lots of work but decent overtime, benefits - Anonymous employee Strange Engineering Employee Review

great pay and the benefits

Outgrown building not enough space

When I left in January, there were zero Pros for working here.

Employees are underpaid, overworked, and morale is generally low outside of management. First off, you don't get paid for all of the hours you work. They round against you in both directions of the time clock: working 12:01-12:29 would count as 0 minutes worked instead of 28 using their rounding system. There are usually 25+ people huddled around the time clock exactly when it's time to clock in or leave, and across the ~100 employees and the single time clock, it is almost impossible to get clocked in within the 60 second pay window you need, as such, you will routinely lose 15-30 mins a day of pay. They also advertised my job while I was still working there, but with better benefits, and often mentioned how "lucky" I was to have a job with them at all. I have around 20 years of individual experience in Software Engineering and CNC Programming, with extensive experience in R&D, automation design, and lean manufacturing. I often kept multi-axis machines running, occasionally 3 or more at a time, while being expected to simultaneously design and program custom applications in C# and .NET utilizing Okuma's THINC API, write machine programs in complex parametric G-Code and Mazatrol, and use Cad/Cam software such as SolidWorks and MasterCam. I also was not given adequate hardware to even write or test software applications, so I had to bring my own personal laptop to even be able to get my work done. I had no desk and no chair to work on, so my back often hurt badly from huching over a stool onto my tiny laptop to write software. On top of this, I was expected to lead a team of machinists and operators and fix any issues that would arise across all manufacturing departments each night, whether maintenance, crash recovery, or programming, as well as perform loading and unloading of delivery trucks. After mostly a decade of employment where I constantly innovated and improved production speed by several orders of magnitude, across dozens of projects, my pay was still significantly lower than it had been previously in my career. Whenever I mentioned pay, despite not having a raise for years, and even brought up how some companies had been emailing me and offering 3x my current salary for significantly less responsibilities and hours, I was told that I should "Just quit." Aside from all of this, I also had to deal with hostile employees who would steal my lunch, turn off lights in the bathroom while occupied, hide/steal my expensive personal measuring equipment and tools, turn off breakers to my area, so I couldn't power my laptop to write software. Also had to deal with general production sabotage from other employees like hiding containers and things to put manufactured parts in, hiding measuring equipment and hand tools, hiding cutting tools, etc. They even locked the PPE like glasses and gloves up, because people were using them "too quickly." Their solution was to prevent employees from having access to PPE entirely. This resulted in many people reusing disposable gloves until the coolant had swollen up and discolored the material, and often resulted in people not wearing safety glasses at all. Lastly, there is no quality control department; parts are often made and sold out of tolerance. I personally wouldn't trust driving a high-performance race car if none of my parts had gone through a quality control process.