IQE Reviews

This place is full of slave drivers. Engineers get beaten so hard to work. Almost everyone needs to work during weekend, no matter in the company or at home. The management is poor. Decisions are often made in a rush. No good organization for projects. Top guys never care the life of the engineers. No respect.

The meat of this review. There are a lot of problems with how this company functions, all of which have coalesced into a work force that has a defeated morale. Most pieces of equipment are outdated beyond belief, do not function properly, or in most cases, both. Almost no budget is squared away to resolve the chokepoints in production that result in severely underperforming for customers. If an almost critical tool suddenly breaks, typically not a dime is spent to gather replacement parts. Sometimes, replacement parts cannot even be found because the equipment is so old that no manufacturer maintains them anymore. Much of the time in-house band-aid solutions are desired with a team that has no experience whatsoever in repairing the equipment, either. The motto is, "Fend for yourself." The laboratory, while meant to be clean, is instead very dirty. Dust and rust should not build up in any clean room. Ventilation should remove contaminated air out of the lab and not feed hazardous gases right back into the facility. Gloves should not rip and tear at a moment's notice, especially when using strong acids. Duct tape should not be used to repair chipped tile in the floor (tiled floor should not be used in clean rooms at all, either). Wood splinters over time and thus is a bad choice for laboratories that are concerned about particles. Why are all these things and so many more bad practices ignored? Reviews are done annually. Salary increases are abysmal and do not even match rates of inflation. Promotional raises have ceilings that do not take into consideration raises through reviews i.e. your new income due to a promotion is set at a flat level and ignore any annual raises. A promotion may therefore merely result in a boost of a few cents hourly. The annual reviews, while done in January, are neither revealed nor acted upon until April. For over four months employees have no idea how they did the previous year. There is no retroactive compensation during this period. Overall, the pay is absolutely atrocious for the industry. Engineers are expected to work far beyond 40 hours a week and to be on call constantly when not in the lab, no matter the hour. Many times this means a solution will be provided in a sleep deprived state and be disastrous to production, or production will stop at certain areas while a response has yet to be meted. Some of the upper layers of engineering aren't even physically in the continent for most times of the year. Management is designed to compete facilities against each other to the detriment of the overall company. Each laboratory will vie for the same customer to make the same exact products. Budgets take this into consideration. If one site has difficulty with equipment (because it is for all intents and purposes broken, as described above) and an order is not completed on time, that site loses in their next quarterly budget, even if another site picks up the slack. Some sites consistently produce well for particular customers, but instead of centralizing production for that customer at these locations, production is instead divided up even to facilities that do much worse. The lab is open 24/7, so don't expect to get holidays off without spending PTO. Employees are expected to come to the lab even during natural disasters. This applies to just about all levels. Promises are supplied and broken constantly. A new practice may be described at a meeting and survive at most a month before the status quo sets in. Management does not like to answer questions that make them even the least bit uneasy, even if they deal with serious concerns. Key roles such as safety may be removed and never replaced. Sometimes employees traverse across the corporate landscape into roles they are completely unsuited for. As an example, how a salesman one day switches to a top engineering position is mindboggling. All these factors and more result in the most astounding thing: a work culture where employees are consistently beaten, where knowledge is squelched, where employee growth is stifled, for management that provides no interest whatsoever in actually solving the problems that consistently arise. There is no feeling of pride in your work here - even less than what is typical in office work. The overall atmosphere gives no inconsistencies with the message that things never get better here.