Highly abusive, brutally exploitative, toxic culture, terrible leadership, and poor benefits. Some opportunity to learn.
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.
