Flex Process Engineering Manager reviews

3.9

95% would recommend to a friend

(2 total reviews)
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Revathi Advaithi

95% approve of CEO

95% positive business outlook

Reviews by job title

2 reviews
1.0
Sep 24, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The pay is not bad and there is a lot to do, which should translate to a lot of experience and potential opportunities down the road, in theory.

Cons

You want stress? They got stress. You want work life balance? I wish you luck. TL;DR Flex has a terrible culture and work environment. In Memphis they do 3rd party logistics (3PL). That means doing contract work for Flex to provide services for big name brands at rock bottom prices. Upper management underbids contracts to win them and then overworks everyone to try to fulfill them. 10-20% of the people do about 80-90% of the work. Middle management's main job is to make excuses to customers and upper management for why Flex can't deliver at the level they agreed to in the first place. SPOILER: It's because upper management agreed to deliver Ferrari results on a Fiat budget, but saying that out loud is just a different way of saying "I wish to resign my position effective immediately." So no one does. Everyone is in it for the money and everyone in middle and upper management is exclusively in it for themselves. The half-life for management is 6 months to a year. Flex will never change this business model and that is why these contracts and the Memphis site are doomed to failure or perpetual struggle. Flex closed all of their other service sites across the country. Memphis is the last one, and it is always hanging on by a thread. There is one main account keeping that site alive, and that account has been on life support for like 20 years. They are almost always talking about pulling the plug. If you know, you know. Flex and its customers have no problem working anyone to death if you let them. Their pandemic response is proof of that. They made people they could have easily let continue to work from home come back in way too soon and a lot of people got COVID-19 that did not have to as a direct result of that. As usual, Flex lied about it and claimed no one got COVID-19 inside the building, but of course they would say that. The State of Tennessee passed liability protections designed to protect businesses from COVID-19 lawsuits in the Summer of 2020 right after Flex Memphis made everyone come back on site. They do not care if you die because they can't even be sued if their negligence gets you killed by COVID-19 thanks to Tennessee's crooked government. Outside of IT, it is not a good idea to try to stay there long term. Doing so could literally destroy your life. IT does pretty well, but the overall environment is not the best in part because everyone hates their job since it is impossible to meet the demands with any consistency, and in part because their senior leadership is hired and retained based entirely on their willingness and ability to ignore reality, smile, and lie through their teeth about anything and everything.

1.0
Sep 23, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Money is literally the only pro - they pay just enough to make leaving a difficult decision, aka "golden handcuffs", but after about a year or two at most, you will likely realize that this is not a healthy or sustainable work environment for salaried employees, and hourly employees are overworked and under-payed based on the unreasonable expectations and performance targets they are expected to hit in order to support the under-performers who are just there to chit-chat and get a paycheck for doing next to nothing. Despite that, hourly employment is not completely out of the question as the work is not too complicated, just grueling and stressful due to poor leadership at the upper management level. Mid-level management burnout is measured in months if not weeks, but if you remain highly engaged and manage to survive, you will gain a ton of skills and experience very quickly which you can use to enhance your resume and springboard to your next job. Another pro is that when you are ultimately forced to leave Flex because of how toxic it is, you will feel much better and your next job will feel like a picnic even if the working conditions are mediocre at best.

Cons

Management all the way up to the executive level under-bids contracts and then offers little to no support to their business teams, often sabotaging efforts to improve by under-staffing, maintaining high turnover rates, and changing gears constantly during key projects causing repeated failures to deliver on time or to the quality or degree expected by the customer. Management constantly burns out high performers by rewarding low performers (favoritism and "keeping the noise level down") because they receive a lot of ethics and EEOC complaints. As a result, turnover at all levels really is ridiculous. Those low performers who are allowed to stay because of the site's fear that they will file complaints continue to sabotage their peers and supervisors with their inadequate performance, unapproved moonlighting, policy abuses, etc. Anyone who is highly capable generally leaves as soon as they can because they recognize a doomed enterprise when they see one. The customers, especially big industry giants, are extremely abusive and toxic. Management and HR not only allow this mistreatment of their employees, but they encourage and exacerbate it by conforming their culture to the attitude of the customer and standing by the old adage "the customer is always right" even if the customer belittles, insults, curses at, and generally abuses employees directly. Management even allows customers to call employees directly, assign work directly to employees, and allows customers to determine who is allowed to work on their accounts, allowing them to essentially fire or reassign employees as the customer sees fit about 90% of the time. The business model in their services sector, which is what Memphis does, is completely unsustainable, because Flex leadership intentionally ignores engineering studies and under-bids to win contracts. As a result, they are unable to fulfill the SLA. This consistently unsustainable approach results in a drastic lack of resources which results in the high-pressure, high stress situation of everyone being required to perform multiple jobs and work unsustainable hours. This has also resulted in every single service site in the United States EXCEPT Memphis being closed within the last couple of years, and Memphis is struggling to keep their head above water due to lack of business. Everyone is pushed not only out of their comfort zone, but often past the breaking point at almost all levels. Even prior to COVID-19, many employees would go on medical leave due to health conditions related to an unhealthy and impossibly demanding workload which leaves no room for self care or any quality of life outside of work. During the pandemic, the company at first promised full transparency, but as the number of cases in the greater Memphis area and the site continued to rise, HR and management became much less communicative about the number of confirmed cases at the site. They have taken some steps to address the pandemic, but they refuse to follow health department guidelines. People work and eat way too close to each other, people walk around with their masks under their noses, gloves are optional and thousands of pieces of shared equipment pass from naked hand to naked hand on a daily basis. Outside of COVID-19, chronic illness and substance abuse is rampant at all levels. I know multiple former and current employees from upper management all the way down to hourly production workers who have been hospitalized after suffering a psychological break directly caused by work-related stress or severe and prolonged substance abuse (self medication). Many workers feel like they have to be drunk or high either on or off the job to continue to work there long term. A disturbing number of people come to work smelling like weed and alcohol from hourly employees all the way up to management. Unless you are a ruthless, cunning, deluded, and narcissistic sociopath, there is no career for you at Flex Memphis. Hard work and high performance are not rewarded anywhere near as much as gaming the system and/or playing politics. This job ruined my health, and almost ruined my marriage. I tried to stick it out for way too long because so many of my coworkers and employees begged for me to stay and I needed the money at the time, but leaving was one of the best decisions I have ever made in my entire life. I still get messages from former employees and coworkers saying they wish I had stayed, but there is no way I would ever go back to that hellish place. Stay away unless you literally cannot find any other job, in which case, you should be prepared to get in, get some experience, and get out ASAP.

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