Great place for learning but not much else
Pros
- jet engines are probably one of the more exciting products to work on as an engineer - get to work with extremely cutting edge technology - access to some of the best technical experts in the world makes this a great place to learn and develop engineering skills and knowledge - good training opportunities for both technical and leadership skills - always good to work for the top dog in the industry
Cons
- poor work-life balance. The company operates extremely lean, so each person has much more work than they can possibly accomplish on time. Everyone is aware of this, but nothing is done to change it. You need to be able to deal with the stress that every time you finish one urgent project, there's constantly a list of others that are now late because you've focused on something else...can feel like you're constantly putting out fires. - engineers are treated as a commodity and leadership generally ignores the input and feedback from individual contributors. - poor healthcare benefits. employees responsible for a large portion of the costs. - below average pay for the industry. Company is very open about how it sets pay which is good, except for the fact that their goal is to pay everyone no better than the industry median, and most are paid slightly below the median. For an industry leading company hiring top talent....this is a joke. They rely on employees wanting the opportunity to work on top technology at the expense of their pay, benefits, and work life balance. - it's an enormous company so there's the typical problems that come with that...extremely political work environment, leadership distant and out of touch with individual contributors, enormous amounts of corporate koolaid, etc. - fairly good opportunities to move laterally, but if you want to advance vertically, you will realize that in such a huge company, the people that advance A) may not be deserving but are connected to the right people and B) put their career as the top priority in their life and are willing to sacrifice everything in their personal life for the company. - global engineers do a HUGE portion of the engineering work now because the company can pay them much less. As a result, engineers in the US are doing less and less actual engineering work, and spending a lot of time managing global engineers. GE is not an American company; it is a global company and it is transferring huge amounts of technical expertise, manufacturing, etc. overseas. - Cincinnati isn't the most exciting place to be. Downtown has been improving lately, but it has a long way to go. In general, employees just seem unhappy and over-worked. When I talk to people who have been there 10+ years, or who have worked elsewhere, most of them seem to only stay with the company because there's something else keeping them in the area (family, kids, etc.). That doesn't give you a rosy feeling looking into the future, and as a result the company has had a high attrition rate with young employees getting out before they set down any roots.
