Exciting, empowering, and frustrating
Pros
- A lot of responsibility is placed on you, giving you ability to make a large impact if you choose to pursue that - You get to work on cool hardware (even with your own hands!) - Your colleagues, generally, are smart, driven folk - Work is exciting and launching regularly makes it even better - The amount of change occuring means you'll always have something to do - Good, cheap food and free coffee make life at work easy
Cons
- I've noticed a dangerous culture overcoming manufacturing/production as production scales. Sometimes you'll feel immense pressure to work harder & faster, with not much sympathy unless you have an understanding lead/manager. Knowing how to handle these situations can make or break your experience. - I've had situations where I've had to explain what I did during a day, hour by hour, as management outside of my group questioned why I wasn't helping them. As an engineer this is not a healthy environment to work in. - Production leadership takes on very little responsibility and is largely incapable of solving the majority of problems. You'll bear the burden of most of this gap, and will not be recognized for it. - Compensation is low for the region, low for the responsibility compared to other positions internally, and low for the hour expectation (weekends and overtime are not compensated) - You'll feel pressured to work longer hours, although most people only work long hours to make up for the lack of structure in their day which is actually counterproductive
