would expound on as much detail as I could so the readers can make an intelligent decision.
