Pros
Agency to learn quickly and take initiative over an entire project
Cons
OPE NPD has had a re-org every year since its inception. Do not expect to know who your manager will be in 12 months time. Do not expect to know what project you will be pulled onto within the next two weeks, but be expected to have a plan for your project for three months out and be able to update it daily. Half to 2/3rds of projects started never make it to launch. Marketing can ask engineering for patently unrealistic new product requirements, the engineers can identify the requirements that are unrealistic and provide a more realistic estimate, marketing can say that isn't acceptable, the directors will shrug, and the project team will proceed to spin its wheels for six months making unacceptable prototypes before the directors realize the engineering team might have known something about the company's present tech capability and cancel the project. All directors-on-up have an ME/business background, and continually underestimate the time required to design and validate an EE design. Projects are continually shuffled around, "catch on fire" (i.e. the design team runs into unknown unknowns which the schedule is not designed to accommodate, see previous sentence) requiring long hours and/or other EE heads to be pulled in. There is no long-term BU strategy given the constant management reorgs, save an arguably weaponized use of "agility" combined with the expectation to provide 110% effort on everything no matter how unlikely it is to have any meaningful effect. Milwaukee has "only increased revenues by $1B last year" which is used as an excuse to cut costs and apply more pressure to engineering staff (???). There are now random teams messages being sent out to EE's across the BU who are expected to respond with where they are and what they are working on at the drop of a hat. Work from home and flexible hours have been rescinded. Overdue promotions are paused for many. There used to be flexible working hours as long as you got your work done, micromanagement only happened during active firefighting, and hard work was rewarded by prompt promotions once a person was able to demonstrate they earned it. I am sorry to say that is no longer the case. My best guess is they are trying to reduce headcount. There is no way this is a sustainable way to run a business. I do not recommend working in this part of the company. EEs are the critical path on all projects, all the time. Pressure is immense and constant chaos is incompatible with long term job satisfaction. Even in this market, look for a better job somewhere else.