Pros
Decent starting salary. Begin with 4 weeks paid time off and 10 company holiday days per year, you'll need them. Opportunity to work with a wide variety of products. Work was usually self-directed.
Cons
Incompetent and out of touch upper management. My team leader had weak English skills that resulted in near daily miscommunication and unclear expectations. 90% of work was E-mail and MS Office based. Employees stole tools, equipment and supplies from the lab regularly. Strict business casual dress code. Hard to find people to go to with real technical expertise when solving problems. These same people received less respect and greater criticism of their flaws than the "Old Guard" at the office who had mostly lost their technical expertise from disuse if they ever had any. Outsourced tech support in India makes even the simplest PC tasks like changing the system clock time or installing a new version of office require hours of waiting on the phone, for downloads to complete or for them to call you back. I was denied a request to work fewer hours to improve my work/life balance. Management decided everyone had to start at 8 am after I'd worked here for 5 months. The 8 am start added 45 minutes to my commute each way. No compromise could be reached except coming at 7 am and working overtime every day. 1 hour lunch break is unpaid but mandatory. Supervisor traveled constantly making feedback very scarce. There was little recognition for producing high quality and through reports only speed was rewarded. Pressured to compromise the quality of a product safety evaluation to do it faster rather than right. Uncomfortable office politics. Rules for the sake of rules, for example which doors people used to enter a lab or what kitchen they kept their food in. Beige shades were installed every exterior office window making it feel overcast indoors even when it wasn't, moral of employees was negatively affected and the shades were universally opposed outside of management but they remained up. No recycling anywhere in the office, not even for toxic batteries or electronics. Messy lab environment, tools are not returned after use, are stolen, broken without reporting it or lost. Usually 1/3 to 1/2 of time away from report writing to test products in the lab is spent actually looking for things gone missing.
