Cool work environment, but salary needs improvement - Sr. Associate FEI Systems Employee Review

It's very stable here. With a lot of opportunity to grow.

Hard to push for improvement but still doable.

- Solid pay for experience - Mostly friendly team, including most co-workers and supervisors - Good health insurance options - Fully remote - Company paid for the work computer - Minor perks like "points" in the company store, which had some cute items - Big picture work was meaningful

- Disorganized training and unclear / contradictory instructions at times - Challenging to get in contact with certain people who have information necessary to do the job. - Communication overall could be much clearer. - Information storage was disorganized. - Small scale, an entire day's work on a section of a proposal could be pointless, entirely thrown out. -- Sometimes this was because the original instructions on how to fill out the section were outdated or incomplete. -- In other cases, the assignment turned out to be redundant. -- At least twice in my tenure of just under a year, the team spent over a week on a proposal, only to be told to scrap the whole thing because the company didn't want to bid on it after all. --- Over time this became pretty demoralizing, at least to me. - One or two highly stressful coworkers / supervisors could create conflict that created a bad "vibe" for the whole day (or week!) - Company prioritized shallow means of boosting morale (cookie party, etc) over doing the time-consuming work to truly improve it. --- That is, no one seemed to be taking the time to figure out what systems or which individuals were the frequent source of conflict / demoralization, and address those with real solutions. Unfortunately, the negative experiences with communication and high-stress team members / leaders led me to leave. Ultimately, I took a writing job at a different company that paid less but had a better team atmosphere. It was worth it. Note: For all I know this may be fixed now. Per LinkedIn, many of the people I worked with (both competent, easygoing people and high-conflict stress-adders) seem to have moved on. So, perhaps the culture has changed positively. You'd probably have to ask someone who's worked there more recently, though.