Pros
-Fort Wayne area is nice with plenty of activities to get involved in.
-Most of the staff is friendly and wants to do a good job.
-Pay was nice—I qualified for the annual raise after being there for a couple of months
-Plant is very clean and everyone helps to keep it that way
Kontras
-The engineering office where I worked was next to a row of several very loud air compressors that are running almost 24/7--I needed earplugs at my desk to keep myself from going deaf.
-Management in charge of my department felt very comfortable saying nasty things about other employees behind their backs. Made for an ugly work environment, and I got the feeling that they were probably saying nasty things about me when I wasn't around as well.
-Management wouldn’t allow me to solve many problems they assigned to me. There were a few projects I didn’t get around to completing because management wouldn’t accept any of the solutions I came up with. Even if the solution was inexpensive and easy to execute, there would be some reason for management to shoot it down. There was one project in particular where my solution was shot down because management believed ‘the machine operators are too dumb to put a square peg in a square hole.’ (The operators actually liked my solution a lot—I ran it by them before I presented the idea to management)
-Management wasn’t helpful when asked for assistance with projects. When I hit roadblocks on a few projects and asked management for some help in working through it, I was told something like ‘we just need to think about it a little more,' and that was it.
-Management’s suggestions for improving at my job weren’t helpful. I had two quarterly meetings with my department’s management about my job performance. In the first quarterly meeting, I was told that I was generally doing a good job. In the second quarterly meeting, the only advice I got was ‘focus on talking to more people.’ I took that advice to heart and tried talking to more people after that meeting, to see if they had any problems I could add to my project list. I was let go 2 months later for totally unrelated reasons.
-Plant management made a mistake in posting the role I was hired for. My ‘role was terminated’ after ~8 months of working there. In the meeting where they told me I was being let go, I asked if there was something I could have done better, since I assumed I was underperforming in some major way, and wanted to correct that issue for my next job. I was told that ‘they weren’t seeing the impact’ of my position, and that they wanted to replace my role with a controls engineer role instead. Any notion of building a career at this job was apparently just an accident by management, and I was left with the bill of all my moving expenses.