Pros
If anyone applying here would like more information than that provided below, feel free to email me at pse.employee at gmail dot com. Most of the younger people that work here are motivated and friendly. The younger cadre of employees is helpful and is willing to offer guidance and limited assistance on projects outside of their stated billing-hour responsibilities if they can. Work-life balance is generally ok, though management does watch over your comings-and-goings, despite their comments to the contrary (I once had the COO point to his watch, for snide emphasis, and comment “you’ve been here for 20 minutes” to me in the break room; nothing like getting an advanced degree to then be watched and chastised like a factory line employee!)
Kontras
PSE is undergoing some *major* growing pains. The two guys who started the company 30 years ago are stepping down and ushering in new management and all the changes that come with it. I was laid off for budgetary reasons and PSE was searching for replacement candidates to my job *within a few months*. This is a company of snakes. Pre-2015, PSE was a company of around 20 or 25 employees. Now it's about 45 employees. This has created a bit of a two-tiered system in which there is an old corps of employees who have been around for 12-20 years and a new group who have been here for 1-5 years. The 12-20 year employees are the mid & upper level management group, basically running the business areas and managing projects. The 1-5 year employees are a more transient group that serves as a workforce to which the old corps can delegate project roles. This group is, ultimately, totally expendable depending on the whims of funding agencies, projects, and research grants. Career role advancement at PSE is *highly* limited (the COO told me this verbatim during my interview). He even mentioned that people generally leave because there *isn’t* anything close to a career ladder there to climb. It’s an ok place to gain a year or two of early career experience, but breaking from the 1-5 year group to the older group of established employees is TOUGH. From my experience, employees jump from “scientist” or “human factors engineer” to “senior scientist” or “senior human factors engineer” at the 3-4 year mark, then remain in that position for the next 10-or-so years. If you’re looking to make PSE a career for 30 years, then more power to you, but its value as a learning experience is limited to 1-2 years. Despite the talk of "this is a company where people stick around for a long time" and "we hate to see people go," I was laid off due to budgetary issues after less than a year. I believed during the interview process that the notion that the company actually tried to retain their employees was a sincere commitment, but I was wrong. It isn't. At all. Take any promises of job security or sincere claims of how the company desires to retain talent long-term with a *LARGE* grain of salt. This company will use you as an expendable asset instead of doing reasonable business planning to ensure that they will need your employment longer than the several months that follow your starting date. The “we’re all scientists here!” claims given during the interview process ends up being a bit of a curse in disguise, as the PSE management style takes a bit of the "indecisive academic" approach and blends it with a normal business model in which you must produce *something* on a given deadline. The groups here are generally segmented into little program fiefdoms that are headed by a “business lead.” This “business lead” has sub-programs within the business area for which they’re ultimately responsible, but not personally involved beyond a *highly* vague idea in their own heads of what they envision for the final product. Ultimately, this manifests itself in a haphazard absence of vision at a high-level and a resulting frustration at a low level of not being able to meet ad-hoc or evolving and vaguely defined expectations from superiors. Essentially, managers don’t know what they want and are frustrated when junior employees thusly don’t know what the managers *themselves* actually want. This is a bad scenario in which to find yourself, even if it is largely outside your control. As a result of the ambiguity in direction, there's a lot of busy-work and a lot of micromanagement. There is stress and tension involved in meeting arbitrary deadlines for make-work projects that will exist solely on company servers with no purpose of being used in external sources. The hierarchical structure of the business areas is such that the “business lead” dictates a nebulous idea, with the rest of the team scrambling to decipher out the inconclusive vision. Any attempt to use your own skillset or education will be met with some variation of “just do the work” or “just do what we’re saying”. This company is looking for mindless drones, not individuals who wish to offer ideas or their own insights into solving problems. Needless to say, this is highly demotivating stuff. This is not a bug in the PSE work process, but rather a feature. Much of the work of the 1-5 year employee group is creating “backup work” for the business area leads. In essence, creating unused duplicate work. Work is generally split between business area leads/project managers (remember, they were/are scientists themselves!) and visual designers. If you’re a 1-5 year employee that is assisting on a project, chances are that your contributions will be to “update this two year old PowerPoint on the server” or “write up an internal document for how we decided on a trivial design process for this interface layout.” For a company of about 45, there is way too much emphasis on the formality and rigidity of meetings. At a larger company one might expect there to be a bit of protocol-creep in which employees settle into a routine of meetings because “we have to have meetings,” but PSE is much too small for this. Hour long meetings for 15 minutes of business are the norm. 30 minute meetings would likely be more than sufficient for most discussions. Frequent meetings require longer than an hour to brief and update managers on projects because they’ve overwhelmingly forgotten what it is that you’re working on. If I could distill down the essence of the cons of working at PSE, it would be this: the company has rapidly grown over the past few years, and the management's sentiments/ideals are slowly catching up to the realities of the new dynamic. PSE may still be considered by those in management positions as some sort of small and tightly linked business, but it is anything but that. I’d stay away for more than a few years until they figure out what they’re doing. Of course, you could take a chance with them as I did, but your likelihood of performing a year of career-stagnating busywork and ultimately ending up laid off is probably higher than most would be comfortable with. I wish I could give Pacific Science and Engineering less than one star. I’m more than happy to elaborate on any point I’ve mentioned here if you contact the E-mail address listed above.