Every month, the cycle repeats: you're given a multitude of projects to complete in one single month. Roughly 80-90% of those projects will involve travel, potentially over the weekend. If there is a chance that a product would be noncompliant, you're required to basically screw the client over by billing them for half (or more) of the work done, and issuing a non-compliance letter so that you can move on to another project as quickly as possible. Everything is about money, and for some bizzare reason, the entire office is constantly missing the budget target even though almost all employees work 60+ hours per week.
Did I mention that the engineer is the person responsible for handling billing of that work as well? Because yes indeed, the engineers are responsible for not only an insane load of project work, but also billing, quoting and selling (endless sales calls), reviewing other engineer's work (which takes large amounts of time), mentoring and training (which is typically poor quality due to lack of time). All this, and everything closes out every month, so you better get it all done in those 4 weeks! Then, the cycle repeats itself, leaving no time for recovery or to catch up in any way once you get behind, but you will be aggressively reminded that you are behind and need to catch up. Thus, resulting in engineers working 60+ hours per week. No reward is given for all of this unpaid overtime, it all just starts again at the beginning of the next month.
Between traveling for 7 weeks straight, and multiple weeks of working 70 hours, the work/life balance is non-existent at Intertek.
Most people end up only staying for 2 years. High turnover rate in both engineers and managers. This creates lack of expertise in certain standard categories, and lack of training only adds to this problem.
