Welch-Allen was an innovative company that sincerely cared about the community and its employees. After being acquired the culture slowly shifted to that of a large corporation that only cares about money. You get the corporate speeches about caring about the employees and community however the actions from upper management do not coincide with their words. There is also no longer any pride in the products they make. This means periodic layoffs, cost reductions which sometimes hurt the quality of the product, not willing to fix or change existing products to improve quality. For example, one of the capacitors was not properly de-rated and would sometimes blow up in our product, however they did not want to incur the cost of a Bill of Materials change. Since they are a large top-down bureaucracy there is a lot more politics and individual interest often conflicts with what is best for the company. For example, management is evaluated based on how many quality issues they address, not how many they solve so they put pressure on engineers to come up with quick cheap solutions that don’t work, instead of giving them the time to truly fix the issue. There is also a general decline in ethics and motivation due to the cultural changes.
